Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Afghanistan: Your U.S. Tax Dollars at Work (Warning: Graphic Photo)

As any reader who has read this blog for any period of time, it's no secret that I believe that the USA's involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq have always been nothing more than a delusional fool's errand sold to the American public via the deliberate lies of Chimperator George W. Bush - the nation's village idiot - and Emperor Palpatine Cheney whose moral standards seem to mirror those of Darth Vader at his worse. If the U.S. was going to do anything, we needed to do limited, surgical strikes to take out and cripple elements of Al Qaeda. That would have struck back against those who launched a terror attack on the USA. Sadly, Barack Obama is continuing the Chimperator's fool's errand and - I believe in the long run - sowing seeds of long term anti-USA hatred. I will be the first to admit that our enemies in Al Qaeda and the Taliban are committing horrific atrocities. But without the U.S. presence in Afghanistan, would their be so many atrocities, or has the USA's presence increased and intensified them? Regardless of the answer to the previous question, the USA is committing its own atrocities that will only engender hatred towards us for many years. The following photo is of civilian victims of a U.S. air strike gone bad. It is graphic and disturbing, but every American needs to know what is being done in their name.
* Andrew Sullivan notes as follows concerning this photo :
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Asan Bibi, 9, (R) and her sister Salima,13, (L) stand in the hallway of Mirwais hospital October 13, 2009 Kandahar, Afghanistan. Both were burned when a helicopter fired into their tent in the middle of the night on October 3rd, according to their father. Three members of the family were killed in the incident. The family belongs to the Kuchi ethnic tribe, nomads living in tents out in the open desert whom are very vulnerable to a war they have little understanding of.
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Each and every American bears some responsibility for this horror. With two daughters of my own, words do not begin to describe the unrelenting hatred I would bear towards anyone or any nation that did this to one or more of my children. And Obama thinks we are winning? Would he be making the same disingenuous statements if one of his daughters was the deformed girl in the photo? I suspect not. And again, I can only ponder WTF is wrong with him? It's far past time that he stops listening to the bullshit emanating from the Pentagon. Here are more of Andrew Sullivan's thoughts on the Afghanistan nightmare:
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As we fight an unwinnable war in an ungovernable country, the enemy simply ratchets up the evil by targeting more and more innocent civilians, especially women and children. . . . then you see an image like that above (having scanned many of them I feel numb from the images of agony and despair) which was the result of a Coalition air-strike gone awry and you see the awful, horrible, gut-wrenching moral dilemma we are in.
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I still favor withdrawal as soon as possible. I do not in any way discount the moral price. If I thought there was any way to win, my calculus might change. But I don't. And we're broke. And evil like this occurs tragically every day all over the world. The art of politics and warfare is the art of the possible within certain limits. We've reached them - and then some. It gives me no pleasure to say this, and my heart is torn. But politics is not the art of the heart in the end. It's the art of the mind.

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