On The Massacre In Kandahar

In the pre-dawn hours of Sunday, a US soldier stationed at a base in Afghanistan's Kandahar province allegedly launched a single-handed gun attack on nearby Afghan villagers.

BBC News

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Not to approve the action of this military member, but this was inevitable. Our military members are at their wits end. More that a few are being redeployed with serious mental health issued barely controlled by powerful psychoactive drugs. When a trooper has to be put on Zoloft to perform routine functions there is a serious issue going on.

The only reason we remain in the Graveyard of Empires is because our utterly corrupt and massively incompetent political class can not admit they screwed the pooch royally. Incurious George rushed into war to check off the required box named Afghanistan before he could engage in his hair-brained obsession of taking on Saddam Hussein.

The war in Afghanistan then degenerated on the back burner until Obama was handed the bag of loose scorpions and venomous snakes that was our military effort in Central Asia.

True to form Obama pondered and dithered and played Hamlet during the winter only to default the common wisdom (and campaign promise) of more of the same. Also true to form, Obama did not actually do what was required to secure the landscape. This is because the political class is unwilling to actually pay the full price of their interventionist mind set. They have learned the lesson of Vietnam but only partially.

Thus our totally inept political class keeps trying to do war on the cheep. They keep looking to quick fixes and technology to save them from the political consequences of their foreign affairs over-reach. Both Bush and Obama knew that what was really required, a call out of the draft, would have cooled the ardor of the American People– even in the high emotional state after 9/11/01. The call up of almost a million men and women would have given even the most ardent war proponents pause.

But we did not call up those one million men and women. We were not asked to for any type of sacrifice. We were asked to go shopping and let Dead Eye Dick Cheney and Incurious George handle the Global War On Terror; which we did like good little children.

So now we are being presented with the end game. We are being presented with the final bill for all the damages wracked up in our name by two utterly cynical Administrations. We are seeing only a small glimpse of the wreckage incurred, that of an utterly ruined and exhausted military. Still being tallied is the blow-back that will be incurred not only in Afghanistan but also in the Muslim World and in the developing world beyond that. Our name is mud.

Beyond that mess is the domestic damage done by the GWOT, now rebranded by Obama. We have allowed our government to degrade into a lawless, unaccountable oligarchy. Our civil rights have been shredded and our chief law enforcement officer, the Attorney General, has become a feckless political hack. The degradation of the AG to the subservient toddies that are Eric Holder and Alberto Gonzales is nauseating to behold. These political flunkies have lead the charge in cashiering our idea of the separation of powers; replacing it with the toxic Yoo-Holder theory of the Unitary Executive who acts as judge, jury and executioner.

I’ll put down the flame-thrower of invective–for now; but this incident reflects everything that is wrong with our nation and the political class that run it. That one soldier may have pulled the trigger for this awful incident, but there are plenty of accomplices that helped him to perform that act.