I was a kid when I decided that you just can't trust cripples. After all, if they were so smart, they'd stand up for what they believe in. I actually do jumping jacks for what I believe, sometimes even dressed.I'll admit that the fact that Charles Krauthammer is wheelchair bound is part of the reason that I don't trust anything he says. Another reason is that his degree is in psychiatry, which qualifies him to diagnose everyone in Washington as deranged, for all the good that'll do. He was also a speechwriter for Mondale and spent eight years agreeing with Bush, which might make him schizophrenic.
Finally, and most importantly, Krauthammer is wrong an awful lot of the time. He's actually wrong to the point of being comical. This is exemplified by his column in the Washington Post yesterday.
In the Barack Obama version, there are 50 or so such blame-Bush free passes before the gig is up. By my calculation, Obama has already burned through a good 49. Is there anything he hasn't blamed George W. Bush for? The economy, global warming, the credit crisis, Middle East stalemate, the deficit, anti-Americanism abroad -- everything but swine flu.That's a truly astounding amount of horseshit to be shovelled by a guy who can't lift with his knees. His back must be a mess after writing that paragraph alone.
The Democrats won twenty years worth of presidential elections based on Herbert Hoover's four years in office. And President Hoover was just wrong in the face of an unparalleled economic crisis. Bush was at least twenty three times as bad as Hoover, and without any excuse other than being stupid. I'm not a fan of President Obama's, and I don't like defending him, but I can sympathize with him, knowing the messes he inherited in virtually every area of policy.
As I remember it, people like Krauthammer were blaming that unfortunate incident on September 11, 2001 on the Clinton administration, and Obama is about where Bush was in his presidency on 9/11. Bush was so busy passing cartoonishly large tax cuts and socializing education that he ignored repeated warnings that something like 9/11 was coming. But that was all Bill Clinton's fault. You know how I know that? Charles Krauthammer told me so.
Krauthammer then chooses to go hardcore stupid. "The full retard" as it was described in "Tropic Thunder." And you never go full retard.
It's as if Obama's presidency hasn't really started. He's still taking inventory of the Bush years. Just this Monday, he referred to "long years of drift" in Afghanistan in order to, I suppose, explain away his own, well, yearlong drift on Afghanistan.President Bush fucked up Afghanistan from the get-go. There's no intellectually honest way of getting around that. You can't, on one hand, suggest that you can replace a brutal regime with drug dealers and war criminals, while on the other insist that you rebuild the nation - doing both with insignificant troop levels.
This compulsion to attack his predecessor is as stale as it is unseemly. Obama was elected a year ago. He became commander in chief two months later. He then solemnly announced his own "comprehensive new strategy" for Afghanistan seven months ago. And it was not an off-the-cuff decision. "My administration has heard from our military commanders, as well as our diplomats," the president assured us. "We've consulted with the Afghan and Pakistani governments, with our partners and our NATO allies, and with other donors and international organizations" and "with members of Congress."
If you attach policy importance to troop commitment, which most sane people do, you can fairly say that the Bush administration thought that Afghanistan was one-seventh as important as Iraq. As things stand this very minute, Afghanistan is only half as important as Iraq, which is already a comfortable Iranian client-state.
There is nothing new here. The history of both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars is a considered readjustment of policies that have failed. In each war, quick initial low-casualty campaigns toppled enemy governments. In the subsequent occupation stage, two policy choices presented themselves: the light or heavy "footprint."And that's moronic! No rational thinker, much less an actual conservative, would ever think that you can invade a country and topple its government, and assume that the locals are going to like it.
In both Iraq and Afghanistan, we initially chose the light footprint. For obvious reasons: less risk and fewer losses for our troops, while reducing the intrusiveness of the occupation and thus the chances of creating an anti-foreigner backlash that would fan an insurgency.
In any military endeavour, you hope for the best and prepare for the worst. In both Iraq and Afghanistan, the Bush administration hoped for the best and prepared for a happy ending uncommon even to fairy tales. Even Dick Cheney held decidedly saner positions in 1994 than he does now.
Republican office holders and their asshole blogger lapdogs took a very different position from 2001-07, screaming as loud as their lungs would allow them that the number of soldiers was just fine. They continued to do so until President Bush announced his "surge" in January 2007. It was only as Bush was halfway out the door that they added any troops to Afghanistan at all.
What most people don't understand is that the Taliban resurgence actually started in 2005 and was taking territory in significant ways by 2007. But because no American forces were being killed, no one really cared except the NATO member countries that started announcing withdrawal dates because the United States showed no indication of being serious.
For three years the insurgency grew more and more powerful, more and more non-American NATO forces were being killed, and the Bush administration did nothing. By Cheney's own admission, his administration didn't start a policy review until the fall of 2008.
Canada, the United Kingdom and Denmark weren't attacked on 9/11. Therefore, you can only expect those countries to endure only so many casualties when the country that was attacked isn't prepared to commit serious force, while invading a country that didn't attack them at all. All three countries have their domestic politics, too, and Afghanistan is increasingly unpopular in all of them. As I've mentioned before, the British Conservative Party would be politically crazy not to run as the pacifist alternative to Labour in next year's election.
President Obama not only inherited a desperately flawed strategy in Afghanistan, he inherited a war that the United States will be fighting on its own in the very near future. And Republican dickheads like Charles Krauthammer are prepared to blame Obama for that.
That reminds me of Vietnam. Presidents Kennedy and Johnson made every bad decision imaginable, but as soon as Nixon was sworn in, it became his war and the very Democrats who created and supported the war, turned on it in a heartbeat. It wasn't fair then and it isn't fair now.
If Barack Obama is going to be the first halfway adult president that the United States has had since 1993, he's either going to to commit hundreds of thousands of troops to Afghanistan - which will necessarily mean reconstituting the draft - or he's going to bring them the troops home. What General McChrystal is asking for is almost criminally irresponsible in terms of what classical counter-insurgency strategy calls for, but he thinks that's what he can actually get.
President Bush was given three months to decide whether he was going to go with a relatively unimportant surge in Iraq. President Obama has hardly been given ten minutes to decide what he's going to do with a far more intractable war than Vietnam ever was. Remember, the Viet Cong never posed a realistic threat to St. Louis and al-Qaeda does.
Why do I know as a moral certainty that if Obama reinstated the draft and committed 400,000 troops to Afghanistan, people like Krauthammer would bitch about that?
Look, I have a special hatred for Democrats, but Republicans simply stopped being serious years ago. All one needs to do is remember the Georgia crisis last year to understand that. The United States expanded NATO in ways that were highly provocative to Russia. When Russia demonstrated that they can smash those countries in an expanded NATO without a realistic chance of reprisal, people like Krauthammer insisted even more strongly on NATO expansion. I guess that's a reasonably easy position for him to take, since most battlefields aren't wheelchair accessible and are unlikely to ever be covered by the Americans With Disabilities Act.
Not only do people like Charles Krauthammer not know what they don't know, they don't care about what they don't know. But the things that they don't know might actually wind up being important at some point.
I honestly don't know why anyone's pretending that they don't know what's going to happen anymore. Obama will commit just enough force to be politically safe, but not enough to win. As NATO withdraws, that commitment will increase until Americans remember that they don't like long wars where Americans get dead.
The Taliban and al-Qaeda will eventually win because the West isn't prepared to. And then there will be another 9/11, which Obama will be blamed for because Bush didn't want to win when he could have at a relatively low cost.
The 133rd Canadian died in Afghanistan yesterday. He was Sapper Steven Marshall, 24, from 11 Field Squadron, 1 Combat Engineer Regiment, based in Edmonton. Given that I know what is almost certain to happen, I can't look in the eyes of his parents and tell them that he died for anything that we aren't just going to abandon later.
But if monsters like Charles Krauthammer want to play politics with this, perhaps he can sit down with the families of the dead and explain why he's going "full retard" with their loss.
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