Fox News’ Tucker Carlson appears in thrall to Lara Logan’s political observations—to her “philosophical” meditations, too. Although treated as a Delphic oracle of sorts; Logan is no Roger Scruton.

You might have heard Logan claim, recently and repetitively, that everything in the world is simple. “Everything is simple,” she keeps intoning in her appearances on Fox News.

Applied to the fiasco in Afghanistan, Logan’s Theory of Simple is that, considering that America is omnipotent, whatever occurs under its watch is always and everywhere planned and preventable.

Ridiculous and wrong, yet Tucker, whom we all love to bits, giggles in delight.

“They want you to believe Afghanistan is complicated,” lectured Logan. “Because if you complicate it, it is a tactic in information warfare called ‘ambiguity increasing.’”

“So now we’re talking about all the corruption and this and that,” she further vaporized. “But at its heart, every single thing in the world… always comes down to one or two things …”

Logan likely recently discovered Occam’s Razor and is promiscuously applying this principle to anything and everything, with little evidence or geopolitical and historic understanding in support of her Theory of Simple.

Occam’s Razor posits that, “the simplest explanation is preferable to one that is more complex,” provided “simple” is “based on as much evidence as possible.”

A nifty principle—and certainly not a philosophy—Occam’s Razor was not meant to apply to everything under the sun.

Misapplied by Logan, why? Primarily because Logan’s explanation for America’s defeat in Afghanistan—that the United States threw the game—is hardly the simplest explanation, despite her assertion to the contrary.

The simplest explanation to the US defeat in Afghanistan, based on as much information as is possible to gather, is that, wait for this: America was defeated fair and square. As this columnist had argued, the US was outsmarted and outmaneuvered, in a mission impossible in the first place.

Unlike Logan, who is convinced America could have won a war other superpowers had lost, Mike Martin, a former British army officer in Helmand province, now at King’s College, London, had this to say about the ragtag enemy:

This was “probably one of the best conceived and planned guerrilla campaigns ever. The Taliban went into every district and flipped all the local militias by doing deals along tribal lines.”

What do you know? The Economist did not ask Logan for her “analysis” of “why America failed in Afghanistan.” Instead, the august magazine called on Henry Kissinger, a stateman with a sinewy intelligence, for his analysis.

Kissinger said what this writer had written in columns like, “‘Just War’ For Dummies (2003), “Afghanistan: A War Obama Can Call His Own” (2008) “To Pee Or Not To Pee is Not the Question” (2012), “Grunts, Get In Touch With Your Inner-Muslim” (2012), and others.

Tribal Afghanistan is thoroughly decentralized, always has been. Our indisputably brave soldiers had been ordered to, at once, woo and war against a primitive Pashtun population that disdained the central government we were dead set on strengthening. (“Afghanistan: A War Obama Can Call His Own,” 2008)

Since Baksheesh (bribery) is in the political bone marrow of Afghanistan; American money and profligate spending habits only fed this proclivity for pelf and strengthened feudal fiefdoms and warlords.

And Afghans simply have more of an affinity for the Taliban than for the Wilsonians who were attempting to westernize them. Those we collaborated with are currently being called “our allies.” But it was not uncommon to hear of an Afghan policeman or soldier leading our men into an ambush, or opening fire on his American “colleagues,” during a joint operation.

Now, all we hear from Logan and the neocon Rambo Rescuers of Fox News is of the urgency of bringing these “Afghan allies” to America.

Back in the day, it was curiously observed that the Afghani soldiers “fighting” alongside our men frequently suffered few casualties; Americans invariably paid the price. In 2009, I quoted Specialist Raquime Mercer, 20, whose close friend died in one of those attacks by an “ally.” He said: “You don’t trust anybody here.”

Now we consider them trustworthy—even eligible to take up residence in our neighborhoods.

Wrote Jim Sauer, a “retired Marine Corps Sergeant Major and combat veteran with over thirty years of service” (2009), about our Afghan allies:

…the bulk of the Afghan National Army (ANA) and Afghan National Police (ANP) are not fighters, nor are they ‘true believers.’ They are simply cowards – frauds – corrupt to the core by any standard and apostates to their own faith. They are slovenly, drug-addicted, dimwitted, and totally unreliable at any level… They thrive on their petty powers and refuse to shoulder any burden or responsibility. Does this sound too harsh? Not for the Marines and Soldiers who have been killed by the treachery of ANA and ANP.

The Taliban does not speak for the small sector of Afghans groomed by America during the occupation. Widely supported by most Afghanis, however, the Taliban tried to tell us that, “the presence of infidels in a Muslim country is a … sin,” and that they would not tolerate the “accursed Western invasion, which [was] forcing itself upon us in the name of democracy.”

They didn’t.

The authentic Kissinger (Henry, not Lara) agrees, speaking about the occupation as “a process so prolonged and obtrusive as to turn even non-jihadist Afghans against the entire effort. Afghanistan,” writes the elder stateman, “has never been a modern state. Statehood presupposes a sense of common obligation and centralization of authority. Afghan soil, rich in many elements, lacks these.”

Islam. Occupation. Tribalism. Traditionalism. Baksheesh in the blood. Only simpletons think failure in Afghanistan was simple.

**

NEW. WATCH: “With Friends Like Gen. Mark Benedict Milley, America Doesn’t Need Enemies”:

©2021 ILANA MERCER
WND, September 16
Townhall.com, September 16
American Greatness, September 18
Unz Review, September 16
CNSNews.com  September 17
The New American, September 20

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Although funded by Americans, the US military’s allegiances are global and humanitarian. Our soldiers are trained to be ‘a global force for good.’ That’s their mindset. And that, in 2009, was the actual recruiting motto for the U.S. Navy, for a short while ~ilana

There is so much unutterable suffering in the US.  The bravado of the typical, tough-talking military man, gushing over—and rushing to—Afghanistan not only doesn’t impress me much, but it turns the stomach ~ilana

 

Fox News celebrity anchors and their tough-talking guests continue to trip over one another to talk up the wonders of our Afghan allies and the legions of Afghan Americans who have American citizenship, but happen to hang out a lot in Afghanistan. It’s a terrible affront, they all say, that America has failed to lift them all to safety.

Between the Republicans and the Democrats, there isn’t a country in the world whose countrymen would not be targets for resettlement in America.

Wait a sec, there is: South Africa. Truth be told, I’m deeply repulsed by legions of Americans, ex-soldiers and other sentimental sniveling wrecks, rushing to bring Afghanistan to the United States.

I’m a South-African American. Who’s rescuing the people I love and left in South Africa? We South-African Americans never think to demand it, although Afghan-Americans stridently do.

Some of my people have been robbed and beaten within an inch of their lives. And others are subjected to daily racial depredations and discrimination; their white kids having no future to speak of. All are far more compatible with life here, although, to be fair, my South Africans do suffer a comorbidity: they’re white.

One of the networks interviewed one Tim Kennedy, a hardened, yet teary ex-military man, Special Forces.

On August the 26th, as he packed his bag, Kennedy waxed fat to his interviewer about dying for anyone who wanted to fight for a freer world.

And off this globalist went to fight for his people du jour, the Afghans. (On Twitter he promotes Special Visas for Afghan.)

I find it hard to respect this kind of deracinated, rootless soldier of Empire.

Although funded by Americans, the US military’s allegiances are global and humanitarian. Our soldiers are trained to be “a global force for good.” That’s their mindset. And that, in 2009, was the actual recruiting motto for the U.S. Navy, for a short while.

The slogan was quickly ditched then, but it is perfectly apropos now, since recruits are inculcated with a thoroughly cosmopolitan, even anti-American, sensibility.

I can’t listen to Special Forces Kennedy’s obscene, quintessentially neoconservative rants about the bad, bad Taliban. Unlike ordinary Americans, these soldiers of Empire have been brainwashed to be thoroughly vested in the fate of homelands not their own. This, as their own homeland is being invaded and is packed with poor, sad people.

Cory Mills is another ex-Special Forces guy bragging about the massive global effort he and another GOP Congressman galvanized in order to import Afghani Muslims into our neighborhoods.

MAGA and America First just didn’t register with the GOP, did they? The GOP’s default is globalism. Which is why I say, “GOP, RIP.”

If members of the US Military had a moral core—in the original spirit of Posse comitatus, an ancient English institution—they’d head to their own country’s southwestern border where an unremitting invasion is underway.

Or, they’d help so many pathetic, helpless and hopeless Americans, an example being “The Whittakers: An Inbred American Family,” living like neglected, shelterless animals in the United States of America. These poor Americans have nothing! But they are not a cause exotic enough for our military and the elites that shape its philosophy. Impoverished Americans don’t have refugee chic.

My point: There is so much unutterable suffering in the US.  The bravado of the typical, tough-talking military man, gushing over—and rushing to—Afghanistan not only doesn’t impress me much, but it turns the stomach.

As I watch the wretched of the world living within America’s borders, I think of the words of Cullen Murphy, author of the superb “Are We Rome? The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of Rome”:

“Imperial overstretch” is “the idea that one’s security needs, military obligations, and globalist desires increasingly outstrip resources available to satisfy them” (p. 71).

Outsized, excessive and over-the-top: The above is a perfect description of the improper and misplaced exhilaration of the Kennedy and Mills military types, on their private mission to Afghanistan. Everything about their displays is outsized, excessive and over-the-top.

Such a military sickens, because a military by definition is designed to defend the homeland and the homeboys.

**

WATCH: ‘Empire’s Soldiers Head To Afghanistan To Defend The Homeland And Their Homeboys’

©2021 ILANA MERCER
WND, September 9
Unz Review, September 9

The post Empire’s Soldiers Head To Afghanistan To Defend The Homeland And Their Homeboys appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

With the American media as master of ceremonies, pundits and politicians—all partners in the neocon-neoliberal joint venture in Afghanistan—are barking mad over the images coming out of the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, and the reality these optics portend.

Naturally, media “reporting” from Afghanistan is nothing but an unremitting sentimental gush, aimed at creating a state of heightened emotions.

“The children; the children; the translators; the translators. Americans held hostage behind enemy lines. ‘Teach the Taliban a lesson, Corn Pop,’” demanded a “macho” personality at Fox News. The same litany runs on a continuous loop.

Forbes reporters dissolved into puddles of tears at the sight of U.S. Air Force pilots bringing in plane loads of young, strong, military-aged men, unfreighted by women and children.

On August 20, about 5,700 people had been flown out of Kabul. Only 169 were American. “Make no mistake,” slobbered Forbes, “lifting six times more people than an aircraft is designed to seat is a heroic achievement of logistics, skill and sheer grit.”

I see a medal of commendation in the future of the Empire’s Pilot, who commandeered a U.S. Air Force C-17 to airlift 800 Afghani passengers from Kabul to Qatar.

War: The Health Of The State —And The Statists

So, who exactly are those “trapped” Americans living in Afghanistan?

What are they doing in such inhospitable climes, in a country most of whose inhabitants hated the American presence? And what is their business in Afghanistan? The incurious moron media have never asked.

My guess is that U.S. citizens in Afghanistan have hitherto lived within Army-erected green zones, paid for by American taxpayers.

My guess is that these Americans are mostly military contractors, an extension of the military-industrial-complex—also the ultimate state, make-work scheme.

A likely breakdown of our “Americans in Afghanistan” comes via Danger Zone Jobs, “which tracks more than 300 companies with overseas contracting jobs in Afghanistan, Iraq and other countries.”

Most “jobs” for Americans in a place like Afghanistan revolve around the military, “the two primary sources of jobs [being] with private contractors supporting the military and companies who subcontract to various international relief and development efforts.” In other words, the NGO racket.

By Danger Zone Jobs’ accounting, “Approximately 29,389 DoD contractors supported operations in Afghanistan during the 1st quarter of 2019.” There you have it. To paraphrase Randolph Bourne, war is the health of the State and the statists.

Still, you are not a good American unless you fret about Afghani translators (who, in turn, complain on-camera endlessly, and as loudly as CNN’s Dana Bash, about American dereliction).

Realpolitik: What Modest Foreign Policy Looks Like

Similarly, you are not a good pack animal unless you worry about “the Uyghurs, the Uyghurs. China is oppressing the Uyghurs. Our values, our values.”

Uyghurs are also China’s biggest headache, now that America is no longer mired in Afghanistan. What the dummies on the idiot’s lantern fail to tell you—although analysts at The Economist do—“Uyghurs count among thousands of foreign jihadists active in Afghanistan, mostly enlisted in Taliban ranks.”

So, as the skittish media hounds and politicians, stateside, gnash teeth and beat on breast over Afghanistan, less hysterical countries, abutting Afghanistan, are acting calmly in their national interest, to ensure that Jihad and heroin don’t spill over their borders.

Unlike Lara Kissinger Logan of Fox News, who “thinks” America could have won a war that other superpowers have lost—the Chinese and the Iranians are hip to what just happened. This was “probably one of the best conceived and planned guerrilla campaigns ever,” says Mike Martin, a former British army officer in Helmand province, now at King’s College London. “The Taliban went into every district and flipped all the local militias by doing deals along tribal lines.”

In negotiations with the Taliban, Beijing has thus realistically demanded that Afghanistan not become “a base for ethnic Uyghur separatists.” For their part, “Taliban leaders have pledged to leave Chinese interests in Afghanistan alone and not to harbor any anti-China extremist groups.”

Like Beijing, Tehran, too, is busying itself with realpolitik. While Iran is “delighted to see the Great Satan, America, abandon its bases next door,” it worries about cheap heroin flooding in from Afghanistan, as well as the persecution of the tiny Shia minority of Afghanistan.

There is another matter that vexes the Shia of Iran, but is of no concern to the State Department, which generally “doesn’t know Shiite from Shinola” (The phrase is, “Doesn’t know sh-t from Shinola.”)

Don’t Know Shiite From Shinola

“Shia Muslims … view their own Islamic revolution as a modernizing movement,” explains the Economist. After all, “Women can study, work and hold office in Iran, so long as they veil.”

Consequently, Iranians “look askance at the Taliban’s hidebound Sunni fanaticism.” Shia Iran worries about the Sunni insanity, and rightly so.

That’s yet another aspect of foreign policy that good Americans are not permitted to question. For merely asking, “When last did Iran commit terrorism against the US?,” Fox News’ Tucker Carlson was attacked viciously by rival personality Mark Levin. Carlson, however, was on the money. As I chronicled in 2017: “Iranians killed zero Americans in terrorist attacks in the US between 1975 -2015.”

What do you know? When compared with Sunni Islam (for example, Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabism), a faction of Islam with whose practitioners the West feels much more simpatico—Shia Islam (Iran’s poison of choice) is more enlightened. Yet America and Israel side with Saudi Arabia, the epitome of Sunni insanity. Go figure.

After Afghanistan, we can all agree that American foreign policy is an angels-and-demons Disney production—starring the prototypical evil dictators killing their noble people, until the US rides to the rescue—and that the producers at Foggy Bottom don’t have the foggiest idea what they are doing.

WATCH:

©2021 ILANA MERCER
WND, August 26
Unz Review, August 26
CNSNews.com  August 30
The New American, August 27
Quarterly Review, August 29

The post Afghanistan: Bringing The Military-Industrial-Complex Home appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

Yes, we know it was chaos, but then again there was no good way to leave that dusty hellhole—or “shithole,” as the much-missed Donald Trump would have put it.

Joe Biden was right in his “Remarks on Afghanistan“: “… if Afghanistan is unable to mount any real resistance to the Taliban now, there is no chance that one year — one more year, five more years, or 20 more years of U.S. military boots on the ground would’ve made any difference.”

Tempting as it may be for right-thinking conservatives and paleolibertarians, in particular, to use the inevitable collapse of the charade in Afghanistan against Biden—honesty demands that we avoid it.

TV Republicans, no doubt, will join the shrill CNN and MSNBC females and their houseboys, who love nothing more than to export the American Nanny State, in bashing Biden for his decisive withdrawal. The president said, “I stand squarely behind my decision. After 20 years, I’ve learned the hard way that there was never a good time to withdraw U.S. forces.”

Falling into the Republican line of partisan, tit-for-tat retorts is wrong. The man made the right choice—as opposed to Barack Obama’s. Indeed, Afghanistan was a war Obama had embraced .

Beware especially the military men, who will flood Fox New with the sunk-cost fallacy. As explained in this 2014 column, “GOP Should Grow A Brain, Join The Peace Train“:

“Military movers and shakers are heavily vested in the sunk-cost fallacy—the irrational notion that more resources must be committed forthwith … so as to ‘redeem’ the original misguided commitment of men, money and materiel to the mission.”

To that end, repeated ad nauseam is the refrain about our “brave men and women of the military,” whose sacrifice for [Afghani] “freedoms” will be squandered unless more such sacrifices are made.

The Skeptic’s Dictionary dispels this illogic: “To continue to invest in a hopeless project is irrational. Such behavior may be a pathetic attempt to delay having to face the consequences of one’s poor judgment. The irrationality is a way to save face, to appear to be knowledgeable, when in fact one is acting like an idiot.”

Besides, it’s time the military heed its paymasters, The American People, a majority of whom don’t want to send U.S. soldiers back into Afghanistan.

The best thing about Joe Biden’s decisive departure from Afghanistan was that he angered the girls and the “girly boys” of the networks as much as he infuriated the jingoists at Fox News and the globalist the world over.

How good is that?!

As always, David Vance and myself do get serious, and dish out hard, immutable truths, via podcast and video, so listen up or watch!

LISTEN: “Biden Decamps From Dark Ages Afghanistan, Infuriates Dems, GOPers And Globalists: BRAVO!”

https://hardtruthwithdavidvanceandilanamercer.podbean.com/e/biden-decamps-from-dark-ages-afghanistan-infuriates-dems-gopers-and-globalists-bravo/

WATCH: “Biden Decamps From Dark Ages Afghanistan, Infuriates Dems, GOPers And Globalists: BRAVO!”

©2021 ILANA MERCER
WND, August 19
Unz Review, August 19
Quarterly Review, August 21

*Image courtesy The Economist

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For the past few weeks, the country’s distinct national navel-gazing has shifted to the military. It began with horror stories about the treatment of veterans at Veterans Affairs facilities across the country and has reached a crescendo in the curious case of Taliban hostage Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, exchanged for five fierce-looking Muhammadans from Afghanistan’s Jihad Central.

As to the first: Backlogs, limited services, fewer service providers, substandard treatment, filthy facilities and the ensuing fatalities—these have been features of the VA system for a long time. Pervasive, institutionalized indifference and incompetence are inherent to—and well-documented in—all centrally planned healthcare systems. America’s neighbors north of the 48th parallel are forever in search of a panacea for the poxes that plague their single-payer gulag. Although the same problems are beginning to percolate across America’s healthcare sector, due to Obamacare regulations and rationing—the misfortunes endured by the military have been elevated above the misery of the multitudes.

We fret and worry over the fate of the 9.3 million veterans who’re enrolled in VA healthcare. Nary is a word said about the consequences of The Affordable Care Act (ACA) to ordinary, elderly Americans—40 million of whom rely on Medicare. Why so? The military is one powerful interest group. It has formidable cheerleaders among the legislative and chattering rabble. Even the weakest links in the military-industrial-complex, as the grunts who do the fighting surely are, wield almost as much political clout as the illegal-alien lobby, and are certainly mightier than advocates for the aged.

As the mantra goes, soldiers fighting phantoms in far-flung destinations are “fighting for us, suffering for us, sacrificing for us,” and deserve better than us.

Not that you’d know it, but death panels by any other name are the lot of non-VA patients aged 65 and older. In compliance with ACA-mandated rationing, government planners plan on penalizing hospitals that suffer from an administrative condition the technocrats have termed “excess readmissions.” Deconstructed, this Orwellian doublespeak means the following: Say a lady aged 84 is admitted to hospital with pneumonia. Months later, she is seen at the same facility for a re-occurrence. Given her age, she will likely be readmitted in the future. To avoid Medicare penalties ordered by the ACA for admitting grandma too often, staff now place sickly repeat offenders on what is called (truly) a “frequent flyer list.” The goal: keep grandma out even if it kills her.

Grandma may pay with her life for the benefit of sectional interests: 30 million uninsured Americans, including millions of illegal aliens, for whose benefit Obama’s $2 trillion ACA was intended. But who cares? In the mass of competing interests that is America, grandma is never as glamorous as the illegal alien or the grunt—who will often confess, as did Army Sgt. Bergdahl, to having joined the military so as to travel the world, experience different cultures and help peoples more exotic than his own.

At the center of the Bowe Bergdahl contretemps—a story that grows in the telling—was a passion to “learn about other cultures.” This motivated him to join the army. Poor Pashtuns are certainly more interesting than the generic granny from the Midwest. Our soldiers, after all, are groomed as “citizens of the world.” “We pay their wages,” this column ventured in “The International Highway to Hell,” “but their hearts belong in faraway exotic places with which Main Street USA can hardly hope to compete” for their affections.

There’s a problem with the American military’s sentimental flirtation with internationalism: The Constitution these men and women swear to obey brooks none of this stuff!

Who then grooms this army of avowed internationalists? Aided by the military’s upper echelons, Uncle Sam does. Commanded constitutionally by the commander-in-chief, the military does the government’s bidding. Although limited-government advocates refuse to consider the military as a division of Leviathan, it is just that. As was further argued in “Your Government’s Jihadi Protection Program,” “The military works like government; is financed like government, and sports many of the same inherent malignancies of government. Like government, it must be kept small. Conservative can’t coherently preach against the evils of big government, while exempting the military mammoth.”

Better still, if the military is government—and it is—fanatical militarism is a facet of statism. And if the military is government—and it is—then the missions on which the government sends the military must be questioned.

An equally distinctive characteristic of the current military statism is to extend the worship of The Man in Uniform to His Mission. We worship the men and women in uniform and their mission without question. Conservatives question government programs. War is a government program. If they hope to retain a modicum of philosophical integrity, conservatives will have to include a critique of the state’s warfare machine in their case against its welfare apparatus.

The blanket chant—”thank you for your service; thank you for fighting for our freedoms”—is the hallmark of a propagandized people in the grip of fanatical militarisms. Even the most irrational person has to recognize how tentative are the ties between “helping” toothless Pashtuns to be more like Americans and protecting Americans like granny.

©2014 By ILANA MERCER
WND, Economic Policy Journal, American Daily Herald,
Praag.org &  Quarterly Journal
June 6

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The force of the to-pee-or-not-to-pee position is just up Beavis and Butthead’s philosophical alley ~ilana

It’s okay to kill ’em, but it’s not okay to pee on them once they’re dead.

This sums up the piss-poor discussion over the LiveLeak clips of “four United States Marines urinating on three dead Taliban fighters.” According the New York Times, the videos, “posted on public video-sharing Web sites including YouTube, began ricocheting around international news Web sites on Wednesday,” January 11.

The urinators “are members of the Third Battalion, Second Marines, which completed a tour of Afghanistan this fall before returning to its base at Camp Lejeune, N.C.” They kicked off the wee odyssey in the northern part of Helmand Province.

Quick to distinguish themselves were the pro-pee pundits. For a ghastly moment, I was back in 2002, watching the anchorwomen of Fox News countdown to obliterating Iraq. How like watching bitches in heat that experience was!

The force of the to-pee-or-not-to-pee position is just up Beavis and Butthead’s philosophical alley. The repartee of the two animated MTV characters, the products of Mike Judge’s genius (think “Idiocracy”), would go something like this:

Butthead: “Beavis, check this out. What’s better; to have a dude waste you or whiz on you, uh huh huh?” (Sound effects are here.)

Beavis: “Yeah, yeah, I’ll take the whiz, Butthead, gimme the whiz, yeah, yeah.” (More grunting.)

As the Daily Mail noted, the dead Afghans may have been civilians or insurgents, we simply do not know. Whichever is the case, they would have, I wager, welcomed the kind of options even Beavis and Butthead are capable of entertaining.

For the truth about the people we are pissing on and pissing off in Afghanistan is quite simple. America’s indisputably brave soldiers have been ordered to, at once, woo and war against a primitive Pashtun population. These Pashtuns disdain the central government we desperately want them to obey. So it goes: We help local groups believed to be patriotic, but, at the same time, end up establishing an authoritarian protectorate they despise.

According to Matthew Hoh, a former member of the Marine Corps, who was cited for uncommon bravery in Iraq, we “are losing soldiers and Marines in combat to people who are fighting us really only because we’re occupying them. … In Afghanistan, everything is much more localized,” Hoh explained in numerous interviews, in 2009.

“Allegiance is really to your family and then to your village or your valley. And that’s what they fight for. There has not been a tradition of central government there and I don’t believe central government is wanted.” Currently, and consequent to US colonization, these poor primitives, hankering after communal autonomy, have come to conflate the central government and the foreign occupiers, and are fighting both.

Matthew Hoh went on to take a position as Foreign Service Officer in Afghanistan, only to resign in protest over the Afghan war, having “lost understanding of and confidence in the strategic purpose of the United States’ presence in Afghanistan.”

But Hoh is no hero to the war hos at home.

Yes, America’s neoconservative pundettes are back. Never underestimate the contribution neoconservative women in the scribbling and broadcasting professions have made to sexing up war. When babes with bursting décolletages quake and quiver for action, their fans do more than just look, they listen. Babes in Brownian Motion have been instrumental in keeping their fans tuned-out, turned-on, and hot for war. Mistaking jingoism for patriotism, their atavistic followers have rewarded them with lifelong loyalty (and royalties).

And the silly sex clearly likes water sports.

One gushed about the Golden Shower, calling it “a victory tinkle.” Another promised she’d “drop trou and do it too.” Still another woman for war heaped scorn on Afghani Islamist culture, alluding to its proclivity for “child rape (sanctioned by polygamous ‘marriage’), to normalized pederasty (dancing boys), beheadings, Islamic male supremacism and zero freedom of conscience.” As if the vileness of their faith justifies our vanquishing of Muslims—and our prosecuting a decade-long, futile war against them in Afghanistan. Let us leave the Afghani to their horrible habits and stop inflicting ours on them.

Aghast, Russia Today (RT) editorialized about CNN contributor Dana Loesch, who egged on the Dana Show listeners, during a January 12 broadcast: “I want a million ‘cool points’ for these guys. Is that harsh to say? C’mon people, this is a war. Do I have a problem with that as a citizen of the United States? No, I don’t.”

Still and all, I disagree with the impressive Allen West, a Republican Representative from Florida, and an ex-Army lieutenant colonel. West joined Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton in advocating “maximum punishment” for the urinators. “It is absolutely inconsistent with American values and the standards we expect from our military personnel,” crowed Clinton. I don’t believe the Marines are at fault. Blame the people who keep them in that country, aided by the King’s comitatus—battle-crying babes included.

Who can forget Hillary’s crassness and cruelty when informed that Col. Muammar Gadhafi had been butchered by her Libyan proxies, the National Transitional Council? “We came, we saw, he died,” cackled Clinton, conjuring Julius Caesar.

The gorgon who heads Caesar’s state department did everything but squat on Gadhafi’s corpse. Now she expresses “total dismay” and wants the Marines to pay.

Spare us.

©2012 ILANA MERCER
WND & RT
January 20

* Screen pic credit

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The Arab Street erupts in atavistic displays when Americans or Israelis are eliminated. The American Street is not that different. Our adversaries hand out sweets when we die; we pass the beer when one of theirs shuffles off his mortal coil. They dance the Debka (an Arabic traditional dance) and ululate at our misery; we bump and grind lasciviously when they expire ~ilana

This is who we are. Which is why President Barack Obama sounded so phony when he intoned: “That is not who we are. We don’t trot this stuff out as trophies.” The president was alluding to images of Osama bin Laden’s shattered skull. Obama had the fortitude to instruct the elite SEAL Team 6 to shoot Osama on-site, but has, ever since, been feigning daintiness about releasing the images.

According to Al Jazeera, a Pakistani security officer is rumored to have snapped shots of three others who were killed during the raid on bin Laden’s Abbottabad hideout. The pictures were purchased by Reuters and have been published. They show surfaces slick with blood. No weapons are evident.

Tellingly, Barack Obama gave a measure of presidential protection, in 2009, to some of the sadistic and slutty servicemen and women toiling in the porn theaters of Iraq. As Reuters divulged, “at least one picture showed an American soldier apparently raping a female prisoner while another is said to show a male translator raping a male detainee.” And who can forget the pornographic pictorials to surface, in 2004, from the Abu Ghraib prison, starring the 800th Military Police Brigade and their Iraqi sex slaves?

The generic GI Joe and GI ho soon surfaced in Afghanistan too. For weeks, “The Kill Team,” a group of American infantrymen serving in Afghanistan, had been baying for blood. As Rolling Stone magazine reported, in March of this year, the “Bravo Company” had been brooding over “the ethics of bagging ‘savages’ and had debated the probability of getting caught,” before they went hunting in “an isolated farming village,” in Kandahar Province. Try as the Pentagon did, the handiwork of the men from the “Bravo Company” has survived for posterity.

Decapitation, desecration, mutilation: Click through this gallery of the grotesque to view these made-in-America, stylized murders.

“The images – more than 150 of which had been obtained by Rolling Stone – portray a front-line culture among U.S. troops in which killing innocent civilians is seen as a cause for celebration. ‘Most people within the unit disliked the Afghan people,’ one of the soldiers told Army investigators. ‘Everyone would say they’re savages.'” In striving to control and transform alien, Islamic societies, US statecraft goes against its own countrymen’s instincts and interests.

As deracinated and divided as our own society indubitably is; it is still united through the force and manufactured consensus of a highly centralized state. Not so the countries with which we meddle. Kin, clan and the Koran are what unite them. The locals, understandably, hate us for untethering them from what sustains them. And boy, do we hate them back. That too is only natural.

Take the Pashtun people we patronize in rural Afghanistan. They happen to disdain the central government we strive to strengthen. The same antagonism exists between the authoritarian protectorate we’ve established in Pakistan and its people.

In 2003, the US placed a bounty on the heads of Uday and Qusay, sons of Saddam Hussein. When the inevitable tip came in, the occupying force converged on the villa in which the two lived with their families, and shot the place up. The men resisted. The victors arranged a gothic display of the bodies of the vanquished.

That’s who we are, Mr. President.

A few of us still remember Abeer Qasim Hamza. The Iraqi girl had a mop of hair, a delicate face and big black eyes. She was only 14 when she died at the hands of the American soldiers who lusted after her. After careful planning, the servicemen murdered her parents and 5-year-old sister, and took turns with Abeer. When they were through with her, our military men summarily executed her with a shot to the head. Rest in peace Abeer. Her fate and the fate of others like her is a consequence of who we are.

There is reason to believe that many of the students who streamed into the streets of the Capital, and gathered at Ground Zero, in New York, to rejoice over the kill, may not have known who Osama bin Laden was. The average young American, after all, has never read a book, if he can help it. (Did you know that forty seven percent of Detroiters are “functionally illiterate”?)

This too is an aspect of who we are.

“Who is Osama Bin Laden and why should I care?” “Is Osama Bin Laden famous? Am I the only one who doesn’t know who he is?” Such tweets were quite common among American teens, observed the British Daily Mail. By the estimate of “Yahoo! Search Trends,” teens ages 13-17 … made up 66 percent of searches for ‘who is osama bin laden?'” “The figures give a revealing insight into the lack of current affairs and general knowledge among teenagers,” quipped the Daily Mail’s correspondent.

The twits were indeed atwitter:

Tara: I’m probably retarded for asking this, but who is Osama and why is it good that he died? Cory: Who is Osama and why is it important we killed him? Shawn: who is Osama Bin Laden? Is he in the band as well?

Reptilian brains like these took their spring-break behavior to the streets when the news about bin Laden’s demise broke. They too are who we are.Why not own our atavism? There will always be a marginalized, underbelly of genius and ingenuity in America. But for the rest, we have morphed into a militant, mindless people.

In 2001, this column wrote of putting “precision pac men—special-ops soldiers”—to good use in capturing the man who confessed to 9/11. Instead, America sent lumbering, standing armies after bin Laden. In its clodhopper’s traipse around the world, our military has caused the deaths and displacement of hundreds of thousands of people, squandered trillions of our debased dollars, destroyed at least two countries, and crippled the American economy. Had the “Pac Men Of The Universe” undertaken and achieved a precision operation after 9/11—it would be worth celebrating. But not now.

Conga lines of jubilant Americans must, by sad necessity, give way to welfare lines. If recent news reports are to be believed, one in seven Americans stands in-line for food stamps from the government. That is now the alpha and omega of American life.

©2011 By ILANA MERCER
WorldNetDaily.com
May 6

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Holding out hope for that elusive humble foreign policy is proving futile. Barack Obama had promised originally to exit Iraq within 16 months of taking office. Now he is wobbling about that war, and has indicated he might “refine” his policy. Or, rather, renege on his campaign commitments.

Obama’s liberal acolytes—and some libertarians still hankering after that humble foreign policy—will soon discover that the troops he withdraws from Iraq will not be heading home; 9000 soldiers will be packed off to Afghanistan to join the 36,000 American fighting in that theater.

You see, Obama wants to maintain a meaty presence in Afghanistan. He may even be conjuring up new monsters and new missions. This is because Obama needs a “good” war. Electability in fin de siècle America hinges on projecting strength around the world—an American leader has to aspire to protect borders and people not his own. In other words, Obama needs a war he can call his own.

In Afghanistan, Obama has found such a war.

By promising to broaden the scope of operations in Afghanistan, Obama has found a “good” war to make him look the part. By staking out Afghanistan as his preferred theater of war—and pledging an uptick in operations against the Taliban—Obama achieves two things: He can cleave to the Iraq policy that excited his base. While winding down one war, he can ratchet up another, thereby demonstrating his commander-in-chief credentials.

The polls tell Obama that Americans want out of Iraq. And more Americans want to leave immediately than want to stay to “stabilize” the situation. Americans have learned this much from Iraq: Democracy has not sprung Athena-like from her father’s head. Surge, smurge; this form of government will not take hold in Iraq, not in our lifetime. And no matter how long we linger. Although they are hardly enthusiastic about the prospects of an interminable conflict there, voters are more ambivalent about Afghanistan.

If a presidential hopeful needed to buttress his commander in chief bona fides, as Obama apparently does, Afghanistan would be the place to do it. The initial mission in Afghanistan was, after all, a just one. Going after al-Qaida in Afghanistan at the time was the right thing to do and was a legitimate act of retaliation and defense accommodated within Just War teachings. Al-Qaida was responsible for the murder of 3,000 Americans. The Taliban succored al-Qaida and its leader bin Laden. The President had told the hosting Taliban to surrender bin Laden and his gang. The Taliban refused. America invaded. So far so good.

But that initial mission mutated miraculously, and now we are doing in Afghanistan what we’re doing in Iraq: nation building. Nations building is Democrat for spreading democracy. Spreading democracy is Republican for nation building. These interchangeable concepts stand for an open-ended military presence with all the pitfalls that attach to Iraq.

Americans are currently training the Afghan army. As in Iraq, it’ll take years if not decades before the training wheels can be removed. The men of the 101st and 82nd Airborne Divisions have made magnificent progress in pushing the Taliban back. But the gains are short-lived. The Taliban invariably regroup. Their stake in that country is simply greater than ours. Always will be. Then there are the costs and the casualties. When Special Forces target the Taliban, they frequently infringe on tribal territory instead. Civilians die. Tribal elders are enraged, and rightly so.

Nation building in that country also entails policing a corruption-riddled police force. Afghani officers of the law are “uniformed thieves.” They run the opium trade by which the impoverished Afghani farmers survive. Somewhere on the food chain sit the drug traffickers. We mediate between them and other crime bosses, or war lords, as they are known. When we supply impoverished farmers with basic supplies, the Taliban first fleece these long-suffering folks and then punish them for collaborating with the Americans. By swooping down to save the locals from the Taliban we cripple them with kindness and deepen their dependency.

Another of the contradictions of occupation: The Pashtun population we patronize happens to disdain the central government we hope to strengthen. So it goes: We help local groups we believe to be patriotic, at the same time, end up establishing an authoritarian protectorate. Pakistan anyone?

So, as Obama sets forth strategically to ingratiate the conflict in Afghanistan on his constituents—all in order to flaunt his fitness for the office—remember: This war too must end.

©2008 By ILANA MERCER
WorldNetDaily.com
July 18

*Screen pic courtesy here.

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There’s a reason the American Constitution emphasizes “the right of trial by jury.” The justice system’s mandate is to unveil the truth. This can only be done in a court of law, and in accordance with due process. The plea bargain is nothing more than a negotiated deal which subverts the very goal of the justice system: In the process of hammering out an agreement that pacifies both prosecution and defense, truth usually falls by the way. As the predominant method of adjudication in the United States, the plea bargain taints the system.

The outcome of the wheeling and dealing in the case of John Walker Lindh, aka Suleyman al-Faris, aka Abdul Hamid, was that the American Taliban agreed to plead guilty only to supplying services to the Taliban, as well as to carrying an explosive during the commission of a felony, both in violation of the United States Code. The plea is peanuts compared to the original indictment.

There’s no doubt that closing such a high-profile case without having to present a jury or judge with evidence and witnesses, and, in turn, without allowing the defendant to present his case, is a sweet victory for any politically ambitious prosecutor. No surprise then that U.S. Attorney Paul McNulty counted the deal as a triumph against terrorism.

For his part, Lindh’s defense attorney bizarrely claimed for himself the feat of having his client certified as a “court approved, non-terrorist.” Both advocates are capitalizing on the perks of the plea bargain. Defense attorney and prosecutor alike can pencil in a victory on their scorecards. This, in the absence of the arduous search for truth and without any regard for the original indictments.

The overwhelming power of the state compared to the limited resources and power of the accused means that ordinarily the accused is the compromised party in a plea. This truism is hard to sustain in the Lindh case, if one endeavors to come to grips with the facts of the case.

Suffice it to say that Johnny Walker Lindh’s Islamic conversion was nowhere near as harmonious as that of Yusuf Islam. The lyricist formerly known as Cat Stevens confines himself to composing “A’s For Allah” devotional singalongs.

Understandably, the family of CIA agent Johnny Michael Spann is piqued. According to the Criminal Complaint, Spann conducted the interviews at the Qala-i Janghi compound near Mazar-e Sharif, in Afghanistan. Lindh was among the Taliban and al-Qaida men captured and brought there by Northern Alliance forces. “Some of the brothers were very tense,” Lindh related to journalist Robert Young Pelton. “We’re going to die either way,” they reasoned. According to Lindh, “the brothers” decided to aim for the virgin-strewn heavens.

To Lindh and “the brothers” at Mazar-e Sharif dying in the course of an uprising meant martyrdom. For Mike Spann it meant murder. The CIA officer was consequently beaten and shot.

Lindh belonged to the Arab section of Ansar, which was a sort of foreign legion affiliated to the Taliban army. It was also part of Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida group. Lindh confessed to having trained at the al-Qaida-run al Farooq base, where, aside from having a brief audience with OBL, he also practiced terrorism warfare. When rumors about bin Laden’s sending “50 people to carry out 20 suicide operations” against the U.S and Israel reached a crescendo in the camp, Lindh cowered. He failed to warn anyone back home.

By his own earlier account, Lindh appeared to be in on the Mazar-e Sharif uprising plot. As one of the prisoners interviewed by Spann, Lindh refused to answer any of Mr. Spann’s questions, much less did he offer him a “Hey man, watch out, and may Allah be with you.”

Is Lindh guilty of conspiring to murder Mike Spann? Lindh certainly failed to warn the victim. Because of the Bush administration’s criminal negligence of the intelligence, a message from Lindh warning about the impending September 11 terrorist attacks would have been to no avail. Had he, however, done that meager thing and warned Mike Spann, Lindh would have discharged his moral duty. As it stands now, this pattern of moral rot has been rendered legally legless.

The questions, nonetheless, linger. In his Statement to the Court, Lindh correctly points out that the U.S. hadn’t always proscribed fighting alongside what were once the Mujahideen. On the contrary, the U.S. supported the Taliban’s predecessors in their fight to repel the Soviets. Yet another effect of this plea bargain is to further hush the irreconcilable implications of U.S. meddlesome foreign policy.

Still, the facts indicate that, in the process of negotiating into being a crime that was palatable to all parties, Lindh was let off lightly.

©By ILANA MERCER
WorldNetDaily.com
October 9, 2002

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