My friends and fellow Christians, it is a most solemn and mournful day when we are forced to postpone the start of another war due to the onerous and demanding commitments of two other simultaneous wars. Is there another way to describe this Tantalus-like torment other than, “the work of Satan”?
The US is too bogged down in Afghanistan to engage Iran militarily over its nuclear program, an ex-CIA South Asia expert and current adviser to US President Barack Obama said in Tel Aviv on Tuesday.
Bruce Riedel, a senior Brookings Institute and Saban Center fellow for political transitions in the Middle East and South Asia, addressed scholars and journalists at Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies.
He warned that the US was fighting a losing battle against Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan, and that Washington would soon have to make difficult choices on beefing up troop levels there.
“Israelis need to understand that there’s going to be a huge drain on resources, attention and capital, and that will have implications,” Riedel told The Jerusalem Post before his talk.
He acknowledged that those implications would primarily affect the Iran question.
During his address, Riedel referred to the US’s commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan, and said, “We’ve got two wars. You’ve got to be bold to say, let’s start a war against a third party, particularly when the third party can hit you in the first two fronts.”
The US has learned that it “can’t fight two medium-sized wars simultaneously,” he said.
Nooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!
We must rage against these self-imposed limitations. Just think of how soft our society will become, how morally decadent, how bereft of meaning our lives will be if we limit ourselves to just two wars at a time. Or, heaven forbid, less!
Just as the country suffered from the Vietnam Syndrome in the decades following that war, a malady that led us to abstain from all armed conflicts (excluding Grenada, Panama, the Balkans, Iraq I, Iraq II, Afghanistan, countless ugly proxy wars, etc), we must not succumb to the Iraqghanistan H1N1 Dove Virus, which will cause us to fret about the limitations of multi-wars.
Time to think outside the kill zone.
What about three small wars? Or one jumbo and one very small war (say, Grenada)? What if we change the name of one war so it’s no longer a war, thus freeing up necessary manpower and resources for another war?
Something must be done, and fast. We are dangling on a precipice – dangerously close to (and I don’t want to have to say this) taking an option off the table.
November 19, 2009 at 9:51 am
Hey but behold the Liberal Islamofascism of the mcCain campaign: (h/t instaputz)
Comment gold
We don’t even have a full Erickson-Palin transcript yet and it has already yielded comedy gold.
I was so delighted when she catagorically rejected the global warming nonesense in an interview with Rush today. This is something that she was unable to do during the campaign because of McCain’s climate facisim views. This issue is one of the most important for me. Global warming facisim is the buggest threat to our liberty, prosperity, free markets, and way of life. Sarah is so far the only possible 2012 contender that holds this view. Don’t let Pawlenty’s 180 degree turnabout fool you.
….
November 19, 2009 at 9:51 am
Buggest threat, fersure.
November 19, 2009 at 11:16 am
I believe the solution is to declare war on the earth, thus returning us to one war, which we can handle.
November 19, 2009 at 11:18 am
Your ideas are intriguing to me
November 19, 2009 at 1:42 pm
War On Drugs, twit.
Just because you can only afford to super-size one happy meal doesn’t mean you throw the baby out with the freedom fries.
November 19, 2009 at 2:57 pm
War on drugs is so much better than war straight.
November 19, 2009 at 4:38 pm
silly liberals. Everyone knows you get a volume discount. Why only have one war when you can get a 2nd one half-off?
November 19, 2009 at 4:40 pm
Bill Maher is nowhere near as well-informed as he likes to think he is, but he sure nailed one thing: the USA is like a stalker. We invade a country and we can NEVER LEAVE.
I’d like to see if this country could quit war for, like, 10 years. Just go 10 years without invading some country.
I’m pretty sure we couldn’t do it. Half the country would get the DTs really bad.
November 19, 2009 at 5:06 pm
All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.
Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac.
War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.
The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it
~George Orwell
November 19, 2009 at 5:50 pm
Well, if we were to start a war in Iran then the three wars would morph together into one.
We’d have a contiguous fighting space from Iraq’s western border all the way to Pakistan. Even though it’s three different countries we could call it one war because all those countries touch one another.
November 19, 2009 at 6:01 pm
“All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.”
Not all. I knew two guys who’d fought in Iraq/Afghanistan. I knew them both from the Ornery American forum.
One died in Afghanistan about a year ago. The other would occasionally email in private and briefly share how life looked like an empty clamshell with no purpose, then he’d go silent again but occasionally return to the forum to tell folks how just our wars are.
It occurs to me that some of us call blessed periods of relative peace are to others merely awkward silences between harrumphing calls for war.
November 20, 2009 at 5:16 am
I’ll second this. One reservist coworker came back from a tour in Iraq, and couldn’t wait to get back to a second tour a year later. Even though it meant leaving his wife and new infant daughter behind. His comment: “I’d LOVE to go back! The camaraderie was GREAT!”
November 19, 2009 at 6:05 pm
‘that whatsome of us…’
November 19, 2009 at 7:44 pm
The simple fact is: The real American(TM) psyche demands constant conflict with some other or otherness in order to validate its own existence. Without it we’d all become French.
November 19, 2009 at 8:42 pm
French!??!
Dame Clara Butt (sic)
whose voice, said Sir Thomas Beecham, could be heard across the English Channel, against the wind, on a rainy day, will save us from such an anti-Anglo-Saxon fate:
Butt kicks ass!
November 20, 2009 at 5:05 am
I remember when the Butt sisters used to ROCK.
November 20, 2009 at 8:54 am
Madame Cassie’s debut in opera marked the… wait for it… bertha the Butt sistahs.
November 20, 2009 at 9:21 am
‘That’s pronounced boutte‘ {/Hyacinth voice}
November 20, 2009 at 9:53 am
That would be Lilian Booute’, not to be confused with Lydia the tattooed Boutte’
November 20, 2009 at 9:34 pm
I believe in fifteen very, very tiny wars.
November 21, 2009 at 6:22 am
It’s not kosher to tell Santa your Hannukah wishes until AFTER Thanksgiving dinner.
November 21, 2009 at 4:41 pm
I’ve been waiting for this…
November 22, 2009 at 9:25 am
Which explains why I refuse to fully grow into an adult?
November 23, 2009 at 8:57 pm
Oy, so!
November 21, 2009 at 5:38 pm
For Kleber:
November 22, 2009 at 12:51 am
For Kenmeer,
November 22, 2009 at 9:22 am
we live in interesting times.
November 23, 2009 at 12:25 pm
Yah that was Siberia vs. Yukon Territories, 2003, When Uuurgha-grr-ougg scored the hat trick.
November 23, 2009 at 3:39 pm
Imagine bear knuckles boxing.
November 24, 2009 at 3:12 pm
Corrections, comrades. Was Magnetogorsk medvedi versus the Banff Bruins.
Carry on.
November 22, 2009 at 6:05 am
Careful, now. More talk like this and Atlas Buggs will be getting a bad case of the vapors….
November 22, 2009 at 12:36 pm
I won’t stand for this. I demand that more of my tax payer dollars be spent on sweet new bombs to launch at THOSE people instead of using it to help my own citizens. I simply can’t comprehend taking an OPTION off the table, that’s just too much for me to handle. How then will we defeat Iran’s stock pile of imaginary Islamist Jihad Nukes that they might someday plan to imagine to launch at Israel with their awesome MechaImam?
November 22, 2009 at 7:39 pm
They’ve spent trillions of dollars devising newer and more sophisticated ways of killing people and now they can’t afford to kill them. Doh!
November 25, 2009 at 1:49 pm
But…but…Bobby Jindal told me Americans can do ANYTHING!
November 25, 2009 at 6:22 pm
Happy first Bush-free Thanksgiving in 9 years, you motherfuckers. Be thankful. I am.
November 25, 2009 at 6:27 pm
WHAT?!? No turkey?!?
November 25, 2009 at 8:13 pm
But come to think of it, 2000 was only marginally Bush free. So make it 10 years.
November 25, 2009 at 7:48 pm
preznit no giv me turkeee
November 26, 2009 at 1:24 pm
Happy turducken hunting! Cheney loves turducken hunting cuz he can kill three birds with one shot.
November 26, 2009 at 4:13 pm
‘Round here it’s deep-fried turducken. The air is thick with the smell of peanut oil.
November 26, 2009 at 7:41 pm
We were just talking about that here.
Aproposof post-feasting idiocy
Yee-HA!
November 26, 2009 at 7:58 pm
November 26, 2009 at 8:53 pm
Awesome.
November 27, 2009 at 9:30 am
I SO agree. I think this is one of the most inspired genre crossovers of all time. I like it better than RJ’s original by far, and I very much appreciate the Rick, bitches.
But properly done, rednecks OWN freakiness. It’s their birthright. The one that looks like the devil’s hoofprint.
November 26, 2009 at 8:09 pm
Rick James, sriously good vintage pop schmoon, and 80s awes!
November 26, 2009 at 8:12 pm
But this was as awesome as them80s could ever know how to be:
The sung/spoken word…
November 26, 2009 at 8:48 pm
And so Rick James ate too much turkey, see, and had this transgendered dream:
November 26, 2009 at 9:07 pm
Ah yes…
November 27, 2009 at 9:32 am
Conservative ideology is a very powerful drug… bitch!
November 28, 2009 at 12:35 pm
Anyone for cricket(s)?
November 29, 2009 at 8:16 pm
Brother Dave.
November 29, 2009 at 8:19 pm
The other Brother Dave.
November 29, 2009 at 8:24 pm
Bless you, sir, bless you! Kiss thine own damn self! I’ve been waiting for Brother G to reappear! See?!? Obama really IS a good preznit after all!
November 29, 2009 at 8:36 pm
Why looky here!