Kucinich Tells it Like it IS

This is the way we need to go.  There are no easy solutions, no wiggle room.  Just pack it up and say, "Sorry, folks, we bombed your country and now we have no solutions.  But you can do it without us.  We're just making more trouble than it's worth."  This is from The Raw Story:

Kucinich to force Congress to vote on withdrawing from Afghanistan after news Obama will extend war to 2014

By Eric W. Dolan

[....] Representative Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) blasted President Barack Obama Wednesday over reports that he is planning to de-emphasize the July 2011 deadline for the withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan.
"When the new 112th Congress convenes in January, I will immediately enter a privileged resolution that will force Congress to vote on setting a withdrawal date," Kucinich said. "The withdrawal of our troops must be driven by Congress, not the corrupt president of Afghanistan."
[...]  "Expanding the timeline constitutes a de facto expansion of the war without Congressional approval," said Kucinich.
The new policy is to be unveiled at a NATO conference in Lisbon next week, where the United States and other NATO countries are set to discuss their commitment to Afghanistan. The United States hopes to introduce a plan to begin the withdrawal of military forces from Afghanistan by 2014, senior officials told McClatchy.
[...]  "The Obama Administration must withdraw our troops now," said Kucinich. "Our presence there is counterproductive, it keeps our troops in harms way and it opens to the door for the expansion of the massive corruption of the Karzai regime."
[...]  "The War in Afghanistan is longer than any other war America has ever fought," said Kucinich. "The war has cost U.S. taxpayers more than a trillion dollars. The death toll is rising. More than 1300 Americans have died, thousands more wounded and countless Afghan civilians have died. The civilian death toll is rising, and there are fewer than 100 Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.
"To top it all off," he added, "we recently learned that Karzai has openly admitted to accepting bags of cash from Iran."

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/11/kucinich-tears-report-afghan-pullout/

Stop the excuses while blood runs in the streets and the "lucky" ones come home too traumatized to live a decent life.  Stop it!

McCain: Dead Wrong Then and Now

With increased attention being paid to Afghanistan and nuke-neighbor Pakistan, it's useful to review how unbelievably wrong (or traitorous) John McCain has been on global matters, even as he spurts assertions of his mastery.
McCain, Anthrax & the Afghan Blunder
By Robert Parry
August 3, 2008
The scene of John McCain – during the anthrax attacks in October 2001 – opining to David Letterman that Iraq might be responsible underscores McCain’s central role in what may go down as one of the biggest strategic blunders in U.S. military history, the premature pivot from Afghanistan to Iraq.
Not only has it been clear for many years that McCain’s speculation about Iraq’s role in the anthrax attacks was reckless – made even more apparent by the FBI now pinning the crime on dead U.S. bio-defense scientist Bruce Ivins – but McCain also told Letterman in that Oct. 18, 2001, interview that “the second phase is Iraq.”
In other words, barely a month after the 9/11 attacks and while the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan was still underway, McCain was already eying a war against Iraq.
McCain opened his appearance with the joke, “What is Osama bin Laden going to be for Halloween?” and then gave the punch line: “Dead.”
However, bin Laden managed to survive that Halloween – and apparently six others – in part because President George W. Bush didn’t commit enough U.S. ground forces to the battle of Tora Bora, allowing bin Laden and other key al-Qaeda leaders to escape.
Then, instead of staying focused on the challenge in Afghanistan and finishing the hunt for bin Laden, Bush heeded the advice of McCain and other neocons and shifted the attention of the CIA and the U.S. military toward Iraq.
Though federal investigators cast aside McCain’s suspicion of an Iraqi link to the anthrax attacks, McCain continued to pin other false charges on Saddam Hussein’s government, including allegations about illicit WMD and supposed operational ties to al-Qaeda.
For instance, on Feb. 2, 2002, McCain addressed the Munich Conference on Security Policy, giving a speech with the ambitious title, “From Crisis to Opportunity: American Internationalism and the New Atlantic Order.”
In it, McCain laid out the full neoconservative case for turning U.S. attention quickly toward Iraq.
“The next front is apparent, and we should not shirk from acknowledging it,” McCain said. “A terrorist resides in Baghdad, with the resources of an entire state at his disposal, flush with cash from illicit oil revenues and proud of a decade-long record of defying the international community's demands that he come clean on his programs to develop weapons of mass destruction.
”A day of reckoning is approaching.”
On March 19, 2003, Bush fulfilled McCain’s dream by launching the invasion of Iraq, succeeding in ousting Hussein’s government in three weeks but then finding a large U.S. expeditionary force tied down by a stubborn insurgency for the next five-plus years.
[...] Al-Qaeda’s Iraq strategy was summed up in a letter that a senior al-Qaeda leader, known as “Atiyah,” sent to Jordanian terrorist Musab al-Zarqawi in December 2005, urging Zarqawi, who was leading the "al-Qaeda in Iraq" contingent, to tone down his aggressiveness and take more time because “prolonging the war is in our interest.”
[To view this excerpt in a translation published by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, click here. To read the entire letter, click here. ]
[...] Aided by the superficiality of the U.S. news media, McCain so far has been able to escape any significant criticism for his role in the central blunder of the “war on terror,” the premature pivot from Afghanistan to Iraq. [my bold]
[...] Having not dealt decisively with the Taliban/al-Qaeda threat in 2001-02, the U.S. military now anticipates many more bloody years battling for Afghanistan and may have to conduct more cross-border aerial attacks inside Pakistan, possibly destabilizing that nuclear-armed country.
In many ways, this worsening Afghan fiasco can be traced back to McCain’s loose speculation about anthrax and his neoconservative pronouncements of almost seven years ago.
[For more on this topic, see Consortiumnews.com’s “McCain’s Afghan Strategic Blunder.”

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2008/080208.html

Afghanistan Body Count Rises

Once again the powers that be have another war to supply, more money to be made by shedding the blood of pawns. Not a mention of who the new soldiers are and where they will come from. Oh, right, we're recruiting from places Americans never would imagine, like Uganda. See my post of 4/9/08–Uganda: The New Face of US Military? for details on what we’re doing to entice that country’s young men to sign up. And there are plenty of Third World Countries where people are willing to risk death in war to escape death from famine, or tribal wars or juntas. Aren't you sick of it?
May Combat Deaths In Afghanistan
Outnumber Those In Iraq
AP, June 13, 2008
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5hmt5RrIrR8Kpia74k7R0PNVwVAbQD919ETBO0
via http://www.uruknet.de/?s1=1&p=44859&s2=14
BRUSSELS, Belgium — It's a grim gauge of U.S. wars going in opposite directions: American and allied combat deaths in Afghanistan in May passed the monthly toll in Iraq for the first time.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates used the statistical comparison to dramatize his point to NATO defense ministers that they need to do more to get Afghanistan moving in a better direction. He wants more allied combat troops, more trainers and more public commitment.
[...] But the deterioration in Afghanistan suggests a troubling additional possibility: a widening of the war to Pakistan, where the Taliban and al-Qaida have found haven.
By the Pentagon's count, 15 U.S. and two allied troops were killed in action in Iraq last month, a total of 17. In Afghanistan it was 19, including 14 Americans and five coalition troops. One month does not make a trend, but in this case the statistics are so out of whack with perceptions of the two wars that Gates could use them to drive home his point about Afghanistan.
Even when non-combat deaths are included, the overall May toll was greater in Afghanistan than in Iraq: a total of 22 in Afghanistan, including 17 Americans, compared with 21 in Iraq, including 19 Americans, according to an Associated Press count.
[...] Gates made a point upon taking his Pentagon post in December 2006, amid great and growing U.S. public doubt about Iraq, that he was deeply concerned about backsliding in the less publicized and less unpopular war in Afghanistan. He seems even more troubled now.
And he appears less patient with the allies, aware that much of the European population is unconvinced by the American argument that al-Qaida in Central Asia _ whether it's Afghanistan, Pakistan or the largely ungoverned areas along their mountainous frontier _ poses a grave danger to Europe as well as to the United States.
Gates said that when it came his turn to talk at Thursday's defense ministers meeting on Afghanistan he tossed aside the remarks his aides had prepared for him and stated his case as sharply and directly as he could.
[...] NATO has no direct combat role in Iraq. In Afghanistan, several allies are taking a fighting role, but most have shied away, preferring to contribute in other ways such as humanitarian assistance.
The relatively low U.S. death toll in Iraq in May continues a trend of declining violence against Americans as well as Iraqi civilians, although the situation there remains fragile. If the trend continues _ which is far from a certainty _ then U.S. officials may decide to withdraw more U.S. troops in the second half of the year and perhaps beyond. That would enable the Pentagon to send more troops to Afghanistan _ for combat and for training Afghan forces.
And that's just what the next president may have to do unless things begin turning around in Afghanistan.
United States Defense Secretary Robert Gates speaks during a media conference after a meeting of NATO defense ministers at NATO headquarters in Brussels, Friday June 13, 2008. NATO nations have agreed to broaden their peacekeeping mission in Kosovo to include training for the newly independent nation's security forces. (AP Photo/Virginia Mayo)