If there was a Nobel War Prize John McCain would have won it every year, because he was - and thank God I finally get to say that in the past tense - the biggest warmonger on the planet. Yeah, John McCain, who was a POW in Vietnam decided that millions more should have to experience the suffering that he experienced by creating as many unnecessary wars as possible. Misery, as they say, loves company.
John McCain, who in 1967 pulled off a jackass stunt on the USS Forrestal, which caused the launch of a Zuni rocket, killing 134 people and injuring 161. But McCain got out of jail free because Daddy was the admiral. No one else would have gotten away scot free.
John McCain, who was shot down over Vietnam, and alleges that his captors were so impressed by his father and grandfather being senior four star admirals that they wanted to release him and good ol' boy Johnny said, "Nay! I'll rot in prison until the last of my brethren are freed!" so they kept him in prison until 1973. As Johnnie Cochran says "It makes no sense. It doesn't fit. If it doesn't fit, you MUST acquit." Think about it. When was the last time the hard core VC guerrillas ever complied with the wishes of their prisoners? That does not make sense.
Even if it were true, does that make McCain a hero? He sure liked to brandish that epithet around as a defense against all criticism, and the dinosaur legacy media likes to use it as the ultimate defense ever since McCain started hating on Trump. Sure, in 2008 when he ran against Obama the legacy media said that the only chair they wanted McCain in was a wheel chair and that he was Hitler incarnate. Sure, the left liked to parade around the legend that in 2008 the head of the KKK endorsed Obama because McCain was totally incompetent. But ever since McCain started taking pot shots at Trump the legacy media has thrills shoot up their legs whenever that warmonger speaks.
But does that make him a hero? Does being captured automatically make someone a hero? 2 million Soviet soldiers were captured in 1941 during Operation Barbarossa, were all of them heroes? When the French surrendered at Compiègne did the entire French nation become a nation of heroes?
Even if the legend is true and McCain convinced his captors not to release him, it has nothing to do with him being a hero and everything to do with the cold, hard truth that his career would have ended had he been released in 1967. He would have been stuck in the Navy, the man who blew up his own aircraft carrier and got captured, and he would have gotten a nice pension on retirement, and that would have been that. There would have been no way for good ol' Johnny to leverage his immortal, untouchable status as a hero to worm his way into the Senate and eventually run for President in 2008. IF McCain decided to remain in prison it had nothing to do with esprit de corps and everything to do with Machiavellianism.
Let's not forget what good ol' Johnny did after he was released. John McCain married his first wife Carol in 1965, back when she was a famous model. When he got out of the Hanoi Hilton in 73 he had discovered his wife had been disfigured in a car accident. Of course by this point Johnny had been beaten into the form looking like a cross between a troll doll and a potato, and his loving wife could look past that, but the narcissistic hypocrite could not get past the fact that his beauty queen had been scarred, so he divorced her in 1980 and married a much younger liquor heiress. Johnny moved to Arizona, leveraged his new wife's fortune, and launched a career into politics. All for himself. All for John McCain, the only person or thing in the world he ever loved.
And what of that long, illustrious political career? Ol' Johnny wasn't finished. Songbird Johnny spent his entire career stonewalling legislation to help veterans and getting America ensnared in as many pointless wars as possible. The vampire McCain needed to turn soldiers into pine boxes in order to keep on living.
2,400 killed and 20,000 wounded in Afghanistan, 4,500 killed and 32,000 wounded in Iraq, more than two trillion dollars spent. On top of that over one million dead Iraqis. The murder of Gaddafi and the war in Libya that destroyed the only African nation that had first world equivalent standard of living and sent millions of migrants into Europe to live off welfare, destabilizing the countries they left and the ones they fled to. The war in Syria, the threat of starting war with Iran, nuclear war with Russia, war in Korea. Never has a POW advocated for so many pointless wars than John McCain.
John McCain is not a hero, he is a monster, and the world is a little closer to peace now that he's gone.
All the news not mystical or urban enough for page 1
Showing posts with label War. Show all posts
Showing posts with label War. Show all posts
Sunday, August 26, 2018
Tuesday, August 22, 2017
Why We Should Get Out of Afghanistan
What is the solution to the war in Afghanistan? What does victory look like? Especially if we disregard nation building?
Would empire be considered nation building? Is empire worth the cost?
We know there are rare earth minerals in abundance in Afghanistan, and China is eying them fiercely. There are also unspecified, and largely unexplored, quantities of oil and natural gas. China at the moment is undergoing the most rapid growth of any country in history. To fuel that growth they need to artificially suppress the value of their currency to create massive amounts of debt to fund construction, and they need more raw materials than everyone else in the world combined. China is gobbling up de facto colonies left and right, in Africa and central Asia and in the Pacific. They are working on building a major highway with Pakistan to facilitate trade, and may expand construction into Afghanistan given the chance.
The United States does not operate that way. The United States hasn't taken one drop of Iraqi oil, multinational monopolies who owe no allegiance to anyone have. Some political cronies like Halliburton have benefited, as have the arms manufacturers like Boeing and Raytheon. The only benefit for the US itself, geopolitically, of including Afghanistan into an American empire would be to keep China from getting its hands on Afghan resources, and good luck with that.
If not to reap economic reward from permanent occupation of Afghanistan why stay? It may be because the US has gotten itself into a no-win situation.
If the US cuts and runs then it faces two potential problems:
1. The power vacuum would result in another Afghan Civil War like when the USSR pulled out in 89. Seven years of fighting saw the rise of the Taliban, a brutal, repressive, Islamist theocracy. The Taliban most likely would resume power within a few years, many tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people would die. Islamist groups like Al Qaeda might be given a platform to plan future attacks on the US like 9/11.
2. The US stands to lose face globally by permitting #1 to occur.
The solution to #1 is very simple, secure America's borders at home and forget about the situation abroad. Afghanistan is not a border checkpoint for entry into the US, nor should it be. US intelligence knew about the 9/11 terrorists prior to the attacks, and internal bureaucracy, or stupidity, or inertia, or take your pick prevented any US agencies from acting. As long as the US secures its borders, as long as the US vets people coming in from terror hot spots, the probability of another attack decreases dramatically. It is entirely possible to prevent terror attacks at home, with no presence abroad.
There may be no solution to #2, but that may not be a problem. If the goal is to make America safe and prosperous then why should anyone care about US image abroad? Does China care about how the world views the tens of millions of slave labourers it has, or the lakes of poisonous slag from unsafe mining, or the clouds of noxious smog from its coal fired power plants? Does China care about its image when it extends its reach into the South China Sea, absorbing islets and reefs right off the coast of the Philippines? Of course not. China does what it wants, when it wants, for the benefit of China, and doesn't give a damn about what the world thinks.
But no one cares what China does? The US is different. The US has a "moral responsibility" to police the world and fight for whatever nonsense "values" the EU or Canada says the US has an obligation to fight for.
Actually, no. The US only has a responsibility to itself, just like China does. By embracing the Chinese model of not giving a damn about its reputation, the US government can actually help the American people, economically and in terms of security. What are we gaining from being in Afghanistan? Thousands of lives lost and hundreds of billions of dollars wasted on a pointless war. The war has been going on for so long that no one wants to admit it's pointless, so more lives and money are sent into the trash to keep the system going.
What does the US lose by pulling out of Afghanistan? Nothing. If we secure the border at home then the terrorists won't be able to launch attacks from their mountain fastness in Crapistan, and the world will hate us no matter what we do, so the world can just go pound sand.
Unless President Trump is playing 49-dimensional ninja chess and has some top secret strategy to achieve absolute victory and turn Afghanistan into Dollywood in under a year hidden somewhere up his sleeves, then the best policy is simply to bug out and call it even.
Would empire be considered nation building? Is empire worth the cost?
We know there are rare earth minerals in abundance in Afghanistan, and China is eying them fiercely. There are also unspecified, and largely unexplored, quantities of oil and natural gas. China at the moment is undergoing the most rapid growth of any country in history. To fuel that growth they need to artificially suppress the value of their currency to create massive amounts of debt to fund construction, and they need more raw materials than everyone else in the world combined. China is gobbling up de facto colonies left and right, in Africa and central Asia and in the Pacific. They are working on building a major highway with Pakistan to facilitate trade, and may expand construction into Afghanistan given the chance.
The United States does not operate that way. The United States hasn't taken one drop of Iraqi oil, multinational monopolies who owe no allegiance to anyone have. Some political cronies like Halliburton have benefited, as have the arms manufacturers like Boeing and Raytheon. The only benefit for the US itself, geopolitically, of including Afghanistan into an American empire would be to keep China from getting its hands on Afghan resources, and good luck with that.
If not to reap economic reward from permanent occupation of Afghanistan why stay? It may be because the US has gotten itself into a no-win situation.
If the US cuts and runs then it faces two potential problems:
1. The power vacuum would result in another Afghan Civil War like when the USSR pulled out in 89. Seven years of fighting saw the rise of the Taliban, a brutal, repressive, Islamist theocracy. The Taliban most likely would resume power within a few years, many tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people would die. Islamist groups like Al Qaeda might be given a platform to plan future attacks on the US like 9/11.
2. The US stands to lose face globally by permitting #1 to occur.
The solution to #1 is very simple, secure America's borders at home and forget about the situation abroad. Afghanistan is not a border checkpoint for entry into the US, nor should it be. US intelligence knew about the 9/11 terrorists prior to the attacks, and internal bureaucracy, or stupidity, or inertia, or take your pick prevented any US agencies from acting. As long as the US secures its borders, as long as the US vets people coming in from terror hot spots, the probability of another attack decreases dramatically. It is entirely possible to prevent terror attacks at home, with no presence abroad.
There may be no solution to #2, but that may not be a problem. If the goal is to make America safe and prosperous then why should anyone care about US image abroad? Does China care about how the world views the tens of millions of slave labourers it has, or the lakes of poisonous slag from unsafe mining, or the clouds of noxious smog from its coal fired power plants? Does China care about its image when it extends its reach into the South China Sea, absorbing islets and reefs right off the coast of the Philippines? Of course not. China does what it wants, when it wants, for the benefit of China, and doesn't give a damn about what the world thinks.
But no one cares what China does? The US is different. The US has a "moral responsibility" to police the world and fight for whatever nonsense "values" the EU or Canada says the US has an obligation to fight for.
Actually, no. The US only has a responsibility to itself, just like China does. By embracing the Chinese model of not giving a damn about its reputation, the US government can actually help the American people, economically and in terms of security. What are we gaining from being in Afghanistan? Thousands of lives lost and hundreds of billions of dollars wasted on a pointless war. The war has been going on for so long that no one wants to admit it's pointless, so more lives and money are sent into the trash to keep the system going.
What does the US lose by pulling out of Afghanistan? Nothing. If we secure the border at home then the terrorists won't be able to launch attacks from their mountain fastness in Crapistan, and the world will hate us no matter what we do, so the world can just go pound sand.
Unless President Trump is playing 49-dimensional ninja chess and has some top secret strategy to achieve absolute victory and turn Afghanistan into Dollywood in under a year hidden somewhere up his sleeves, then the best policy is simply to bug out and call it even.
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