2010-01-03 We Must be Insane

2010-01-03 Ernest A. Canning Brad Blog \Barack Obama/criticism\Afghanistan http://www.bradblog.com/?p=7591 We Must be Insane We Must be Insane  The same President who opted for escalation of a "war of absurdity" has now given us an Orwellian Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in which he sought to bring the ongoing wars of choice in Afghanistan and Iraq within the concept of "just wars" and war as a "last resort."

Obama quoted Dr. King [emphasis added]: "Violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: it merely creates new and more complicated ones." The President then added, ironically, "The instruments of war do have a role to play in preserving the peace" --- an assertion that is analogous to one of the three major slogans in George Orwell's 1984: "War is Peace."

The President's words, set against photos of burned out sections of Baghdad, call to mind the remarks of the ancient Roman historian, Tacitus: "They created desolation and call it peace."

The Tacitus reference can be found in the seldom heard words of our "objectified enemy," Taliban commander Mullah Sangeen, who, in asserting that the Taliban still occupy 80% of Afghanistan, said of the U.S. invasion and occupation: "They turned Afghanistan into ruins. Thousands of Afghans were killed and their houses bombed in the name of the War on Terror. The US still does not understand the complexity of the situation. It wrongly considers the Taliban are furthering somebody else’s agenda. Now is the time for the US to understand that we are Afghans and are fighting for the freedom of our homeland." While this by no means erases the oppressive nature of the Taliban's religious fundamentalist ideology, especially as it applies to women, it does help to explain why the desolation wrought by our presence, along with the corrupt nature of the drug-lord infested Karzai regime, have driven so many ordinary Afghans into the ranks of the Taliban --- just as the desolation, along with an equally corrupt South Vietnamese government, swelled the ranks of the Viet Cong.

&ldquo;The same President who opted for escalation of a "war of absurdity" has now given us an Orwellian Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in which he sought to bring the ongoing wars of choice in Afghanistan and Iraq within the concept of "just wars" and war as a "last resort."&rdquo;   