Each morning I wake up and turn on my computer. I load up the news websites and blogs which I frequent, and I begin to read over the news for the day. Although this is usually a quiet time for me, which a bowl of oatmeal perhaps being the only distraction in an otherwise tranquil tradition, there is inevitably a small voice in the back of my head screaming the following:
Please, please...tell me those bastards haven't said something incredibly stupid again.
And invariably, each and every morning, I am let down by yet another affirmation that this administration is not only leaving a legacy of death, destruction, and destabilization across the world, but they are also are filling the historical tomes with page after page of sentences that at face value seem to imply an idiocy previously unknown to the modern American Presidency.
Of course, yesterday was no different...and this time I just have to vent.
Condoleezza Rice, who represents our country throughout the world, had
this to say during her visit to Canada:
On the eve of a NATO meeting to round up more troops for Afghanistan, US officials urged its partners there to stay the course, amid fresh fighting and kidnappings in the turbulent country.
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice issued a rallying call not to abandon Afghanistan as it struggles to build a stable democracy.
"If you allow a failed state in that strategic location, you will pay for it," she warned, speaking on a trip to Canada where she expressed her gratitude for Canada's 2,300-strong troop deployment to Afghanistan.
In case there was any confusion, that sound you just heard was the noise made by the Irony Gods simultaneously exploding into nothingness. No shit.
What we are seeing here is a Bush administration official preaching to the international community about the dangers of understaffing a foreign invasion. This, of course, begs the obvious question: Where the hell was this brand of logic when you abandoned Afghanistan back in 2003?
The Boston Globe took aim at these questions yesterday, in their piece entitled, "Afghanistan: After 5 years, a forgotten war?."
[F]ive years on, the war is far from over. The Taliban are resurgent in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Al Qaeda continues to metastasize into lethal cells from London to Lahore. And bin Laden has remained out of reach.
Cornered near the Pakistan border at Tora Bora in early December 2001, bin Laden escaped into the mountains south of here, according to U.S. Afghan, and Pakistani officials.
Insufficient U.S. troops on the ground, inadequate real-time intelligence and a reliance on local Afghan warlords were what those officials believe allowed bin Laden to flee. Those same deficiencies and flawed strategies persist as the hunt continues, they add.
The Afghan front is at a critical turning point that imperils many of the hard-fought successes of the early phase of the conflict and the prospects for snaring bin Laden. Yet the war seems, to many fighting it, to have been obscured by the conflict in Iraq and undercut by the resources it has sapped from this mission. In what the White House calls the long war against terrorism, it seems almost a sideshow.
Nye, looking thin and weary, had his own way to describe it.
"This is the forgotten war," he said. "Everyone talks about Iraq and forgets about this place, the place our country got attacked from. I just don't get that."
And out of the rubble of this botched nation-building warmup, we are now seeing the Bush administration lecture other NATO members that they have an obligation to prevent a failed Afghan state? Are they really this oblivious to how ridiculous they sound?
Now, I realize that Condi has had a lot of practice throwing Bush's bullshit around for the last six years, but it still seems to me like it would take a significant level of practice to keep a straight face when saying something like this. I mean honestly, do they really think that anyone inside of these governments doesn't see the humor in all of this? Is this possibly one big international inside joke amongst the Bush ally states? Am I losing my mind here? I mean honestly, my head hurts a lot when I am bombarded with these sort of things, and I think we all need to prepare for the potential reality that the Bush administration may actually be capable of making our heads explode.
Afghanistan will "come back to haunt us" unless it becomes a stable democracy, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said, as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization appealed for reinforcements to fight the Taliban.
The international community will pay if it allows the country to become a failed state where Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network operates unhindered, Rice said in a speech yesterday, according to the U.S. State Department.
You know what Condi? Right now there are quite a few thousand of our brave men and women fighting in Afghanistan who would like to tell you a thing or two about "haunting." For example, how haunting is it to know that you are supposed to be securing and stabilizing one of the most historically turbulent countries in the world, and your government considers your mission secondary to their pet project in Iraq? How haunting is it to wake up every morning, knowing only too well that the night brought more enemies over the border from our "allies" in Pakistan? How haunting is it to live with the haphazard mismanagement of a government who ignores you except when it is politically beneficial to them. How haunting do you suppose that is?
I swear, every morning this gets harder and harder.
(Originally posted at Deny My Freedom and cross posted at My Left Wing)