Bush Jr.’s assault on the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001 made perfect sense after their sanctuaried client Al Queda’s murderous work in Lower Manhattan a few months before.
Likewise our 2003 invasion of Iraq where dictator Saddam Hussein had the means, the motive and the opportunity to aid Al Q as well, though our leftist federal bureaucrats never could seem to find the proof of it.
More than a decade of largely-feckless political and military operations later, Bush’s leftist successor cut and ran from Iraq and is hobbling what’s left of the American military in Afghanistan.
As pathetic as it all is, as Darkwater shows, this history actually rhymes—with Rudyard Kipling’s 1917 poem Mesopotamia. Kipling even called our aftermath as the leftist federal bureaucrats, their president and lifelong pols like Hillary Clinton continue their lucrative careers:
“Our dead shall not return to us while Day and Night divide –
Never while the bars of sunset hold.
But the idle-minded overlings who quibbled while they died,
Shall they thrust for high employments as of old?”
You betcha. Their leftist media pals who likewise don’t believe in military service will continue to cover for them and the American dead of Iraq and Afghanistan will be forgotten by all but their families. Some of the crippled ones can even look forward to being assaulted on American streets.
I hope the volunteers of 2001 and 2003 and subsequently will impart the lesson they learned to a new generation of would-be warriors: our government cannot be trusted and joining the micro-managed American military—for any reason other than to repel a direct attack on the homeland—is only slow-motion suicide.
Via Darkwater at Phase Line Birnam Wood.
THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER 
Like I said at the beginning of the Afghan war, go in, punish them, then leave. That would have been OK. But your boy, W, insisted that we bring western style democracy to them.
Then, he doubled down by trying to do the same thing in Iraq – where they would welcome us with open arms, and the oil revenue we gained would more than pay for the invasion.
I was roundly hammered at the time in many discussions for those viewpoints. Mostly by non-veterans or if they were vets, the pro-war guys were office pogie types.
Yeah, I did back W’s initial policies. I thought the democracy idea was worth a try, long as we had to be there. Might have been my staff job experience second half of my tour. But I was never very hopeful re Afghan.
Still think Iraq was working until we decided not to confront the Persian bomb smuggling except at the Dictator’s Club. W. got cold feet, the feet Wormtongue was born with. Some Iraqis did welcome us and we had subdued most of the rest by time the Democrats took over—and starting retreating.
And so much of the military policy was just stupid. Riding around in those thin-skin Humvees, instead of walking produced a generation of cripples. And still refusing to arm Medevacs in Afghan. I sure wouldn’t want to be part of it now and I wouldn’t advise any young man to be. Now or in the immediate future.
I’m a little late to this discussion, so another time. Here though is someone with whom I can agree and admire.
http://neveryetmelted.com/2014/02/28/retired-venezuelan-general-declined-to-be-arrested/
Gee, Prince, there’s no time limit on this discussion, if you want to weigh in. As for the link, you know, as a commenter there says, that’s precisely the reason Obama/Holder want to relieve us of our guns. Unarmed, we’ll be so much easier to round up when the feds take a notion to do it.
Unfortunately I didn’t phrase my comment that well. I tend to agree with much of what you and jdallen say, though I do have other thoughts on the subject. I just don’t have my “real smart guy hat” on at the moment, must have left it at the ziggurat bar the other night.
Not a subject I like to go on about, since it’s American boys dying there and not Israeli ones. Still, a lot was done for the Afghans and a lot was achieved. Leaving them to Taliban will turn the clock back – about 500 years.