Warrior Cultures With A Shitload of Corruption

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The US is getting the shaft in war making.
Two invasions and two bloody, nasty quagmires.

Rare is the Maureen Dowd column that is more than pancake face powder, or a shoe-horned turn at national politics, and rare still is a piece with insight into the US’ two beleaguered faraway wars.
In her column this morning, Dowd touches upon the deathly maze of Afghanistan and how the US is up against some terrible and experienced fighters.
The money graph:

We invaded two countries, and allied with a third — all renowned as masters at double-dealing.
And, now lured into their mazes, we still don’t have the foggiest idea, shrouded in the fog of wars, how these cultures work.
Before we went into Iraq and Afghanistan, both places were famous for warrior cultures. And, indeed, their insurgents are world class.

Along with the IEDs, the savage car bombs and a wicked, back-stabbing insurgency, is a shitload of cruel corruption, a corruption so deep, the the majority of Afghans would take the Taliban over the supposedly
legitimate government in Kabul.
Indeed, the culture of corruption is a way of life, according to some of those 92,000 documents leaked Sunday by the whistleblower website, WikiLeaks.

Why is the US there?
There have been 1,207 US military deaths in Afghanistan and to fuel the conflict there requires gasoline at $85 a gallon — enough said.
The US needs to do a quick shit out of dodge, eagle pull before the situation gets worse.

Big, Bad Bogeyman Can Still Boogie

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Instead of George Jr.’s arrogant rant: “I want justice,” he said after a meeting at the Pentagon, where 188 people were killed last Tuesday when an airliner crashed into the building. “And there’s an old poster out West that says, ‘Wanted: Dead or Alive.’ “
We should follow Andy Borowitz’s reporting:

In a bold new strategy designed to locate the world’s most wanted man, the United States today dispatched a team of paparazzi to find Osama bin Laden.
“If these people can find George Clooney when he’s vacationing on Lake Como, they can find Osama,” one intelligence insider said.

(Illustration found here).

In the face of Dick Cheney’s insanely-ironic blast last month that President Obama was “dithering” on Afghanistan, dickhead and George Jr. more than dithered in December 2001 in letting Osama and his boys slip out of the east Afghan mountains of  Tora Bora and flee to Pakistan, a move directly connected and a root-cause of the shit-mess now in the Af-Pak region.
Read a good, comprehensive report on the entire Tora Bora muck-up here.

Late to the game: US military/intelligence — pushed by the Bush White House — total dithered in adapting to the new (though very, very ancient) method of “asymmetrical warfare” (although Don Rumsfeld called for a study [pdf] of such tactics and strategy in 2002), which all insurgency/guerrilla groups practice and continue to this very day, and instead relied on a pure power, “shock and awe,” style, something akin to randomly swinging around a large shovel to combat a mosquito in a crowded theater lobby.
Most-likely scenario — the mosquito will vanish amidst the carnage inflicted on all those innocent-bystander theater patrons.

And Osama has been a weird, terror-like guy a long time.
One of his sons, Omar, has penned a ‘Dearest Mommy’-type memoir that paints a picture of a crazy person from the get-go — war against the infidal above all things, even from being a daddy.
From Time magazine’s review of “Growing Up bin Laden: Osama’s Wife and Son Take Us Inside Their Secret World” (St. Martin’s Press):

The younger bin Laden fled Afghanistan only when it become clear that Osama was planning a massive attack on the U.S., but he still couldn’t accept that his father was responsible for 9/11 until months later, when he heard the familiar voice on audiotape claiming credit for the attacks.
“That was the moment to set aside the dream I had indulged, feverishly hoping the world was wrong and it was not my father who brought about that horrible day,” he writes. “This knowledge drives me into the blackest hole.”
…
Still, ever the dutiful Saudi son, Omar couldn’t bring himself to break with his family until the day that his father asked his sons to volunteer for suicide missions.
When Omar protested, Osama replied, “You hold no more a place in my heart than any man or boy in the entire country. This is true for all my sons.” Omar writes, “I finally knew exactly where I stood.
My father hated his enemies more than he loved his sons.”

Another view inside the infamous bin Laden family can be found here, which concluded: One F.B.I. analyst summed up the bureau’s assessment this way: there were “millions” of bin Ladens “running around” and “99.999999 percent of them are of the non-evil variety.”

Osama bin Laden, however (apparently the .01 of the “evil variety”), has become the most-wanted person on the planet and just about everybody on the planet can recognize his mug — and the group he founded, al-Qaeda, is now listed along with Nazis and child rapists as bad, bad bogeymen of history.
Bill Moyers Journal has a good history on Osama and al-Qaeda in campaigns against the West, and especially the US, culminating with those attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.
And nowadays, despite all the manpower, firepower, unmanned drones and satellite images, Osama is still at large, causing some to question whether the guy’s still alive (read this), although a lot of horrific shit is still taking place in al-Qaeda’s name.
In Iraq, the group claimed responsibility for the horrific car bombing a couple of weeks ago in Baghdad, which killed 160 people and wounded more than 500, and this despite all kinds of smack-down operations.
This analysis last week from CNN‘s veteran war reporter Michael Ware:

While al Qaeda in Iraq has been gutted from within, principally by Sunni insurgents turning on them and assassinating them over recent years, the network still exists.
Al Qaeda, an organization built with the expectation of loss, has endured and will continue to do so until Iraq’s slated January election and beyond.
…
Al Qaeda in Iraq is not the network it once was, it’s not able to deliver multiple suicide bombings on an almost daily basis.
When I was last in Baghdad nationalist insurgents told me there were but a handful of operational al Qaeda cells in the city.
Nonetheless, they warned five committed al Qaeda members can “wreak havoc.”

Yes indeed.

From Al Jazeera English:

The reality is that, whilst direct al-Qaeda actions have been seriously restricted, the organisation has franchised from Somalia to Indonesia and North Africa.
In Afghanistan, it directs or collaborates in Taliban attacks.
Al-Qaeda is mercurial and, like a virus, mutates and adapts.

Also at the link is an most-excellent video on the subject.

In Afghanistan, the US appears to have driven out the group, as top dog Gen. Stan McNasty (oops,sorry) McChrystal told reporters in September: “I do not see indications of a large al-Qaida presence in Afghanistan now.”
So why does the US then continue its presence there?

Matthew Hoh has been in the news lately — he’s the US State Department official who resigned in September in protest over the Afghan war strategy — and this week he was on CNN to discuss the issue, which also included some words about al-Qaeda.

Crooks and Liars had this partial transcript:

ZAKARIA: Do you think  –  the top military brass have all endorsed General McChrystal’s report and request. Do you think that down on the ground there is a very different feeling?
HOH: Oh, yes. Yes, there is. I think on the ground  –  and the perspective is that, what is the strategic value of what we’re doing here. Why are we doing this? What are we getting out of it?
It’s not going to defeat al Qaeda. It’s not going to — if you take our two goals as being the defeat of al Qaeda, and then, because of its nuclear weapons and because of the relationship with India, the stabilization of the government in Islamabad, 60,000 troops taking 50, 60 dead a month in this country, and how many wounded and killing how many Afghans, as well, it doesn’t accomplish either of those goals.
ZAKARIA: Why doesn’t it defeat al Qaeda?
HOH: My belief is that, after 2001, al Qaeda evolved. They became, as I like to say, an ideological cloud. It exists on the Internet. They don’t need a safe haven in Afghanistan. They’ve got safe havens in five, six, seven other countries.

In this respect, should the US invade and occupy those “five, six, seven other countries” where Osama’s boys have been operating?
One would hope the obvious is apparent — the fight in Afghanistan, no matter how long and cruel, will not yield Osama bin Laden or any of his boys: Asked whether he would give up bin Laden, Mullah Omar explained in a September 21, 2001, interview with the Voice of America that “We cannot do that. If we did, it means we are not Muslims . . . that Islam is finished. If we were afraid of attack, we could have surrendered him the last time we were threatened and attacked. So America can hit us again.”

The moral: When trying to kill a mosquito, much less anything as vaporous and crazy as an ideological cloud, don’t use a big shovel in a small, crowded room.

George’s Gall (Unmitigated Version)

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One wonders what is bubbling up in George Jr.’s brain fluids and what makes the guy so blind he can’t see the huge, out-stretched, multi-layered hand about to slap his freakin’ face.
Either he’s so dumb to be believed, or he just don’t give a fat-rat’s ass.
Most-likely a strange, biological combination of both.

On Saturday, the former president (I write that with a heavy heart) told a leadership conference in New Delhi, India, the war in Afghanistan should be escalated beyond the boiling point as apparently the conflict is the linchpin for the freedom of the planet.

The boy hasn’t lost his touch for irony and unmitigated gall.

(Illustration found here).

Via Agence France-Presse:

“If the Taliban, Al-Qaeda and their extremist allies were allowed to take over Afghanistan again, they would have a safe haven and the Afghan people, particularly the Afghan women, would face a return to a brutal tyranny.”
“This region and the world would face serious threats,” he added.

The former buck-stops-here Big Decider guy steered clear of offering direct advice to President Obama, who is currently figuring out what to with George Jr.’s Afghan debacle — more troops and how many — but that didn’t plug his face-hole, however:

“…the work is hard and I hope we don’t abandon the people of Afghanistan.”

The asshole has a memory lapse — George Jr. abandoned the country in December 2001 when he started prep work on the Iraq invasion — and even after it became apparent the Taliban was re-emerging years later, denied a troop increase (due to the Iraqi front going to shit in a wire basket).
And he punked the Indians with the continuing line that extremists want to destroy us simply because they just plain loath our way of life.

Bush said both the United States and India were “involved in an ideological struggle against extremists who murder the innocent to advance a dark vision of extremism and control.”
“They attack political, financial and diplomatic targets because they hate our way of life and they hate our vision for freedom and human rights and human dignity and prosperity and peace,” Bush told the conference.

This is also the same George Jr. who waxed poetic nearly two years ago  about the sweet-fiction of war: “I must say, I’m a little envious. If I were slightly younger and not employed here, I think it would be a fantastic experience to be on the front lines of helping this young democracy succeed. It must be exciting for you … in some ways romantic, in some ways, you know, confronting danger. You’re really making history, and thanks.”

For what, you lying, freakin’ freak!

War! ‘He Who Picks A Rose’

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UPDATE/ADD-ON BELOW

Yes, the Edwin Starr song paraphrased is the counterinsurgency of fighting dumb-shit wars.
Last month on PBS‘ “Frontline,” an interview with Andrew Bacevich, a retired US Army colonel and a level head in this era of military idiots.
He’s also a professor of international relations and history at Boston University, a Vietnam veteran and the author of the 2008 book “The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism.”
The US military’s fog-horning a counterinsurgency program in Afghanistan is baffling:

I am baffled by the fad of counterinsurgency, and I’m especially baffled by the extent to which the American officer corps has embraced this fad.
Now, I say that from the point of view of somebody who comes from a generation when counterinsurgency was anathema to the United States military.
In the era after Vietnam, the officer corps believed with something close to unanimity that long, protracted campaigns were very much at odds not only with the well-being of the military as an institution, but frankly at odds with the interests of the country.
Post-Vietnam, the officer corps was committed to the proposition that wars should be infrequent, that they should be fought only for the most vital interests, and that they should be fought in a way that would produce a quick and decisive outcome.
What we have today in my judgment is just the inverse of that.
War has become a permanent condition.
I mean, we’ve been at war now for eight years, and for all practical purposes, nobody can say with any accuracy when war will likely come to an end.
In my judgment — I know people that would disagree with this — we are now engaged in wars where we do not have vital interests at stake.
And … we’ve now abandoned the notion that we can win wars quickly or cheaply.
Our approach to war is one in which we now accept the notion that war is an open-ended proposition and that if someday out there some outcome is reached, it’s likely to be an ambiguous outcome that really doesn’t resemble in any sense the traditional definition of military victory. …

And this shit is generational?

It’s probably generational in that perhaps young people — and this is not necessarily a bad thing — have bigger dreams, have bigger ambitions. Older people tend to perhaps be more given to pessimism or cynicism.
I mean, I would like to call it realism, but others might view it differently.
I hesitate to say that older people have a better understanding of the human consequences of unrealistic and naive projects, because I know that these younger fellows like Nagl and [CNAS fellow Andrew] Exum have lost friends.
But at the same time, I puzzle over why their personal losses don’t cause them to question the implications for the policy proposals that they support.
We’ve lost over 5,000 American soldiers over the past eight years between Iraq and Afghanistan.
We think Iraq is now finally winding down.
At the same time, we ratchet up Afghanistan.
So if we do indeed have a full-court-press application of counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, certainly at least several hundred more American soldiers are going to die.
And I think it’s very, very important to be absolutely certain that no alternative exists that would enable us to achieve our interests in Afghanistan without all those soldiers being killed.
And I think the people who insist that it has to be done through counterinsurgency have not seriously examined all the alternatives.

Is President Obama boxed in with regards to an Afghan escalation?

I think so. … I don’t think the president has to worry too much about being criticized from the right.
I mean, he’s going to be criticized from the right on, if not on the war in Afghanistan, on any number of other issues.
By staying the course in Afghanistan, he’s not going to get more Republican votes for health care or anything like that.
But if the president alienates the core of his support, plunging more deeply into this war when many on the left or people like myself, … wary of an overly militarized foreign policy, then I think he could find the enormous public support that he had during much of the first year of his term in office collapsing pretty quickly. …
There are many glib comparisons between Iraq and Vietnam.
And maybe we’re beyond making glib comparisons. But I do think that’s one of the areas where the Vietnam comparison still has merit.
The Vietnam War destroyed the Johnson presidency, and it destroyed the Johnson domestic reform agenda. And to the extent that Obama’s war becomes this costly, open-ended proposition with no end in sight, then one possible consequence that he has to consider is that his own very ambitious and important domestic reform agenda could be placed in jeopardy. …

And is this Obama’s war?

I think so.
And the question is whether or not [it is] going to be Obama’s war in the same sense that Iraq became Bush’s war, that Vietnam became Johnson’s war; that it’s going to be the one issue that consumes his presidency; the one thing that, … for the rest of his time in office, reporters [are] going to be asking: “When is it going end? When will light become visible at the end of the tunnel? How many more soldiers are going to have to die? How many more hundreds of billions of dollars are going to be spent?”
That’s what I fear he is inviting if he allows himself to be sold this counterinsurgency program.
But the president is a smart guy, and the president, I believe, is a very shrewd man in the best sense of the word.
And so I retain at least a smidgen of hope that he will understand the trap that he’s being led into here and therefore avoid it.

Read the entire interview here.

And to highlight the coup-like seriousness of the problem, yesterday NATO indeed boxed Obama.
From the UK’s Independent via antiwar.com:

Nato defence ministers signalled their backing for the Afghan strategy put forward by the American commander General Stanley McChrystal yesterday in an implicit rejection of the alternative plan proposed by US Vice-President Joe Biden.
The general had made an unscheduled appearance at the meeting of ministers in Bratislava, Slovakia, to give a presentation behind closed doors. Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the Nato secretary general, said: “What we did today was to discuss General McChrystal’s overall assessment, his overall approach, and I have noted a broad support from all ministers of this overall counter-insurgency approach.”

Real-bad moon rising — an insurgent War, What is it good for?

Update/Add-On:
Just discovered this evening — a way-little noted story of Seymour Hersh’s speech at Duke University 10 days ago, in which he said the US military, along with working hard in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Philippines, Somalia, etc., are also “in a war against the White House — and they feel they have [President] Obama boxed in…They think he’s weak and the wrong color. Yes, there’s racism in the Pentagon. We may not like to think that, but it’s true and we all know it.”
According to the Herald-Sun in Durham, North Carolina, Hersh also had this to say (h/t HuffPost):

“A lot of people in the Pentagon would like to see him get into trouble,” he said. By leaking information that the commanding officer in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, says the war would be lost without an additional 40,000 American troops, top brass have put Obama in a no-win situation, Hersh contended.
“If he gives them the extra troops they’re asking for, he loses politically,” Hersh said. “And if he doesn’t give them the troops, he also loses politically.”
The journalist criticized the president for “letting the military do that,” and suggested the only way out was for Obama to stand up to them.
“He’s either going to let the Pentagon run him or he has to run the Pentagon,” Hersh said. If he doesn’t, “this stuff is going to be the ruin of his presidency.”

If anywhere near reality, and Hersh has been so-many times around the military block, he’s got a shitload of DOD sources — what a US-constitutional catastrophe.

Crossing the Rubicon — Or How Not to Shit in Your Mess Kit

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US troops slugging through Afghanistan are sick of it and according to their chaplains:

“The many soldiers who come to see us have a sense of futility and anger about being here. They are really in a state of depression and despair and just want to get back to their families,” said Captain Jeff Masengale, of the 10th Mountain Division’s 2-87 Infantry Battalion.
“They feel they are risking their lives for progress that’s hard to discern,” said Captain Sam Rico, of the Division’s 4-25 Field Artillery Battalion.
“They are tired, strained, confused and just want to get through.” The chaplains said that they were speaking out because the men could not.

And they’re about to get more of the same.

(Illustration found here).

Adding thusly:

Sergeant Christopher Hughes, 37, from Detroit, has lost six colleagues and survived two roadside bombs. Asked if the mission was worthwhile, he replied: “If I knew exactly what the mission was, probably so, but I don’t.”
The only soldiers who thought it was going well “work in an office, not on the ground.”
In his opinion “the whole country is going to s***.”

The word above is ‘shit‘ – in case dear reader is unfamiliar with asterisks.

Right now there’s about 100,000 foreign troops in Afghanistan, with more than 65,000 of them US GIs, and head of the operation there, Gen. Stan McNasty — oops, sorry, I keep doing that — Gen. Stan McChrystal has requested another 40,000 soldiers and just recently a surprise ante-up: An open-ended possible option of 60,000 more to be funneled into the Afghan countryside.
Despite all that, and the morale of the GIs, the US public views the war as one without end — according to a Clarus Research Group poll earlier this month: Sixty-eight percent of the respondents said the United States will not win or lose the war which will go on without resolution, Clarus said.
Couple such a message from the public with an actual deteriorating Afghan war and you’ve got yourself a reverse-history/time-travel episode of the Twilight Zone, featuring Viet-fuckin‘-nam (that’s a whole ‘nother country).

The current Afghan condition and LBJ’s decisions on how to handle Vietnam are similar, especially how there’s no winning to either one.
Historian John Prados has an excellent piece at History News Network on a similitude between LBJ in 1967/1968 and President Obama’s upcoming way-weighty decision on an Afghan strategy/troop build-up.
A couple good snips:

Then came the Tet Offensive and America was visibly shaken. We need not engage the argument about the true outcome at Tet to make the point that the Vietnamese adversary could carry out their country-wide initiative because the measures possible for Johnson were not ones that actually affected the adversary’s capability.
And such real progress as there was could not alter the final outcome of the war, except for adding to the toll in blood and treasure.
…
The best U.S. force may be able to accomplish — like Vietnam — is likely to be prolonging stalemate. And the longer that persists — worse if deterioration becomes evident — the more restricted become the options for President Obama.
This is the real Afghan problem.
…
As Lyndon Johnson saw in 1967, escalation had few prospects.
He did not see, as President Obama needs to realize, that an escalatory course now actually accelerates America’s new march into quagmire.
In Vietnam the greatest mistake was to avoid looking at the full range of options — withdrawal was repeatedly kept off the table.

And in a point of Twilight Zone-like mirror, Obama frontman Bob Gibbs told Helen Thomas earlier this week withdrawal from Afghanistan is not an option — “That’s not a decision that’s on the table to make.”
Yet one must remember why the US is in Afghanistan in the first place — Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda.
So the comments last weekend by Obama’s national security advisor, James Jones, seemed to convey a message that it’s now stupid to be there.
From AFP:

But the retired general insisted that the presence of Al-Qaeda — which launched the September 11 attacks on the United States — was “very diminished” across Afghanistan, with fewer than 100 members of the group operating there and “no bases, no ability to launch attacks.”

This should indicate something, huh?

And what of the Taliban?
Obama has said he would accept some Taliban involvement in governing Afghanistan, though, will “not tolerate their return to power,” but at least that’s a peephole in which to view a possible future for the US without a huge troop buildup, but who’s to really say.
A good source on the history and current status of the Taliban is found here.
The problem is everyone is scared that once the Taliban take over, al-Qaeda will return and start creating shitfires all over the place, including the US homeland.
Which is bunk…

This morning it was reported another US serviceman has died in Afghanistan, bringing the total to 871 since 2001, but 241 of those just in this year alone — eight in one fell swoop last weekend when the Taliban attacked an isolated outpost in mass — and the entire US military operation since last summer has been a bust, a deadly bust.
And don’t underestimate the Taliban — they’re much stronger than anyone anticipated earlier this year, just look at the power in that outpost attack — a “shock” in how many fighters were involved in the assault.

Former Naval aviator Jeff Huber has a right-on blog at Pen and Sword, and on Thursday wrote the US should get the shit out of Dodge (Afghanistan) with a post extremely-aptly titled: Just Say No to McChrystal.
The real bottom line:

It’s time to bring our troops home.
They’re not doing any good.
That’s not their fault. At the tactical level, the level at which combat occurs, they’re unbelievably competent. But strategically, use of military force by global hegemon America has become a losing proposition.
We need to let the Afghanistan conflict blow itself calm at the nearest opportunity.
We can best do that by fading away and letting the natural political forces that exist in that part of the world duke things out among themselves.
We don’t need to send any more kids over there to get killed or have their legs blown off, or to take part in the slaughter of innocents that they’ll experience trauma about for the rest of their lives.
We need to shut down this madness now.

And with a Nobel Peace Prize in his grip, Obama should think peace, should use what the Nobel Prize committee was thinking in laying that surprise prize on his ass — how would it look if  death and destruction was attributed to the guy given a peace award.

The best way to not shit in your mess kit is watch what the fuck you’re doing!
Obama’s big, shinning hope, or is he entangled in another LBJ moment.
Time is not on his side, but a decision to do the right thing is most certainly.

Afghan Awful

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“On the heights of the Kabul Gorge, they still find ancient belt buckles and corroded sword hilts. You can no longer read the insignia of the British regiments of the old East India Company but their bones — those of all 16,000 of them — still lie somewhere amid the dark earth and scree of the most forbidding mountains in Afghanistan. Like the British who came later, like the Russians who were to arrive more than a century afterwards, General William Elphinstone’s campaign was surrounded with rhetoric and high principles and ended in disaster. George Bush Junior and NATO, please note.”
– Robert Fisk, The Independent, Sept. 14, 2001

(Illustration found here).

Now it’s President Obama’s turn to take note.
And from the above-mentioned journalist, Robert Fisk, who has interviewed Osama bin Laden three times, the last in March 1997: “The next year, he told me he sought God’s help “to turn America into a shadow of itself.” I wrote ‘rhetoric’ in the margin of my notebook — a mistake.”
Is Obama poised to make a really, really bad mistake — not taking history serious enough?

Last week, establishment-stalwart, larger-than-life reporter Bob Woodward of the Washington Post ran an A1 story of Gen. Stan McChrystal’s supposedly secret assessment of the Afghanistan war, which accordingly bled out the bottom line that the whole shebang “will likely result in failure” if the US does not supply a shitload more boots on the ground there — reportedly McChrystal wants at least 40,000 fresh fodder to boost US presence in country upwards to 68,000 military personnel (combined with other NATO forces, there’s already more than 100,000 Western troops fighting the insurgency).
The hard-core, nutcase general then told “60 Minutes“ Sunday night the Afghan war has turned nasty: “They’re probably a little worse,” McChrystal tells CBS’ David Martin. “I think that in some areas that the breadth of the violence, the geographic spread of violence, is a little more than I would have gathered.”
Dumb-ass Duh!

One crucial item: McChrystal wants to beef up the Afghan security/army forces.
What forces?
The so-called Afghan army is fairly-near non-existent – Writer/photographer Ann Jones, the author of Kabul in Winter: Life Without Peace In Afghanistan, describes an invisible army in a recent post at tomdispatch.
Key snippets:

American military planners and policymakers already proceed as if, with sufficient training, Afghans can be transformed into scale-model, wind-up American Marines.
That is not going to happen.
Not now.
Not ever.
No matter how many of our leaders concur that it must happen — and ever faster.
…
When 4,000 U.S. Marines were sent into Helmand Province in July to take on the Taliban in what is considered one of its strongholds, accompanying them were only about 600 Afghan security forces, some of whom were police.
Why, you might ask, didn’t the ANA, 90,000 strong after eight years of training and mentoring, handle Helmand on its own?
No explanation has been offered.
American and NATO officers often complain that Afghan army units are simply not ready to “operate independently,” but no one ever speaks to the simple question: Where are they?

They’re lost in that vast-vapor of ‘victory’ and success.

Success in Kabul?
Hamid Karzai leads such a corrupt, slip/shod government it’s extreme-black-humor laughable and last month’s election is considered a three-dollar bill, so much fraud with near a quarter of the votes requiring a recount.
The depth of corruption amongst Karzai’s operation would never allow for any kind of substantial government, never — the Taliban will forever fight tooth-and-toenail any puppet authority the US props up and then leaves to fall.

Afghanistan has been a quagmire for centuries — even for its own people.
And worse for foreigners.
History has a way of circling back around and biting one on the ass.
Obama is supposedly facing such discord among his own advisers on how to proceed on this Afghan-awful mess, DOD honcho Bob Gates had to respond: “General McChrystal was very explicit in saying that he thinks this assessment, this review that’s going on right now is exactly the right thing to do,” Gates told ABC television’s “This Week” in an interview taped Friday and broadcast on Sunday. “He obviously doesn’t want it to be open-ended or be a protracted kind of thing.”
A decision not to be taken lightly.

Frank Rich had another good read Sunday in the New York Times with a post aptly titled, Obama at the Precipice, likening this president’s particular Afghan-awful moment to LBJ’s decision to ramp-up the US foray into Vietnam.
Check it out.

‘Tragedy’ Escalates

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Despite tough tours in Iraq, an even-more persistent and deadly situation:

But he says he never encountered an enemy as tenacious as what he saw immediately after arriving at this outpost in Helmand Province in Afghanistan.
In his first days here in late June, he fought through three ambushes, each lasting as long as the most sustained fight he saw in Anbar.
…
The bombs found so far have been largely homemade with fertilizer, though they have still killed more than 20 British soldiers and United States Marines to the north and south of Nawa.
“If they had better weapons, we’d be in real trouble,” said Lance Cpl. Vazgen Matevosyan.

(Illustration found here).

The upticking war in Afghnistan lies in the vast, ugly shadow of Iraq.

Iraq was on top of the list from the get-go — going after Saddam was topic “A” 10 days after the inauguration — eight months before Sept. 11. “From the very first instance, it was about Iraq. It was about what we can do to change this regime…Day one, these things were laid and sealed.”

In December 2001, even as the incursion into Afghanistan was just winding down and Osama and his boys were reportedly pinned down in the Tora Bora Mountains, George Jr. was meeting repeatedly with Army Gen. Tommy R. Franks and his war cabinet to plan the U.S. attack on Iraq.
This hyper-active bunch’s biggest concern was fueled by the CIA’s conclusion that Saddam couldn’t be knocked-out-of-the-box except through some kick-ass “shock and awe.”
And, of course, George Tenet’s now infamous “slam dunk” claim that Iraq possessed WMD.
A showcase for horrifying, dumb-ass planning: The U.S. would have only 5,000 troops left in Iraq as of December 2006 and assumed the military would be almost completely “re-deployed” out of Iraq within 45 months of the invasion.
In the UK,  bloody-dumb business at 10 Downing: “Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, though military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route… There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.”

Apparently: What aftermath?

Afghanistan tanked as much-needed, required resources were diverted to the war in Iraq.
From USAToday in March 2004:

In 2002, troops from the 5th Special Forces Group who specialize in the Middle East were pulled out of the hunt for Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan to prepare for their next assignment: Iraq.
Their replacements were troops with expertise in Spanish cultures.
The CIA, meanwhile, was stretched badly in its capacity to collect, translate and analyze information coming from Afghanistan.
When the White House raised a new priority, it took specialists away from the Afghanistan effort to ensure Iraq was covered.

A good look at the overall cause/effect of the Iraqi war on Afghanistan can be found here.

And in the Iraqi blowback: In their quiet moments, aid workers call it “the tragedy:” the billions of dollars that never arrived here. The troops that landed somewhere else. The bright minds that turned to that other, greater subject. And, in all those events, the sad sinking of the promise that greeted the American-led victory over the Taliban in November 2001, more than seven years ago.
The “tragedy” these aid workers are referring to, of course, is the war in Iraq. Not that the Iraq war itself was tragic but that it was calamitous in its results for the other war that suddenly fell to the lower tier. More than any other factor, it is the American invasion of Iraq that looms over Afghanistan and all of its dashed hopes.

Hence to the dangerous, complicated and escalating new/same operation in Afghanistan.

Last October, Gen. David D. McKiernan, head of US/NATO forces in Afghanistan and only four months on the job, said an “Iraqi-style surge” will not work in a country of mountains and few paved roads.
McKiernan described Afghanistan as “a far more complex environment than I ever found in Iraq.”
And this past March, McKiernan opened his big-general’s mouth and told the BBC the war cannot be won via military might: “But there are other areas — large areas in the southern part of Afghanistan especially, but in parts of the east — where we are not winning.”
So then last May, the good general was fired.
Defense honcho Bob Gates, in showing McKiernan the door, was quoted as saying the US needs “fresh eyes” and “fresh thinking” on the becoming-debacle of Afghanistan — so instead named as a replacement an old eye and mind in the form of one, Lt. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, a true-blue, fierce military nut and fervid warrior of the dark side.
So praise from Dick Cheney: “The decision to send Stan McChrystal…is a good one… “I think the choice is excellent. I think you’d be hard put to find anyone better than Stan McChrystal.”
McKiernan, for his part, claimed he was “dismayed, disappointed, and more than a little embarrassed” about getting the axe — a telling insight into the chaos of the US involvement in Afghanistan.
Also revealing is how the now-retired McKiernan’s emotional outburst — catch words, ‘dismayed, disappointed, embarrassed’ — does kind of float like President Obama’s alliterated vow to “disrupt, dismantle and defeat” al-Qaida.

First and foremost, however, those freakin’ Taliban.
Not only with increase in use of IEDs and suicide bombers, the Taliban are also viewing politics on a world scale.
From foreignpolicy.com last week:

Although 4,000 U.S. Marines entered the Taliban’s heartland in southern Helmand province at the beginning of this month, the Taliban seem to be largely bypassing the Americans to focus on the British contingent in the center and north of the province.
This should not be a surprise.
Public dissatisfaction with the war is growing in Britain and Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s unpopular Labour government is facing a general election by June 2010.
Taliban strategists likely believe they have a chance to drive the British from the field.

The UK has indeed been mauled — Twenty-two soldiers, including eight within one 24-hour period have been killed.
According to Pakistan’s The News, a senior British general said the insurgent level in Helmand province was under-rated from three years ago: “We thought that the insurgency still existed in Helmand, but the violence and scale has been shocking,” General Sir Timothy Granville-Chapman said.
Indeed. 
In a British poll result released Tuesday by the UK’s The Independent: More than half of voters (52 per cent) want troops to be withdrawn from Afghanistan straight away…Fifty-eight per cent view the war as “unwinnable”, with 31 per cent disagreeing.

And with the US?

Obama’s plan right now is to nearly double the US Afghan presence to about 68,000 troops by this year’s end, but from all indications, McChrystal will ask for more boots on the ground, as did one of his advisors today in Washington, though, I’m sure he missed the extreme-ugly irony.
According to VOA:

Senior Washington analyst Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies says the United States and its allies need to take the Afghanistan war more seriously.
…
“This war has been fought without resources, but above all without realism,” he said.
…
Cordesman says the current U.S. and British military operation in Helmand Province was launched without adequate preparation for civilian aid after the military delivers stability.
But he said it might still be successful, and could become a model for what is called the clear-hold-and-build approach to defeating insurgents.
In any case, he says, it will provide valuable lessons as Afghan, U.S. and NATO forces prepare to move into other parts of Afghanistan.

In any case, how many US body bags before Afghanistan in its serious realism is understood?
A tragedy.

War’s Media “Bloodbath’

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There are old war correspondents and bold war correspondents but no old, bold war correspondents…
–  Joseph L. Galloway

In an age of seemingly perpetual war all over the globe, those reporting from the front are dying at an alarming rate.

From Agence France-Presse:

Fifty-nine journalists have been killed around the world so far this year, in an alarming rise from 2008 that has become a “bloodbath” of the media, a watchdog said Thursday.
The Press Emblem Campaign (PEC) said 53 journalists were killed in the first six months, up from 45 in the first half of last year, but highlighted another six killings in July including Russian journalist and rights activist Natalya Estemirova who was murdered on July 15.
Mexico leads the media blackspots with seven journalist killings this year, according to the PEC.
It said there were six in Pakistan, five each in Iraq, the Philippines, Russia and Somalia, four in Gaza and Honduras, three in Colombia, two each in Afghanistan, Guatemala, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Venezuela and one in India, Indonesia, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, and Madagascar.

The big threat is not necessarily from actual combat as politics plays the death card more often than not, and local news people are more apt to die than a foreign correspondent.
According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 742 news people have been killed since 1992 worldwide (through July 8, 2009) with murder the main charge in 71.8 percent of the time vs. only 17.8 percent dying in actual combat.
And the biggest perpetrators?

  • Political groups: 32.1 percent
  • Government officials: 18.3 percent
  • And the military: 5.8 percent
  • Local/national reporters die 86.5 percent of the time, while foreign news service people at only 13.5 percent.

The guts to these murdered journalists — those who actually did the killing received complete impunity in 88.7 percent of the cases.

In March 2007, Reuters reported on a study by the International News Safety Institute (INSI): More than 1,100 journalists and support staff have been killed carrying out their work in the past decade and the annual toll has jumped since 2003, the year of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.
And it’s worse at home:

Worldwide, last year was the worst for media workers with 167 killed worldwide, up from 149 in 2005 and 131 in 2004. That compares with 94 in 2003, 70 in 2002 and 103 in 2001.
The total tally since the start of 1996 was 1,101, said the report, “Killing the Messenger.”
Nearly half were shot and the vast majority — at least 657 people — were murdered covering news during peacetime in their own country.

J-School with a flak jacket.

And according to Joe Galloway (from above) for a war reporter to avoid getting killed — among a long list:

Strive to look as much like a private of whatever service you are travelling with. You do NOT want to stand out like a sore thumb. BLEND IN! If you look different you may thus appear important to someone peering through a sniper scope. If he is low on ammo or short on time he will definitely shoot you first. Those on the recent media exercise who declared that they had to look different, and donned brightly colored shirts and vests or stripped the camo cover off their kevlar helmet and substituted white tape with a large PRESS emblazoned thereon, are idiots. It is not worth dying to make a statement about your civilian status.
…
Avoid animals. Period. Cute dogs and other critters bite. Then you go to the rear to get your rabies shots.
…
There is no way I can prepare someone who has never witnessed combat for the shock of the first sight of a badly wounded soldier, screaming in pain, begging for his mother. Or the sight of the face of a young soldier in death….a soldier of either side. You will learn to process the images and move on and do your job. But what you see in battle will never leave you.
In combat you may find that those around you may need a helping hand. Do not shy away from an opportunity to act first as a concerned human being and then later as a reporter. Help the wounded, if called to do so. Carry water or ammo or the dead if it seems needed. None of that violates either the Geneva Convention or your objectivity as a journalist.

And take care…

‘Please, please bring us home…’

Filed Under Just Plain War, Orwellian, War & Politics | Leave a Comment

Four more US soldiers were killed in Afghanistan on Monday and this morning news of eight suicide bombers striking government compounds in two eastern towns as this near-decade-long war is going from bad to worse to even worser (if there is such a word/situation).

Thirty US GIs have already been killed this month, and coupled with 25 more deaths from other NATO forces brings the total to 55: The deadliest since this whole mess started in October 2001.

Down on the down stalemate as the Iraq and Afghan operations are becoming inter-twisted  with comparisons to Vitenam.

(Illustration found here).

Over the weekend a video clip was released of a US GI captured/snagged by insurgents.
A sad reminder of the bullshit involved with these wars.

The US is in a hypocritical losers stance, this time in Afghanistan.
Captured American Pfc. Bowe R. Bergdahl, 23, of Ketchum, Idaho, showed evidence both pathetic and revealing.
Via antiwar.com:

The soldier gave his name, age and hometown on the video, which was released on a Web site pointed out by the Taliban.
He said the date was July 14 and that he was captured when he lagged behind on a patrol.
He was interviewed in English by his captors.
He was asked his views on the war, which he called extremely hard; his desire to learn more about Islam; and the morale of American soldiers, which he said was low.
Asked how he was doing, the soldier said: “Well I’m scared, scared I won’t be able to go home. It is very unnerving to be a prisoner.”
He later choked up when discussing his family and his hope to marry his girlfriend.
“I have a very, very good family that I love back home in America. And I miss them every day when I’m gone,” he said.
He was prompted by his interrogators to give a message to the American people.
“To my fellow Americans who have loved ones over here, who know what it’s like to miss them, you have the power to make our government bring them home,” he said. “Please, please bring us home so that we can be back where we belong and not over here, wasting our time and our lives and our precious life that we could be using back in our own country. Please bring us home. It is America and American people who have that power.”
A U.S. military spokeswoman in Afghanistan, Lt. Cmdr. Christine Sidenstricker, said the Taliban was using their captive for propaganda.
“I’m glad to see he appears unharmed, but again, this is a Taliban propaganda video,” she said. “They are exploiting the soldier in violation of international law.”

And this claim of “violation of international law” coming from a country that tortures, illegally invades other countries, eavesdrops on its own citizens, creates a band of roving assassins, among a shitload of other nefarious enterprises — what a mouthful!

And now word that Bergdahl most-likely has been taken to Pakistan, which would make it even harder to get his release, despite the jawing of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton the incident is “outrageous” and shows “It’s a real sign of desperation and inappropriate criminal behavior on the parts of these terrorist groups, so we are going to do everything we can to get him.”

And once again, ‘inappropriate criminal behavior,’ as pot calling the kettle liar.

The Afghan Cannon-Fodder Stare

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Two US marines were killed Saturday in southern Afghanistan, two more died Monday, while the UK lost eight soldiers in a swift, 24-hour period at the end of last week — a war getting worse and already in apparent bad need of more boots on the ground.
An ironic scenerio when coupled with the recent death of bullet-Bob ‘Strange’ McNamara, a self-taught expert on how to horrify even a war, and seemingly one of the more despicable people this side of Dick Cheney.


(Illustration above is from a New York Times story last November and is found here).

Bob McNamara tried to run a war like the Ford Motor Company and it cost 58,000 US lives, not to mention a shitload of money — Between 1965 and 1967, US spending on the Vietnam War escalated from $1 billion to $20.6 billion.
LBJ bailed McNamara’s sorrowful ass out of the Vietnam catastrophe with the presidency of the World Bank, where Bullet-Bob created another debacle but this time worldwide, mostly by lending tons and tons of money to authoritarian dicatorships.
A good, swift look at McNamara’s nasty World Bank days can be found here.

Bullet Bob wouldn’t blink an eye to a major troop escalation in Afghanistan.
Even with the first major US Afghan operation under President Obama’s watch only 10 days old — 4,000 Marines and hundreds of Afghan troops are working the Helmand River Valley in southern Aghanistan searching for the Taliban — the situation in country is and will get nasty.
A Taliban spokesman: “I cannot accept the fact that 4,000 US troops have taken part in this operation,” he said, quoted by the Afghan AIP news agency. “I consider it a part of a psychological war, but if 4,000 US troops really are taking part in the operation, they will not have any permanent victory.”

The Brits have lost 15 soldiers in the past 11 days, including the eight killed Friday, bringing the UK’s total losses to 184, now more than the 179 the country lost in Iraq.
According to the UK’s Independent:

The offensive in Helmand is exacting a heavy toll on the coalition — 11 Americans and two Canadians also died in the past week.
Senior British defence sources say that about 190 Taliban fighters have been killed in the British end of the operation, with about 60 more, many of them foreign fighters, still putting up resistance.

And in that bloody Helmand province on Monday, a NATO helicopter operated by civilian contractors crashed, killing all six aboard — the Taliban claimed they shot it down, but they always say that.
There’s been continued intense fighting all over that boiling country — in the last couple of days, insurgents attacked a compound in Uruzgan province north of Kandahar; in the northeast a pitched battle in Kunar province, and in eastern Paktia province in the middle of the country along the Pakistan border more bullets flying — without an end in sight.

The aim of all this nasty, bloody dust-ups is to calm the country from the US perspective, and to uncalm the country in the Taliban view, prior to the August 20 national elections — which appear to be an unsafe proposition: Zeina Khodr, Al Jazeera’s correspondent in Kabul, said: “Security is proving to be a major challenge in the upcoming presidential elections.  According to the interior ministry, 134 out of 364 districts in the country are deemed unsafe. There are more than 28,000 polling stations across Afghanistan, and according to the free and fair election foundation here, 30 per cent of those polling stations will not be secured.”
One major problem: Afghan cops are being killed at an alarming rate — “six to 10 police every day since March with nearly 50 killed in attacks in the past week alone…”
Afghan police in some places, however, are not peace officers:

As British troops moved into the village newly freed from Taliban control, they heard one message from the anxious locals: for God’s sake do not bring back the Afghan police.
…
But as they advance, they are learning uncomfortable facts about their local allies: villagers say the government’s police force was so brutal and corrupt that they welcomed the Taliban as liberators.
“The police would stop people driving on motorcycles, beat them and take their money,” said Mohammad Gul, an elder in the village of Pankela, which British troops have been securing for the past three days after flying in by helicopter.
He pointed to two compounds of neighbors where pre-teen children had been abducted by police to be used for the local practice of “bachabazi,” or sex with pre-pubescent boys.

In fact, police and official Afghan government corruption is the biggest problem in handling this dirty, little war: A 2007 International Crisis Group report entitled “Reforming Afghanistan’s Police” found that Afghans often view the police “more as a source of fear than of security.”

In a NYT review this week of the RAND Corporation political scientist Seth G. Jones’s new book, “In the Graveyard of Empires: America’s War in Afghanistan,” a picture is painted of hopeless defeat:

The tragedy of Afghanistan, Mr. Jones concludes — in a passage that echoes the conclusions about Iraq that the Washington Post special military correspondent Thomas E. Ricks drew in his 2006 book, “Fiasco” — is that the “rise of the insurgency in the wake of the U.S. victory over the Taliban” in 2001 “was not inevitable” but the result of the failure of the Rumsfeld Pentagon and the Bush White House, which were preoccupied with Iraq, to listen to “seasoned diplomats and military commanders in Afghanistan” who were calling for more resources and troops.
It was also a failure, Mr. Jones reminds us, to learn from history; after all, “past empires that have dared to enter Afghanistan — from Alexander the Great to Great Britain and the Soviet Union — have found initial entry possible, even easy, only to find themselves fatally mired in local resistance.”
Which is why that harsh and mountainous country has become known, in the words of his book’s title, as “the graveyard of empires.”

The powers-that-be, however, never, ever learn.
Escalation is just a matter of time.
Obama’s waiting for those national election results.
According to Politico:

“I think that all of us are going to have to do an evaluation after the Afghan election to see what more we can do,” Obama said in an interview broadcast Sunday on Sky News.
“It may not be on the military side. It may be on the development side, providing Afghan farmers alternatives to poppy crops, making sure we’re effectively training a judiciary system and a rule of law in Afghanistan that people trust.”

Such bullshit, Mr. President.
Obama’s hand-picked commander for Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, one wacked, military nutcase in his own right with his own tortured background, has reportedly said he would ask for more US troops despite being told he wouldn’t get them — if the situation warrants more US GIs in country.
More cannon fodder was needed yesterday.

Last spring, McChrystal toured Afghanistan under the guise of talking to people in order to develop a new strategy, but he already knew full well a shitload of fresh GIs was desperately required in order to at least bring a bit of calm to the country.
In illustration was this routine — According to the BBC:

In a traditional reception room the size of a tennis court, Gen McChrystal listened intently to an Afghan governor.
The official told the commander that he had only taken his job after being led to believe by the Afghan government that the security situation was good — but it turned out it was not.
Gen McChrystal then joked that US President Barack Obama had “done exactly same thing to me” — provoking laughs from the assembled audience.

Hahahaha…

And what do these cannon fodder boys and girls from all over the world face in Afghanistan?
In an interesting, but realistically depressing post at counterpunch.org, can be seen a tactic similar to Muhammad Ali’s old ‘rope-a-dope’ boxing technique — “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee” –the Taliban’s strategic aim is to wear down their adversaries by keeping them under continual strain and by working on their psychology, or as the late American strategist John Boyd would say, by getting inside, slowing down, and disorienting their adversary’s Observation-Orientation-Decision-Action (OODA) loops.

And this piece (mentioned in the above counterpunch story) from the timesonline about the UK’s Welsh Guards in Afghanistan (but it could be any troops from any number of countries):

Such operations, which often come under fire, are exhausting, frustrating and take place every day.
To avoid the bombs the British troops have to be efficient, and to some degree lucky, all the time; Taleban bombmakers need to be lucky once.
The Welsh Guards Reconnaissance Platoon has lost almost two thirds of its strength to casualties over the past two months.
Many Welsh Guardsmen have fought more firefights than they can remember.
Though morale appears solid, some are clearly feeling great strain.
“I just feel cold inside,” one very young soldier said in a quiet moment last week, admitting that the death of his platoon commander some weeks earlier had left his unit grief-stricken.
In some firefights, he said with odd detachment, he was finding it increasingly hard not to freeze up, to stay in control of himself.

Obama’s asking for real-bad trouble if he doesn’t get everybody the shit-out-of-Dodge.

Cracked-Cranium’s Combat

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As the US slogs its way through two disastrous wars, the ones doing the fighting are killing themselves.
At record numbers, 88 so far this year, 21 more than the same time in 2008:

“Every soldier suicide is different and tragic in its own way,” said Brig. Gen. Colleen McGuire, director, Army Suicide Prevention Task Force.
“Our current research and prevention efforts are identifying common denominators that lead soldiers to take their own life. It’s often a combination of many factors that overwhelm an individual.”

(Illustration found here).

Maybe those “many factors” are too many wars, and bad ones at that.

And maybe there’s a way out, at least in Afghanistan.
According to CNN this morning, there’s a chance for talks:

Pakistan’s military has declared that not only is it in contact with Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar but that it can bring him and other commanders to the negotiating table with the United States.
…
Retired Gen. Hamid Gul, a former head of the ISI, Pakistan’s equivalent of the CIA, is known as the “Godfather of the Taliban.” He, too, said talks can be arranged. In terms of U.S. interests in Afghanistan, he said, there is only one man who can make it happen.
“Mullah Omar, nobody else,” Gul said.
He insisted the Obama administration, through the Pakistan military, can access Mullah Omar. “Why not?” he said, “Is he a terrorist by any definition? Has he indulged in any act of terrorism?”
Gul added a stated Taliban condition to any discussions, the complete withdrawal of foreign troops from Afghanistan first, was not necessarily a fixed demand and, with concessions from Washington, could be softened and make way for negotiations to begin.

And soon, as the IED attacks have soared, starting in March with a record 361. April beat it with 407, May had 465. The steady 10-15% monthly climb is gone now, replaced with a precipitous rise in June, which records are showing had 736 IED incidents.

Do something!

Memory

Filed Under Just Plain War, Musings | Leave a Comment

Despite all the posturing, the US is a war-like nation.


(Illustration found here).

War has always been in the vital interests of the US — starting from day one, but officially most-likely from the Pequot War in 1637 with 11 wars fought before the so-called Revolutionary War and 30 even prior to the Civil War, a shitload of dying in such a small space.
The US has wasted 653,708 lives in wars prior to the modern era and the Global War on Terror, which has been rebranded as the Overseas Contingency Operation (to soften up the phrase, I guess) has currently produced two quagmired conflicts without an end in sight, both immoral and illegal.
Although Iraq supposedly has an end, it’s going to be bloody until then.

So here we are on Memorial Day 2009 to honor all those war dead.
Originally called Decoration Day in 1868 for the mass of US peoples slaughted in the Civil War and was “designated for the purpose of strewing with flowers, or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion, and whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village, and hamlet churchyard in the land.”

And what better time than to recite a few words of Mark Twain’s sarcastic, horrifing-but-true anti-war ode/poem, The War Prayer:

O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it – for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet!
We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts.
Amen.

War, yes, war!

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