Mr. Moderate

For ’tis the sport to have the engineer
Hoist by his own petard
William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act III, Scene 4

The initial Soviet deployment of the 40th Army in Afghanistan began on December 25, 1979. The final troop withdrawal began on May 15, 1988, and ended on February 15, 1989. Due to the high cost and ultimate futility of this conflict for this Cold War superpower, the Soviet war in Afghanistan has often been referred to as the equivalent of the United States’ Vietnam War.
Wikipedia article on the Soviet War In Afghanistan.

As hundreds of Muslim “enemy combatants” remain held in the Gulag at Guantanamo, lost in all of the moral outrage mounted by the Republicans is the fact that during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the United States funded and provided arms to those very same Muslim “enemy combatants” (really, “terrorists”) for the purpose of defeating the Soviets in Afghanistan.
Continue reading ‘USA Terrorism’ »

With the passage of the Iraq War funding bill yesterday, giving President Bush another blank check through at least the end of September, there has been much time wasted on talk radio and in print media with analysis of minute shifts of opinion among the political elites. All of this misses the main point: we are fighting the wrong war.

The right wing focuses on the terrorist acts in Iraq and claims “we have to fight them there or else we will end up fighting them here,” in the United States. This ignores the one undisputed fact of the 9/11 terrorist attack: it was an operation run by Osama bin Laden, and Osama bin Laden continues to hide out in safe houses, most likely in a region of Pakistan where neither the US nor Pakistani armies dare to go after him. My rejoinder to the right wing is this: we need to find and fight Osama where he is hiding or else he will continue to lead and inspire terrorists to come after Americans.
Continue reading ‘Fighting The Wrong War’ »

I get so mad listening to President Bush continue to argue for his “stay the course” strategy when it is obvious to the majority of Americans that the ship is drifting ever closer to rocky shoals. In my mind, the 2008 election can’t come quickly enough to get the USA a new hand on the rudder of the ship-of-state.

Osama bin Laden is, to all intents and purposes, stronger than he ever was, in that he has more “combat effectives” at his disposal today than he did on September 11, 2001. This result is due to a totally bungled war effort that sent most of our combat forces off to Iraq, where there were few (if any) actual terrorists, and only a few combat troops off to Afghanistan and the border regions of Pakistan where there remain many terrorists and terrorist sympathizers. Including, of course, one very tall Saudi by the name of Osama bin Laden.
Continue reading ‘Iraq & Terror - What Next?’ »

I am all for being against terrorism. Particularly religiously-inspired terrorism. But it sure seems to me that our government has seen fit to selectively ignore some terrorists for present or future political gain. For instance, the date picked for triggering the Oklahoma City bombing was the second anniversary of the violent end to the Waco siege. It is clear that the two events were linked. And another disturbing link was the inspiration drawn from The Turner Diaries, a fictional novel that described a similar bombing. There is little doubt in my mind that the Oklahoma City bombing was inspired by anti-Semitic hate groups with a strong religious motivation. Nonetheless, the US government has refused to adequately investigate any links from the immediate perpetrators to the religious hate groups which obviously supported them, and which gave them their inspiration. Why?

And of course, there is the ever-baffling mystery of why President Bush only sent about 15,000 soldiers after Osama bin Laden, the chief perpetrator of the September 11th attacks, while committing ten times that number to sit on the border of Iraq, waiting for orders to invade. The net result is that there were too few US troops to successfully capture Osama bin Laden, and bin Laden remains at large today (April 30, 2007).
Continue reading ‘Bush’s Bogeyman - Osama bin Laden’ »