"Declare victory and get out!"

"Declare victory and get out" is a political phrase often wrongly attributed to Senator George Aiken (R-VT) regarding Vietnam in 1966. It suggests ending military involvement by claiming success, a strategy frequently raised to avoid long-term quagmires, most recently discussed... errr... today, in connection with the American-Israeli war on Iran. 

The Myth: It is widely believed Senator George Aiken suggested the US of A should simply declare victory and leave Vietnam. The Reality: Records show Aiken did not use that exact phrasing. He advocated for a strategic shift rather than total immediate withdrawal. The Intent: The phrase became popular shorthand for a "face-saving" exit from a war with no clear objective. Not that America would ever again be involved in such a war, of course.

Contexte du jour: It is said that some of POTUS's advisors, along with the usual suspects in the media, are suggesting that the Trump administration should "declare victory and get out" of Iran to prevent further escalation. This advice follows strikes by the US. and Israel, with proponents arguing that continued involvement risks becoming an endless, costly conflict. Arguments to declare victory and exit include protecting domestic economic interests and avoiding long-term, direct conflict in the region.

Stay tuned.

Can you say "stalemate", boys 'n' girls?

Call me a traitor if you like, but it has to be said that the US of A has form for starting wars which it can't finish. Before Afghanistan, Iraq and Vietnam we can point all the way back to the War of 1812, which then POTUS James Madison said would be "only a matter of marching", all over in a month or so. Does this sound familiar?

Since the outcome of the War of 1812 is barely mentioned in US schools nowadays, let us review how Madison's little excursion turned out. There was fighting, mostly on the Canadian (British, in those days) side of the Great Lakes. The Royal Navy attacked and burned the American capital, causing Dolly Madison to pack up her dishes and flee the White House. The Americans won the final battle (New Orleans) nearly a month after a truce had been agreed. The borders of the US of A remained as they had been ante bellum. Much treasure and blood was expended, but nothing was gained.

Walt predicts a similar outcome for the American-Israeli war on Iran. 

Again, call me a traitor if you like, but I don't see a lot of winning going on here! The Israelis are said to have invaded Lebanon, but that's a sideshow. The Big Show is Iran. The mission (so far as we can understand it) is to (a) terminate the Chief Mullah and so (b) to effect the overthrow of the Islamist theocracy, while also (c) ensuring that Iran would never have nuclear weapons and (d) the supply of Big Oil would be secure forever more, Or (e) all of the above.

Three weeks in, after the loss of dozens of American lives and expenditure of many millions of dollars, as nearly as Walt can see, only (a) has been accomplished. So what? The same gang of mullahs may be hiding behind a cardboard cutout of the Son-of-the-Mullah, but they're still in control. A few oil tankers are getting through the Strait of Hormuz, but the US is clearly incapable of keeping that channel oopen to the point where President Trump is almost screaming "A little help here!?!?" at America's fair weather friends.

I can't see any favourable outcome to this conflict. POTUS says it'll be over when he thinks it's over, but when will that be? Seems to me the stage is being set for a declaration of victory and a "withdrawal" under cover of a cease-fire which will be touted as a Big Win, just like that over Hamas a few months ago.

Many Americans have been killed. US military bases in the Gulf are burning. America's so-called allies are running for diplomatic cover. The only "winning" is being done by the Israelis, who are finishing what they couldn't do in 1967. Clearly the US of A has lost control of a war that will not end until Iran says so. 

Any realist has to call the situation a strategic stalemate, with intense air campaigns failing to force capitulation or halt Iranian retaliations. While initial strikes damaged infrastructure, Iran has continued targeting energy routes in the Strait of Hormuz, leading to a protracted conflict with no clear endgame. Iran has successfully targeted global energy security, creating a protracted war.

The stalemate is causing major global disruptions, with oil prices rising over $100/bbl and increasing economic uncertainty in other regions, notes. It's hard to see how this ends except in a "draw" where both sides declare victory, or settle into a low-level, long-term confrontation that could reshape the region. Or not.

I would dearly love to be wrong. I would like to see the people of Iran liberated from the yoke of Islamist oppression. I have similar hopes for the people of Venezuela and (even more so) the people of Cuba. But we're not there yet... are we...

VIDEO: Would you buy an iPhone or sneakers made by these guys?

President Trump has said that the point of all these tariffs on foreign-made goods is to not only address unfairness in the global trading system, but to bring jobs and factories back to America. Soon (he says) there will be lots of good jobs in factories like those to be found in places like Xinjiang province, in the Worker's Paradise that is China.

What would winning the trade war with China look like? Something like this, perhaps?

 

Yes, that's Chinese Communist propaganda, but it has got a lot of people thinking... even the Donald, who yesterday announced that smartphones and computers will be exempt from reciprocal tariffs, including the 125% levies imposed on Chinese imports. 

The apparent flip-flop comes after concerns from Amerian tech companies that the price of such gadgets could skyrocket, because many of them are made in China or use Chinese-made parts. The exemptions also include other electronic devices and components, including semiconductors, solar cells and memory cards. 

Some estimates suggested iPhone prices and other electronic goods in America would have gone up three times if the costs of the tariffs had been passed on to consumers. The US of A is a major market for iPhones, while Apple accounted for more than half of its smartphones sales last year. As much as 80% of Apple's iPhones intended for sale in America are made in China, with the remaining 20% made in India. 

Along with fellow smartphone giants such as Samsung, Apple has been trying to diversify its supply chains to avoid over-reliance on China in recent years. India and Vietnam emerged as frontrunners for additional manufacturing hubs. As tariffs took effect, Apple reportedly looked to speed up and increase its production of India-produced devices in recent days. 

President Trump had planned a host of steep tariffs on countries around the world set to go into effect this week. But on Wednesday, he quickly reversed course, announcing that he would implement a 90-day pause for countries hit by higher US tariffs - except China - whose tariffs he raised to 145%.

Trump said the Chinese tariff increase was because of the country's readiness to retaliate with its own 84% levy on US goods. In a dramatic change of policy, Trump said all countries that had not retaliated against US tariffs would receive a reprieve – and only face a blanket US tariff of 10% – until July. The White House then said the move was a negotiating tactic to extract more favourable trade terms from other countries.

Says Walt (pulling at the outside corners of his eyes to make them look kinda slanty), rotsa ruck with that.

Stumbling towards the decline and fall of the USA

What (Walt hears you ask) is The United States Department of Defense's Office of Net Assessment (ONA), and why do we need (and pay for) one? Well sir... The ONA was created 51 years ago by Richard Nixon to serve as an "internal think tank" for the Pentagon. Aided by outside contractors, it's supposed to look into the future of the military -- kind of like a khaki crystal ball -- and produces report [prophecies? Ed.] on the results of its research.

"Do we really need this?" Walt hears you ask. The official answer is that it is important to have a good grasp of net assessment because it is an "important part of the language spoken by leaders in the higher levels of DOD" and officers who lack familiarity "will be at a disadvantage in communicating with the civilian leadership." Got it now?

No? Does it help for me to tell  you the Director of the ONA is one James H. Baker, who has held that position since 2015, serving under the Prez, then No. 45, and now Senile Joe? One of the "ourside organizations" who assist the ONA is the Rand Corporation. Understand now? We're talking Deep State here!

According to a report prepared for the Office of Net Assessment by the Rand Corporation, the future of the Paranoid States of America isn't so bright. "The Sources of Renewed National Dynamism" looks at the US competitive position as it faces a rising China, and finds that America is stumbling towards a decline from which few great powers ever recover. 

The US of A is diminishing in power on a relative basis geopolitically, militarily, financially, economically, and technologically. Competitive pressures from within include slowing productivity growth, an aging population, a polarized political system [No kidding? Ed.] and a "corrupted information environment". Does that mean (Walt wonders) that someone is lying to us? Who could it be?

These problems are exacerbated by an addiction to luxury, failure to keep pace with technology, an ossified bureaucracy, an overstretched military and "self-interested and warring elites." Again... who are they talking about? A clue may be found in Listen, Liberal, a brilliant but obscure book by Thomas Frank (Henry Holt & Co., 2016), which Walt recommends highly.

The title is misleading. It's not a rant by an Alex Jones type, but a stinging criticism by a certified liberal of the Democratic Party, the "professional elites" and the corporate and cultural elitism, which dominates liberal politics and is responsible for the ever-deepening rift between the rich and poor in America and elsewhere.

The ONA report concludes that unless Americans can unite to identify and fix the problems it outlines, the US of A risks falling into the same downward spiral that resulted in the fall of the Roman, Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires. 

Is it too late to reverse the decline? Is it too late to make America great again? You be the judge... on November 5th!

Excerpt from Listen Liberal (cited above): 

Popular attitudes toward the professions started to sour in the 1970s. "Technocracy" was the new term for describing the reign of professionalism, and its connotations were almost entirely negative.

Rule-by-expert, it began to seem, excluded rule-by-the people. It was dehumanizing and mechanical. In a technocracy, the important policy decisions were made in faraway offices that were insulated from the larger whirl of society. The people making the decisions identified far more with society's rulers than they did with the ruled, and their decisions often completely ignored public concerns.

Busing was one of the era's classic examples of failed technocratic overreach; another was the Vietnam War, a catastrophic intervention in which tens of thousands of working-classs Americans were sent to their deaths...largely because foreign-policy professionals in Washington were unwilling to listen to voices from outside their discipline, bearing uncomfortable views.

A sensible view of demands to retaliate against Iran

Most of Walt's readers don't read (or haven't heard of!) the National Post. Founded by Conrad Black, sometime Canadian (when he wasn't busy being Lord Black of Cross Harbour) and arch-conservative, the Post (and its group of Sun newspapers) is the only media outlet in Canuckistan which takes a reasonably balanced view of the world. 

One of the Post group's premier columnists is Kelly McParland, who wrote an excellent piece today on the stupidity of the Excited States of America's entering yet another war in the Middle East. Mr McParland argues that the Republicans who are pressing Crooked Joe Biden to hit back at Iran for the drone strike that killed three US soldiers [How come all three were black? Ed.?] are all but insane to advocate such folly. 

Worse, they are urging a course of action which President Trump has rightly and repeated condemned. I've emphasized Mr Trump's words in Mr McParland's column, which I'm reposting, in a slightly shortened version. (To read the entire column, click on the headline link.) 

Biden pressed to start another 'stupid' war

If you disliked Donald Trump but were determined to say something positive about him, you could always cite his consistent criticism of “stupid” American wars. It’s a position that hits home with a lot of people — Democrats as much as Republicans — who have lost loved ones in distant countries over matters a lot of Americans don’t view as their responsibility to solve.

Trump has been nothing if not consistent on the point.While campaigning for re-election in 2020 he boasted of his efforts to reduce U.S. military deployments overseas and pledged to "keep America out of these endless, ridiculous, stupid, foreign wars in countries that you’ve never even heard of."

He regularly assails the Biden administration over its defence performance — particularly the bungled withdrawal from Afghanistan, insists he could end the Ukraine war in 24 hours as president, and says the White House "has brought us to the brink of World War III."

His admirers like to cite his record of having "no wars" during his four years in office — a claim with some merit compared to recent predecessors. One 2017 study concluded that crucial Trump victories in three key states in the 2016 election may have been helped by concern over high casualty rates under previous administrations. All of which makes it a bit odd that top Republicans are loudly demanding the sort of retaliatory action against Iran that history suggests would be an excellent way to start yet another ill-fated U.S. military entanglement....

"The only answer to these attacks must be devastating military retaliation against Iran’s terrorist forces, both in Iran and across the Middle East. Anything less will confirm Joe Biden as a coward unworthy of being commander-in-chief," said Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), who is backing Trump’s renewed bid for the presidency. 

Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell charged in a statement that "the entire world now watches for signs that the President is finally prepared to exercise American strength to compel Iran to change its behaviour."

He said U.S. enemies would continue to be emboldened "until the United States imposes serious, crippling costs — not only on front-line terrorist proxies, but on their Iranian sponsors who wear American blood as a badge of honour." Republican Senators Lindsey Graham and John Cornyn both fired off tweets insisting the White House aim hits directly at Iran, while Trump himself used the attack to criticize Biden for his "weakness." 

Given the Middle East’s status as one of the world’s most relentlessly volatile regions, Iran’s success in spreading its tentacles throughout the region, the tensions already centred on the bitter confrontation in Israel and Gaza and the growing boldness of Iran’s determination to taunt western powers, it’s difficult to see how yet another one-off U.S. retaliatory effort could accomplish anything other than increasing the danger the region’s many festering hot spots erupt into one giant conflagration.

In other words, just the sort of "endless", "stupid" foreign war that Trump has so often derided, and just the sort of quagmire the mullahs in Tehran would love to see sweep over the region. Chaos and conflict work to the benefit of regimes like Syria’s and Iran’s, helping focus hatred on foreign powers rather than the brutality and repression they inflict on their own people. 

A few quick missile strikes on known Iranian dependents in Syria or Iraq, or even Iran itself, might raise cheers for a day or two in Washington but would be yet another opportunity for Tehran to recruit the sort of fanatics who think spilling more blood is a good reaction to all the blood that’s already been spilled. Jumping impulsively into doomed conflicts is indeed a trait that has brought the U.S. tragedy and humiliation time and again. 

Vietnam was a quagmire. It was far harder for the Obama and Trump administrations to get US troops out of Iraq than it was for the Bush White House to get them in. The US disaster in Benghazi may not have killed Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign all on its own but was certainly a nail Republicans hammered at enthusiastically. And Joe Biden’s rush to flee Afghanistan was a fiasco from which he’s never managed to recover.

It’s easy to understand the temptation to use Washington’s immense military might to strike back at a country that works so hard to bring despair to so many people. But in pressing Biden to risk lives for the sake of a quick headline or two, Republican leaders are demanding a response that’s diametrically opposed to what their favoured candidate has been preaching since the day he entered politics. 

Would they be making the same demand if it was a Republican sitting in the White House, forced to confront the prospects of setting off a regional explosion, complete with body bags being shipped back home? If so it would be evidence they’d learned no more about the dangers of stumbling into foreign wars than the presidents who sent U.S. sons and daughters into Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, and came to regret it.

VIDEO: Venerable Fulton J. Sheen interviewed by Wm. F. Buckley Jr.

We have a long (53:20) and serious video for you, suitable for a Sunday when one should spend at least some time reflecting on higher matters. This is Episode 186 of Firing Line with William F. Buckley, Jr., recorded on 6 January 1970. Mr. Buckley's guest is Archbishop Fulton J.Sheen, whose earthly remains have recently been returned to the Diocese of Peoria and whose cause for beatification is now proceeding. Although the interview is almost half a century old, it still provides many insights which are relevant to a world which has become much worse in the intervening years.

VIDEO: Suspicions confirmed! Hamilton Gregory talks about "McNamara's Morons"

Whenever I watch Apocalypse Now -- and I've done so several times -- I am struck by the lack of intelligence, or even common sense, displayed by some of the "boys on the boat". I have the same thoughts when I read accounts of the behaviour of American troops during the invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. Think Abu Ghraib. The average IQ of 1000s of the men... and women... who were chosen to implement US foreign policy seems to have been a degree or two above room temperature.

Why was that? In McNamara's Morons, Vietnam vet Hamilton Gregory argues that people of low intelligence -- "intellectually challenged", if you will -- were deliberately chosen in preference to better abled draftees and volunteers. In this video (running time 36:28) the author discusses the reasons for the deployment of "McNamara's Morons" -- troops of limited mental ability -- and the consequences of this deliberate choice on the part of those commanding the United States military.



Is it any wonder that, for the first time since 1814, the Paranoid States of America lost a foreign war. Sadly, Vietnam wasn't to be the last loss. This week President Trump has ordered another 10,000 troops sent to the Middle East sandpit. How many of them, I wonder, will be smart enough to throw a grenade in a high arc, rather than straight ahead? (Mr Gregory mentions this in his talk.) 100s of them will die as the result of their own stupidity. As for winning a war (even though the Islamist enemies aren't all that bright or brave either), good luck with that!

Further reading: Don't take Walt's word for it. Check out "VP Pence tells West Point grads it's a 'virtual certainty' they will fight on a battlefield for America", Fox News, 26/5/19.

VIDEO: Why Ron Paul voted against Martin Luther King Day

Yesterday was Martin Luther King Day, a national holiday in the USA, although not widely celebrated everywhere, including in my corner of the woods. The law proclaiming the holiday was passed by Congress in 1983. Dr Ron Paul was a member of the House of Representatives then. In this 21-minute video he explains why.

"Project Pigeon" - a true story from the Vietnam War

During the Ten Thousand Day War in Vietnam (and Cambodia and Laos), the US military maintained the self-named "Jason Group" -- a semi-official think tank comprising top university scientists, Nobel Laureates, technocrats, computer experts and military strategists. By 1967 it had been very much enlarged and secretly ensconced in Washington under the new, innocuous-sounding "Defense Communications Planning Group". It had fiscal carte-blanche and a priority rating which had its members talking in "reverential and enthusiastic terms", according to Paul Dickson, author of The Electronic Battlefield (Indiana University Press, 1976). The author quotes a DCPG member as saying that if the group "needed 10,000 chocolate cream pies from the army by noon the next day, it would get them, and without any questions."

Until the ignominious end of American involvement in the 'Nam, the Jasons kept on thinking of new ways to wage war on the "gooks". Some of their ideas worked. Some were impractical. Some were downright flaky. There was, for instance, the "Lava Plan" -- an unsuccessful search for a chemical formula that could turn the moist forest soil of the Ho Chi Minh Trail into slippery grease. They also came up with a heat and motion sensor in the shape of a dog turd. They called the Seismic Intrusion Detector (SID) a "TURDSID".

And then there was "Project Pigeon", a plan right out of Dr. Strangelove foreseeing limitless flocks of bombers, in the form of homing pigeons. The idea was to strap tiny bomblets to pigeons which would home in on North Vietnamese vehicles, blowing one and all to bits as the metal triggered against the explosives. This brilliant plan was abadoned when the pigeons, tested against American trucks as well as North Vietnamese, proved unable to identify their ideology.

This true story -- you couldn't make this stuff up! -- is taken from The Ten Thousand Day War by Michael Maclear (St. Martin's Press, 1981. The book is a companion piece to the highly recommendable 13-part television series of the same name, which is now available on YouTube. Click here to watch the first episode, which summarizes those that follow. Each part runs about 48 minutes so you won't want to watch them all at once. But you can go through the book, which includes additional material, at your leisure. As you do, consider the lack of clear thinking and misunderstanding of the lessons of history which have characterized the American "interventions" in Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Syria. Vietnam, too, started with the arrival of just a few dozen US "advisors".

The Middle East is NOT "another Vietnam"; it's WORSE!

I have been misunderstood. Apparently some "readers" glance at the headline and just skim the text, often getting the wrong message from the few words that stick in their alleged minds. When, in commenting on the jihadists' attacks on Paris, I wrote [WHO wrote? Ed.] "How about we fight back?!", my suggestion was NOT that the French nor the US nor anyone else step up the air strikes in Syria and "bomb them back to the Stone Age". (copied right, Curtis LeMay).

All I said was that it was suicidal stupidity to be admitting to our countries 1000s upon 1000s of "undocumented aliens" because of the wave of weepy hypocrisy stirred up by the professional handwringers in the human rights industry ("We do well by doing good!") and the lamestream media. See "Paris jihadist attacks result of suicidal stupidity" (WWW 13/11/15)

In previous posts -- for instance "ISIS atrocities worse than ever; Canada ends mission" -- I'd thought I'd made clear my view that what the USA and its allies should do is stop interfering in the Muslim civil war. Get the hell out of the Middle East / get out of the Middle East hell... and let the Sunnis and Shias duke it out until, like the gingham dog and the calico cat, they eat each other up!

In "Why American must (not?) save the world from ISIS", I suggested that American military and political leaders persist in intervening in fights in which the USA has no gingham dog (or calico cat) because of a failure to learn the lessons of history in general and the Vietnam war in particular. What seems to have been misunderstood is that I don't believe that the Bush-Obama war is analogous to the Kennedy-Johnson-Nixon war, except insofar as America is fighting a losing battle far from home for the wrong reasons.

A better understanding of what the Vietnam war was really about will be gained by reading Two Cities: Hanoi and Saigon (Jonathan Cape, 1992) and A Bright Shining Lie (Random House 1988), both by Neil Sheehan, one of those chiefly responsible for obtaining the Pentagon Papers. Mr. Sheehan views Vietnam as essentially an anti-colonial war, a war fought by the Vietnamese for their independence.

Vietnam, along with Laos and Cambodia, comprised French Indochina, a part of the French empire until it was overrun by the Japanese in World War II. When the Japanese were defeated, the British, who had occupied the region, unaccountably handed it back to the French. Some Vietnamese, mostly in the south, were happy to serve their colonial masters once again. Others, mostly but not only in the north, started a guerilla war against the French.

They -- the Viet Minh -- became Communists almost by accident because the only outside powers that supported them were the USSR and its satellites (not including Marxist China). They weren't concerned with ideology so much as with getting the French to go home. After the fall of Dien Bien Phu, the Americans supplanted the French, to prevent the spread of Communism, prevent the other countries of southeast Asia from falling like dominoes, and so on -- the wrong reasons.

In Two Cities, Neil Sheehan says that for the first year or two after the Americans installed the puppet government of Ngo Dinh Diem, Ho Chi Minh actually expected that once they counted the cost -- in money and lives -- of propping up the South Vietnamese regime, they would pull out. He was wrong, because for the Americans, unlike the Vietnamese, the battle was ideological, not practical. Johnson and Nixon really believed (one hopes) that they could defeat Communism by winning the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people. They were wrong.

The war being fought in Syria and Iraq (and Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, etc etc) is not ideological. At least, it is not a clash between political ideologies. It's not about democracy versus Communism. There isn't a single democratic government in the entire Middle East. Never has been. There are only autocracies, either secular or religious. A religious autocracy can be described as a theocracy, which describes the governments of Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Afghanistan when the Taliban ruled. A theocracy is what ISIS wants to establish in its "new caliphate". And that's what the war is all about.

The followers of the Prophet Mohammed are fighting each other to decide which are the better Muslims, and which version of Islam shall prevail. It's Sunni Muslims versus Shia Muslims, with non-believers and infidels (that would be us) stuck in the middle. We -- the "Christian" West -- have no business in the Middle East.

There's no way for us, as outsiders, to win what is essentially a religious civil war. If you disagree, please tell me what a victory for "our side" would look like. If we "degrade and ultimately defeat" ISIS, will Basher Assad remain in power in Syria? Is that a win for "us"? Or will there be a power vacuum, as there is already in Iraq, thanks to America's lack of an exit strategy? Or will the entire region continue to be fought over by gangs of barbaous warlords, as is the case in Afghanistan? Could any of those outcomes be described as "victory"? I rest my case... for today...

Why America must (not?) save the world from ISIS

Not long after posting "US invasion of Syria begins; Walt predicts the outcome", I found on a shelf of my lower level library a dog-eared copy of The B.S. Factor: The Theory and Technique of Faking It in America, by Arthur Herzog (Simon & Schuster, 1973). In the chapter headed "Historical Analogies", the author warns us to beware of dubious lessons supposedly learned from history which lead us -- our political and military leaders -- to make bad decisions for the present and future.

Historical analogies, Mr. Herzog writes, can be reduced to what Aristotle called "the fallacy of accident", which arises when you take an accidental property for an essential one. He gives the example of Vietnam, which General Matthew B. Ridgway thought was a second Korea. "And so did General Mark W. Clark, who learned from Korea, 'The sure way to maintain the peace is to be strong militarily and unafraid politically, and to let the enemy know that we will use that strength to maintain the security of the United States.'

"Eugene V. Rostow, of the Yale Law School, remembered the Soviet-Finnish conflict before World War II, and claimed that if the United States did not maintain its position of dominance in Southeast Asia it would be reduced to the status of Finland -- subject to Russian will.

"Secretary of State Dean Rusk continually compared Vietnam to Munich. An American withdrawal, he said, would lead to further aggression like Hitler's. Lyndon Johnson himself compared North Vietnam's actions to those of the Japanese at Pearl Harbor and believed that the American Actions in Vietnam would be justified on the same grounds as our involvement in World War II."

Mr. Herzog was writing in 1973, before the Paranoid States of America lost the first war in its history. That's if you ignore the War of 1812 and the Korean War, both of which can be said with charity to have been fought to a draw. No such thing can be said about Vietnam. It was a stinging defeat for the USA, the soi-disant greatest military power in the world, inflicted by a smaller gang of ill-equipped but super-motivated Asian peasants.

Did the leaders of America learn anything from the egregious error that was Vietnam? Apparently not. Every president from Bush the Elder right down to POTUS has fallen into the same logical trap, drawing the wrong conclusion -- that the USA is responsible for the security and freedom of the whole world -- from the lessons of history. And so America is doomed to learn the same lessons once again.

Why the Middle East hates the West - Part II

In Part I (above), Walt gave you the Reader's Digest version of how American (and British) support for the despotic regime of Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi contributed to his overthrow in 1979 and the establishment in Iran of a true and fanatical theocracy led by Ayatollah Khomeini.

A theocracy  is a form of government in which clergy have official recognition as civil ruler and official policy is either governed by officials regarded as divinely guided, or is pursuant to the doctrine of a particular religion or religious group. That's bad, right? 

Well, that's official US policy. A state or people should not be ruled by people with religious principles! In America, church and state are separate. America's rulers are decidedly irreligious. The principles that govern "the land of the free" are the "principles" of secular humanism, which has become the de facto state religion. 

But let's return to the Middle East. The Shah of Iran was not the only despot supported by the USA. During the Cold War, any dictator who professed to be against the Commies was, ipso facto [That's enough Latin. Ed.], America's friend. By means of foreign aid, military support and the occasional coup (as in Iran), America propped up Chiang Kai-shek, Syngman Rhee, Fulgencio Batista, Ferdinand Marcos, [That's enough dictators. Ed.]

However, the USA had never actually resorted to war to maintain in power a corrupt and incompetent -- but pro-Western -- dictatorship until... wait for it... Vietnam.  Yes, Vietnam -- the longest war in American history, the only undeclared war, and the first war America lost since the War of 1812-14. 

Most people think of Vietnam as being LBJ's war or Nixon's war. In fact, it started on President Eisenhower's watch, in 1954. And it rested on Ike's theory that if the USA "lost" Vietnam, it would next lose Laos and Cambodia, then Thailand, and so on. But hold on (nobody cried). How can you lose something you never had in the first place?

Vietnam was (with Laos and Cambodia) part of French Indochina and the larger French empire. The battle of Dien Bien Phu showed France incapable of hanging onto her colonies. What to do? Let them have their independence? No, that would never do. They might decide to be neutral in the Cold War, or, worse, support the Other Side. So the USA began its first colonial war, fully justifying, in the minds of the rest of the Third World, the use of the phrase "American imperialism".

American imperialism is not just a slogan invented by the Communist propaganda machine. It has been a fact of geopolitics for six decades, and remains so today. Today, though, the "empire" which the USA is fighting to maintain is in the Middle East. It is the "empire of oil".

Can the imperial storm-troopers quell the rebellious Islamists of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran? Don't bet on it. (Lifetime pct .983) We'll look at what happened to an earlier empire in Part III, below.

Some wars would be better forgotten

Today is Remembrance Day or Armistice Day, the day on which we honour the brave men and women who died, often far from their homelands, fighting for freedom and/or democracy and/or civilization. Many of us will wear poppies, reminiscent of those that blew in Flanders fields. And we will be doing so -- as we will be reminded, over and over -- that we do all this "lest we forget".

Walt means no disrespect to those who made the ultimate sacrifice. Most of them went into battle bravely, if not willingly, because they had to. Willingly or not, they answered their countries' call, and did what they were told to do, without questioning the right or wrong of the wars in which they fought.

Some of those wars, in Walt's opinion, were fought in vain, for the wrong causes. By all means, remember and honour the fallen, and pray for their souls, but forget what I'll call "bad wars". Four examples come to mind.

In Canada, today, the names and dates of two semi-forgotten wars were added to the "National" War Memorial*. They were the Boer War -- more properly the Anglo-Boer War -- and the Afghan War -- more properly the Third or Fourth Afghan War, depending on  who's counting.

The Anglo-Boer war was perhaps the first modern war, and a nasty affair it was, won by the British only by sheer force of numbers, and by tactics such as imprisoning the Boers' women and children in concentration camps. You can look it up.

It was an imperial war, fought by then-Great Britain and its colonial subjects (that's how Canadians got involved) against the Afrikaaner citizens of a couple of tiny republics who wanted nothing more than to be left alone. Did Britain subjugate them in the name of freedom or (as is now pretended) racial equality? Hardly. The war had more to do with the fact that the Boers were sitting on top of a mountain of gold.

The Boer War ended on 31 May 2002. Fast forward a century to find Canadian troops fighting alongside another imperial power against another people who wanted only to be left alone. The imperial power would be the US of A, and the people who wanted to be left to alone were the Afghans.

We pretend now that this fourth attempt to conquer a barbarian and unconquerable people -- the British had already tried twice, the Russians once -- was for the purpose of bringing them the benefits of Western civilization. In reality, history will see the Afghan wars as part and parcel of the larger War of the Middle East or -- my prediction -- the Oil Wars.

Dear readers, let's not kid ourselves about the real reason for Armerican "intervention" in Iraq, Afghanistan and other sandpits. No matter what Presidents Bush and Obama told us, there is considerable doubt, in my mind at least, that the Taliban/Al-Qaeda/ISIS pose any real threat to the USA, Britain, Canada, Australia, the Netherlands, or any other country which has joined the Armerican "coalition of the willing".

Let's be honest. The American government has sent tens of thousands of men and women to their deaths in some of the must useless land on earth because under that land are billions of gallons of oil. The USA wants to control the entire Middle East to guarantee an uninterrupted supply of cheap(ish) oil, and that's a fact.

Canada and the other members of the "coalition" have gone along with the Americans because, having sat out Vietnam and/or Iraq and/or Libya and/or the last-but-one Afghan war, they couldn't be seen to shirk any longer. Why? Because if it ever came to an actual threat against Britain and/or Canada and/or Australia and/or the Netherlands, they'd be screwed without the protection of the USA, and they know it!

I promised you four examples. As well as the Anglo-Boer War and the Oil Wars, I had in mind the Spanish-American war (which coincided neatly with the Boer War) and, of course, the Vietnam War. But I think the point has been made that there's no point in remembering the bad wars unless we do so with a resolve not to make the same mistakes again. Sadly, that resolve seems to be totally lacking in Washington and the other bastions of democracy and freedom.

* Footnote from Ed.: I put "national" in quote marks because Poor Len assures me that in Canada the word has two different meanings, depending on whether you're saying it in English or French. Advice taken!

"Disease of victory" infects US military to this day

Walt is still catching up on his reading. I'm still stuck in 1988, which seems to have been a banner year for books about the American malaise. Earlier this month I recommended The Great Divide: Second Thoughts on the American Dream, by Studs Terkel, in which ordinary folks talk about what they thought was wrong with America. The point of reading The Great Divide a quarter of a century later is that things seem not to have changed, except perhaps for the worse.

I'm now half-way through Neil Sheehan's 1988 book, A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam. His name may ring a bell in connection with the Pentagon Papers which he obtained from Daniel Ellsberg in 1971. Mr. Sheehan's series of articles revealed a secret US Department of Defense history of the Vietnam War and led to a case in the Supreme Court case when the American government attempted to halt publication.

The Vietnam War, which Mr. Sheehan covered for UPI and the New York Times, was the subject of A Bright Shining Lie, for which he received a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award. The monumental book is a penetrating analysis of why the United States lost the war, based on the wartime experience of Lieutenant Colonel John Paul Vann -- something of an American counterpart to Lawrence of Arabia.

According to the dust jacket summary, "A Bright Shining Lie reveals the truth of the war in Vietnam as it unfolded before the eyes of John Paul Vann: the arrogance and professional corruption of the US military system of the 1960s; the incompetence and venality of the South Vietnamese army; the nightmare of death and destruction that began with the arrival of the American forces."

In the chapter titled "Taking on the System", the author identifies the syndrome which caused the US military to fail in Vietnam, which persists even today in the American campaign in Afghanistan. He calls it "the disease of victory". Here's the quote.

"By the second decade after World War II, the dominant characteristics of the senior leadership of the American armed forces had become professional arrogance, lack of imagination, and moral and intellectual insensitivity. These are the kinds of traits that cause otherwise intelligent men...to behave stupidly.

"The attributes were the symptoms of an institutuional illness tha might most appropriately be called the disease of victory, for it arose out of the victorious response to the challenge of Nazi Germany and imperial Japan.

"The condition was not limited to the armed services. It had also touched the cilian bureaucracies -- the Central Intelligence Agency, the State Department, and the lesser civilian agencies -- that joined the armed services in managing American overseas interests for the president. The attitudes had spread as well to the greater part of the political, academic, and business leadership of the United States.

"World War II had been such a triumph of American resources, technology, and industrial and military genius, and the prosperity that the war and the postwar dominance abroad had brought had been so satisfying after the long hunger of the Depression, that American society had become a victim of its own achievement. The elite of America had become stupedfied by too much money, too many material resources, too much power, and too much success."

Walt asks you, dear reader, to ponder the stalemate in Iraq and the debacle of Afghanistan. Were any lessons learned from Vietnam? Was the illness which John Paul Vann and Neil Sheehan identified even treated, let alone cured? Has anything changed? Evidently not. On the contrary, Walt sees the possibility that the illness has become terminal.

Will America never learn? The persistence of bad foreign policy

Almost 237 years ago the United States of America started life through an armed rebellion against established authority -- the British monarchy -- which established a revolutionary new model of government "of the people, by the people and for the people". That remains a great and noble goal, and the fact that it has yet to be fully realized hasn't stopped US governments from trying to impose their model on the rest of the world.

Over the course of the last two centuries, successive administrations have adopted a policy of forcing other countries to adopt the US model, sometimes by persuasion and sometimes by conquest. Walt has a little list.

In 1812 the US Congress thought Canadians could hardly wait to join the new republic. Taking Canada from the British would be "merely a matter of marching", said Jefferson. Two years later, with the White House burned and the country nearly broke, Congress changed its mind.

The Mexican Invasion of the mid-19th century succeeded in annexing to the USA a large chunk of the southwest. For some reason, people from further south keep coming into "New Mexico" and neighbouring states, wanting to keep their language, customs and religion. Some folks, especially in Arizona, think it might be better to give the territory back to the Mexicans.

Then came the War Between the States, in which some states had the temerity to assert the right to leave the Union, a right which they thought had been guaranteed by the Constitution. They learned that once you're in the Hotel America, "you can check out, but you can never leave".

Having got that nasty business out of the way, and realizing that the Hispanics were a soft target, the USA embarked in 1898 on a truly imperial war against Spain. The net gain was a handful of tropical paradises (?) --- Puerto Rico, Guam and Philippines -- but hey, America was now a colonial power, just like Britain! The economic and other benefits were, errr, dubious.

What about the World Wars, I hear you ask. [Yes, what about the World Wars? Ed.] Is Walt saying the USA should have stayed out of the War to End All Wars...and the second War to End All Wars? Didn't America save the world for democracy? Well... No matter how many John Wayne movies you watched, America didn't bail out the Allies singlehandedly. And if the USA had come into the wars at the beginning rather than during the second act, the other colonial powers might have been accomplished faster and at considerably less economic and human cost.

But, you might argue, that's precisely why the USA was so quick to jump into Korea. Sorry, wrong again. Omar Bradley called the Korean War "the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, with the wrong enemy". One lesson that might have been learned (but wasn't) is that if you're going to fight, use both hands!

Douglas MacArthur wanted to cross the Yalu and invade Communist China, possibly dropping the Big One for a quick and decisive victory. But "wiser men" in the Truman administration wouldn't let him, for fear of provoking a war with the Soviet Union, for which China was merely a proxy.

Apparently they didn't consider the possibility that the USSR wasn't as strong as it appeared, and might well have been defeated, sparing the world the 40 years of cold war that followed the Korean truce. Even the willingness to call it a draw may now be regarded as a mistake, for the war, which technically never ended, threatens to go ballistic -- literally -- at any moment.

Which brings us to Vietnam, which Pentagon types will tell you is the first war the US ever lost. (This ignores the War of 1812, but Washington's memory is short.) In The Rise of the Chinese Republic (McGraw-Hill, 1989) American historian Edwin P. Hoyt says:

The Americans did not learn fast. It took them still another war in Asia [Vietnam] to learn that what American leaders had said many years ago was true. No statesman with a lick of sense will let the country get involved in a land war in Asia.

There was another lesson that the Americans May not even yet have learned: Anyone who interferes in an indigenous revolution anywhere is a fool, and such interference is bound to fail. In China and in Vietnam the Americans tried to interfere. These actions cost them billions of dollars and far too many lives, and ultimately the revolutions succeeded in the face of American interference.

Mr. Hoyt wrote that in 1989. Since then we've had the Gulf War, Iraq, Afghanistan and (sort of) Libya. These theatres of war are all in Asia, although not the part Hoyt was thinking of. And they're all part of the Muslim world. Walt predicts that 100 years from now historians will lump them all together as "the Middle Eastern War" or "the Great War Against Islam". ("Crusades" has already been used.)

And still the USA cannot or will not learn. Now the Prez -- no Muslim he? -- is making noises (again) about taking action (nature unspecified) in Syria to overthrow a tyrannical dictator, make it safe for democracy, yada yada yada. Haven't we seen this movie before? (Canadians need not feel all smug and superior. "Call me Steve" Harper and his bumboy Baird are very vocal in their willingness to hold America's coat...at least until Uncle Sam's nose bleeds.)

Edwin Hoyt again:
The United States has run out of gas politically and philosophically. Any nation that converts from a dynamic economy to a service economy...finds that it loses that precious quality of initiative. The American government is still posturing itself in the world as the defender of the status quo. It is hard to consider a less dynamic and less appealing posture for a nation that once boasted of its revolutionary spirit.

Book review: A journey through Vietnam and a refugee's psyche

A month ago, in "What they eat in Vietnam", I introduced you to Catfish and Mandala, a book I bought expecting a travelogue of a journey through that little-known country. Although Andrew X. Pham's 1999 book contains plenty of fascinating travel tidbits -- like the descriptions of the strange Vietnamese cuisine -- it should really be described as more memoir or autobiography than travel book.

Mr. Pham describes himself now as a Viet kieu -- an overseas Vietnamese. He is one of the 1000s of "boat people" who fled Vietnam in the aftermath of the war. With his family, he was "adopted" by a Baptist congregation in Shreveport LA. After a short time the refugee family moved to California, to be in poorer circumstances but at least in a community of Vietnamese and other immigrants.

A disturbing theme of the book is the effect that life in America had on the family. By the time Pham decides to leave home and return to Vietnam in search of his roots, two of his brothers have decided to be gay, and his elder sister, a transvestite turned transexual, has committed suicide. Whether these problems of sexual identity are due to culture shock or a dysfunctional family life is a matter for speculation. The author talks freely about his own identity problems and those of his siblings, but reaches no conclusions.

As for the travel part, Pham, after experiencing a bit of an epiphany while bicycling in Baja California, throws in his job as an aerospace engineer and sets off to bicycle counterclockwise around the Pacific rim to the land of his birth. He gets a decidedly cool welcome from the Vietnamese who have been left behind. Even folks in his old neighbourhood seem to be asking, "What did you come back for?"

That part of the book, then, is yet another statement of Hardy's dictum -- you can't go home again. The resentment of those who left by those who were left behind is particularly acute in Vietnam, but still the same sentiment one finds in China, Zimbabwe or just about any other third world country.

The more interesting part of the book is the painful personal history of Mr. Pham and his family. There are hints of dark doings while the family is still in Vietnam, and at the end the source of the family's (comparative) wealth is revealed. Pham writes about his family compassionately, not critically, implicitly putting at least some of their troubles down to the trauma of adjusting from a traditional Asian culture to that of modern America.

He is understanding, too, of the grasping rudeness he meets in Vietnam. What the reader sees in Andrew Pham is the emerging of the "global soul", so well described by Pico Iyer in his book of the same name. (The Global Soul, Knopf, 2000)

Catfish and Mandala is extremely well written, a pleasure to read. For his work, Pham won the 1999 Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize. I expected to be entertained, and was not disappointed. I did not expect to learn as much as I did about the life and emotions of "displaced persons". Highly recommended.

Saint Ho Chi Minh? Oppression of the Church in Vietnam continues

In a remote corner of the Vietnamese province of Gia Lai, an intrepid traveller would find the village of Dak Pnan. The people who live there are lepers. The chapel is based in Dak Pnan village, whose members are lepers. Most of them belong to a tiny ethnic minority, the Bahnars. And most of them are Catholics

In 1999, a charitable organization based in France built a chapel in Dak Pnan in which the villagers could worship and hold their common activities. The villagers furnished the building with an altar, tabernacle, crucifix, and an image of the Blessed Virgin.

Last week, Communist officials ordered the faithful villagers to remove the Catholic pictures and items -- every last one -- from their chapel. If they didn't, the Communists told them, their lay leader would be put in prison.

So the villagers had to carry the cross, Marian picture, altar and tabernacle to the lay leader’s house. Authorities then put two pictures of Ho Chi Minh in the places where the cross and Marian picture were.

On the following day, authorities dismantled the bell of the chapel after local Catholics refused to do it. The bell was also taken to the lay leader’s house.

Stories like this are common in Communist-ruled countries like Vietnam, China and North Korea, but also in nominally secular states like India. I'm posting this one to remind all readers (not just Catholics) that Communism and Christianity are antithetical. The official belief system of Communism is atheism. That's why we call it "godless Communism". To Communists and atheists, Christianity is the enemy, to be treated accordingly, as in this example.

The same can truly be said of the secular humanists who rule the United States of America. President Obama and his administration are waging war on Christianity, especially in its truest form, Catholicism.

Believers! It is your right and your duty to resist such oppression, at home and abroad. Support in whatever way you can those who are persecuted for the sake of the True Faith. And remember Christ's promise: Blessed are they that suffer persecution for justice's sake, for theirs is the kindgom of heaven. Blessed are ye when they shall revile you, and peresecute you, and speak all that is evil against you, untruly, for my sake. (St. Matthew 5:10-11)

What they eat in Vietnam

Just finished a great book -- review will follow -- called Catfish and Mandala (Picador 1999) by Andrew X. Pham. Mr. Pham is a "Viet-kieu", a Vietnamese-American, one of the many who came to the USA as a child in the 70s, in the aftermath of the Vietnam war.

After growing to manhood in California, this "boat person" decided to return to the land of his birth to discover his roots (as the cliche goes) and rediscover himself. Catfish and Mandala is thus an autobiography rather more than a travelogue, a journey not just in space but in time.

Pham bicycled -- alone -- from Ho Chi Minh City (the Saigon that was and still is) to Hanoi. Along the way he ate some thoroughly disgusting meals, even by third world standards. Here he describes a dish he was offered in Hoi An (not far from Hue) but declined. It's called "Gaping Fish" and here's how the Vietnamese chef said he would prepare it.

It is a dish I learned from a great Chinese chef when I went to Canton to study. I can make it with any sauce you want, garlic-lemon-butter, French tomato and mushrooms, or Chinese sweet-and-sour. Anything.

It's very hard to make. First, I must tell the fisherman that I need the fish alive so he'll keep it in a bucket for me. I take two bamboo sticks that I cut myself. They must be the right thickness and length [he explains, holding his hands about eight inches apart].

I stick them into the fish's mouth, piercing its brain just so. This paralyses the fish. It is alive but it cannot move. I don't gut it. I heat up oil just right. I put fish in hot oil, vertically so that the head is not in the oil. If the head gets in the oil, the fish dies right away. The fish is paralyzed so it doesn't flip around and splash oil. I don't want to get burned.

I cook fish just right. If the oil is too hot, the fish dies too soon. If the oil is not hot enough, not all the meat will be cooked. That's the real hard part. You must know when that is. You must be able to tell if it is about to die. You don't want it to die.

Some species of fish are tougher than others, and every fish is different. You must take everything into consideration: How big? When was it caught? Young fish or old fish? How you can tell is... you watch the eyes!

I put it on a plate covered with fresh lettuce, pour the sauce of your choice on top. Bring it to your table myself. Then I take the bamboo sticks out. And if the fish doesn't gape [he mouths the gaping part, making O's with his lips] if it's dead, you don't pay. Free. On the house.

I guarantee you that as you eat the cooked flesh of the fish, it is still alive! Alive and gaping!

Enjoy your lunch...

War of 1812 bicentennial celebrations: has anything been learned?

The first shots -- purely rhetorical -- in the commemoration of the 200th anniversary of the beginning of the War of 1812 have been fired. At the historic battlefield of Queenston Heights, Ontario, yesterday, the Right Honourable David Johnston, Governor General of Canada (and winner of the Steve Harper Prize for Excellence in Drafting Terms of Reference) launched "1000 days of commemorations" of the first war started and lost by the USA.

Perhaps because it was not a Great American Victory [like Vietnam? Ed.], the War of 1812 is not well known in the Excited States. War was declared by President Madison on June 18th, on the advice of many political and military notables, including President Jefferson who opined that the annexation of Canada -- that being the point of the exercise -- was "merely a matter of marching".

As in Vietnam, Iraq and, now, Afghanistan, it turned out to be not so easy. The United States was not prepared to prosecute a war. Madison had assumed that the state militias would easily seize Canada and that negotiations would follow. In 1812, the US Army comprised fewer than 12,000 men. Congress authorized its expansion to 35,000, but the service was voluntary and unpopular. It offered poor pay, and there were few trained and experienced officers.

The militia objected to serving outside their home states, were not open to discipline, and performed poorly against British forces when outside their home states. One of the first places this lesson was learned was at Queenston, in October of 1812, when units of the New York militia refused to cross the Niagara River to join in the invasion.

All the same, enough Americans scaled Queenston Heights to overpower a small British force and capture its gun. The British, led by Major General Isaac Brock, counter-attacked. Brock, unwisely dressed in his full-dress uniform replete with gold braid, made an easy target for American sharp-shooters as he ran up the hill, and perished.

However, his 2IC, General Roger Hale Sheaffe, arrived with reinforcements -- British regulars, Canadian militia and a large number of "Indians" (as "First Nations" people were then called), whom the Americans feared greatly for their interest in scalp-collecting.

The men in red (and green and tan and assorted other colours) handed the Americans a crushing defeat, which will be re-enacted this fall. In his address yesterday, the Governor General expressed the hope that, in the spirit of friendship between the two countries, the Americans would refrain from using live ammunition. [Ed. Please check this; I didn't really listen to the speech.] Nevertheless, as they always sing in their national anthem, the Canadians will "stand on guard".

Footnote: Major General Brock became "Sir" Isaac Brock only after his death, being knighted posthumously. A very tall monument on Queenston Heights is surmounted by a statue of Brock, looking watchfully across the river -- standing on guard, no doubt. The only statue dedicated to General Sheaffe -- who actually won the battle -- is a small one...of his horse.

Another footnote: On June 15th, Canada Post issued two stamps, one showing "Sir Isaac Brock" and the other his great Indian ally, Tecumseh. The inscription on the marginal tab (above Tecumseh) says "They protected territories from American expansionism". Indeed.

Recommended reading: Two entertaining pop histories by Pierre Berton: The Invasion of Canada (covering the period 1812-13) and Flames Across the Border (1813-14). In the latter, you can read how the Americans routed the Brits from Newark (now Niagara-on-the-Lake) and burned the village to the ground. Of course you'll also have to read about the British and Canadian burning of Buffalo. Niagara-on-the-Lake was rebuilt and is today a very pretty little town. As for Buffalo... well...

Let's quit while we're behind

Item: Earlier today, in eastern Afghanistan, a roadside bomb killed 10 members of the local police, while they were travelling home from a ceremony.

Item: Also today, in southern Afghanistan, two Taliban militants hiding small guns in their shoes [not turbans? Ed.] slipped into a provincial governor's compound, setting off a fierce gun battle that left two security guards and both attackers dead.

Item: As reported here earlier this week, Prime Minister Harpoon says if Canada is asked by the USA to extend its hopeless "mission" in Afghanistan beyond 2014, he will "consider all the options".

Suggestion, from Walt to Messers Obama, Harper et al. Isn't it about time to declare victory in Afghanistan and get the hell out?

Precedent: When the undeclared Vietnam War was at its height, with the US military spinning its wheels, all the while piling up American as well as Vietnamese corpses, Lyndon Johnson called an old Senate colleague, George Aiken. The prez asked his friend, who had been in the Senate since 1941, what he should do about Vietnam. Senator Aiken's advice? Claim victory and get out. Did Mr. Johnson listen? Noooooo...

Congressman Ron Paul, among others, have given the same advice to Al O'Bama. Enough already! Let's quit while we're behind!

Bombs started to fall on Kabul eleven years ago, the announced objective being to oust the Taliban. Well, as noted above, the Taliban are still there. When they get pushed out of one area, they retreat into another, or cross into Pakistan, or melt into their Afghan community.

Meanwhile, the Americans, Aussies, Kiwis and even Canucks fight on to support the Karzai government, which is not only thoroughly corrupt, but also irrelevant beyond the outskirts of Kabul. In the provinces, warlords again run the show. And Afghanistan's neighbours -- Pakistan, India and Iran -- have their own agendas, which NATO members can't begin to understand, let alone affect.

The Prez keeps saying US troops will be drawn down swiftly in 2013 and gone by 2014. Should Americans believe him? Last weekend, Washington and Kabul drafted an agreement that would see the USA supporting the Afghan government for a decade after combat forces leave. That would stretch the U.S. commitment from 2001 to 2024.

The mission after 2014 period will be to building democratic institutions and develop Afghanistan's economy, once all the opium poppies are killed. The estimated cost is $4 billion... per year! The US would put about $2.7 billion of taxpayers money on the Persian carpet, while the begging bowl will be passed around at the NATO heads of government meeting in Chicago in three weeks, to collect the remaining $1.3 billion.

But no matter how much money we pore down the Afghan rathole, once our forces leave, Afghanistan is almost certain to enter a period of fracture marked by political instability and ethnic conflict. Some would say, in light of events such as today's, that a civil war has already started.

So what we're doing is throwing good money -- not to mention precious western lives -- after bad. No matter what we do, Afghanistan's future will be shaped by domestic forces and pressure from nearby nations over which NATO will have little or no control.

Afghanistan has seen outside powers -- Persia, Britain, Russia, now America -- come... and go. Yet Afghanistan hasn't changed. Nor will it. The American war against Afghanistan -- let's not kid ourselves that NATO would be there if it wasn't for America's pushing -- has unclear goals (now that Bin Laden is dead) and only two chances of success: slim and none. Time to go.