The wrong way: in Iraq, in the Holy Land, and in Afghanistan

****The "new" general subscribes to the myth of nation-building and targeting "hearts and minds" of a country that never advanced beyond warlordism and whose people both change with the breeze (or bribe) but are fundamentally Islamic and jihadist. Failure to recognize these simple facts allows the U.S. to aspire to make even more mistakes in Afghanistan than the Brits did 150 years ago.
In recent years, American administrations ( Obama's but also Bush's) have repeatedly lost sight of primary goals and substituted secondary ones, often irrelevant to the first. There is the myth of elections where we ASSUME ( invariably wrongly) that the winner will be competent, honest and aligned with us. Elections gave us "OPEC-participating, Israel-boycotting, Hezbollah-supporting Iraq. Does it count as a "hearts and minds" victory? The "ungrateful volcano," as Churchill called it, never let us fill up a humvee for free, and even after everything we've put into the country doesn't grant us staging rights for an attack on Iran (or anywhere else)." Elections in Afghanistan gave us a questionable victory by a Karzai regime noted for corruption and incompetence and unconcerned to advance OUR interests.
We went into Afghanistan to deny Al Qaeda a safe haven. We went into Iraq to destroy WMDs and get rid of Saddam. We certainly didn't wish to destroy an army designed to thwart Iran. In both cases, we substituted the fantasy of nation-building in places where successful democracy had never been demonstrated.
The elusive search for peace in the Holy Land has morphed into a quest for a Palestinian state, as if that chimera, available but disdained in 1947 and not even demanded when Gaza was governed by Egypt and the West Bank by Jordan, has anything POSITIVE to do with peace between Israel and her neighbors. Bush's initiative in calling for such a state is on the level of his lauding "Brownie" as doing a great job with Katrina.Mo Abbas is hailed as a paragon although flawed "elections" were won by (strangely?)...Hamas. His record as a terrorist ( albeit a more "moderate" one) is beyond question.Gaza could have been a model for the desired state; instead it is a counterexample.
Where did Colin Powell get the idea that the Pottery Barn had a policy: if you break it, you own it? Even they do not and assuming it applied to Iraq was insane. It used to be that "The Mouse That Roared" was a parody and farce; it is actually quite accurate as a description of American folly but now it's not just innocents who make us suckers, but the truly malevolent.*****
http://tinyurl.com/ybfbhpg
Ready, Aim, Fire McChrystal Diana West
There are many reasons to fire Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, and all of them are contained within his 66-page "assessment" of the war in Afghanistan...a strategy to combat Taliban jihad in the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan without once mentioning Islam, and forget about jihad (fireable offense No. 1)....so simple as what a member of the Afghan parliament recently told the Economist: "The Taliban tell them the Koran says they have to fight the Crusaders and they believe them."...the general blames us -- our troops -- for the Afghan people not liking us....(fireable offense No. 2)...not as a battle in the war on global jihad (fireable offense No. 3), but rather as "the struggle to gain the support of the (Afghan) people," (fireable offense No. 4), he writes that we must "connect with the people" -- the same "people," he acknowledges, who "can often change sides and provide tacit or real support to the insurgents" (fireable offense No. 5)...have to take off their armor (fireable offense No. 6). "Pre-occupied with protection of our own forces," McChrystal writes,...McChrystal is "pre-occupied" with what he calls "population protection" in a manner that "distances" him -- psychologically and emotionally -- from the men and women under his command (fireable offense No. 7)...vision is akin to the familiar Marxist notion...that denies that identity, religion and culture matter...."Hearts and minds" is not only the flawed rationale behind "nation-building," it also inspires the restrictive rules of engagement...must be junked as a fraud if our military is ever to be used effectively and appropriately....