Needlenose

Could President Obama actually be prepared to hold firm to some position this time in his upcoming round of negotiations with the Congressionals?  Or is he some sort of Republican Manchurian Candidate who will just appear to have some sort of plan or convictions and then cave in on demands to cut social programs (as he did recently with the Bush Tax Cuts for the Wealthy)?  What with extending warrantless wiretapping, keeping Gitmo afloat, ‘surging’ troops in Afghanistan and keeping a sizeable number of troops in Iraq, Obama seems to be hell-bent on keeping the Bush Legacy alive!

*Update* California is a crazy bi-partisan microcosm of the Great American Stalemate.  However, under Jerry Brown’s stern governance, we’ve somehow managed to move forward on a budget before our bonds became Junk.  That’s a mixed omen, with a ray of light indicating that budget deals are possible, however the budget was largely an exercise in painful cuts to education and social services.  It wasn’t all bad, though, as it seems like Jerry was still able to piss off a few Reactionaries – some of the more radical counties want to split and form their own Hicksylvania.  I’d be all for it were it not for the creation of two more Repug Senators.

Was reading about Bin Laden’s ‘trail’ from Kabul to Abbotabad, when this little bit caught my eye:

“Gul also accompanied bin Laden to Kunar, where they met Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and his military chief Kashmir Khan, who “provided protection for the group before they continued to an unknown location at the request of Hekmatyar,” the interrogation report said.”

Surely not the same Gulbuddin Hekmatyar who was Shrubya’s ally among the Northern Alliance in 2001, and his daddy’s ally back in the 1980s?  Et tu, Brute?  The Bush’s old pal is a bit irked by the killing of their mutual ’80s pal Osama.  Don’t take his crocodile tears too seriously folks as he whines about all the U.S. injustices in the region, just remember that it was his militia that leveled Kabul after the Soviet occupation because he didn’t get the job he wanted.

"I'm sooo gonna enjoy campaigning for 2012!"

Some early reactions from various parties to the news of Osama Bin Laden’s death:

Sean Hannity, Fox News: “What we want to know here at Fox, is ‘Why did it take Obama three years to catch him?’”

Donald Trump: “”I am really honored to play such a big role in hopefully, hopefully getting rid of him”

Tea Party Nation head & Birther Judson Phillips: “How do we know it’s really Osama Bin Laden?  We demand that he produce see long form death certificate!”

Apple Spokesperson Lynn Fox: “See?  We told you that retaining your locational information was a good thing!  Osama sure loved his iPhone!”

Got any more?

*Update 5/2/11* Checked out Redstaters.  In spite of their happiness in the killing of their great BugBear, they can’t help but throw in some spite, first with a slap at us for “the relentless drumbeat of “war crimes” for those who did so much of the long and lonely work to make this possible.”  Academic Elephant, the “war crimes” were perpetrated by Shrubya for invading a country in contravention of international law that had absolutely nothing to do with Osama Bin Laden (as well as war crimes shit like not protecting the Iraqi antiquities museum, National Library, letting folks raid uranium out of the Tuwaitha Reactor .  Dumbass.  His pal streiff can’t help himself, he has to take a swipe at Code Pink, whom, he presumes, will hold a “take back the night march’ some place to mourn his passing.”  Asshole.  streiff’s big fear now?  That Obama will use this as the justification to close down Guantanamo.  I guess streiff was too lazy or blinded by ideology to notice that Osama was located through classic intelligence work, not through another 100 waterboardings of  Khalid Shaikh Mohammed or Osama Bin Laden’s driver.

*Update 5/2/11, 5:10P* spoke with a reactionary co-worker, who echo’d streiff’s sentiments – he claimed that intelligence gleaned from Gitmo was responsible for locating Bin Laden.  I guess for conservatives, old-fashioned intelligence work just isn’t as sexy as waterboarding and ‘enhanced interrogation techniques.’

*Update 5/4/11* Heh Fox had to find something to criticize.  Shep Smith floats a trial (leaden) balloon that Obama’s operation was illegal.  I thought reactionaries loved violent action and results by enemy means necessary?  I guess the Wrong Wing Wurlitzer is throwing shit on the wall looking for something that will stick to nay say Obama’s achievement.  There is always a backlash, this will just be hard for them to spin.

Then:

Afghanistan Vs. Soviet Union, 1985

And Now:

Afghanistan vs. USA, 2010

If this is progress, I’d hate to see what a downturn in our war in Afghanistan looks like!  Even Karzai wants us out.  Obama, dude, give up on Shrubya’s broke-ass policy, let’s get out of there and out of Iraq!

*Update 12/16/10* Obama shines a turd.

*Update 12/16/10 1:28P* Red Cross points out the turd isn’t shiny and in fact stinks.

Yesterday, the New York Times offered this in an article on the evolving relationship between President Obama and Gen. David Petraeus:

Come December, when the president intends to assess his Afghan strategy, he will be able to claim tangible successes, General Petraeus predicted by secure video hookup from Kabul, according to administration officials.

The general said that the American military would have substantially enlarged the “oil spot” — military jargon for secure area — around Kabul. It will have expanded American control farther outside of Kandahar, the Taliban heartland. And, the aides recalled, the general said the military would have reintegrated a significant number of former Taliban fighters in the south.

“He essentially promised the president very bankable results,” one administration official said. (Others in the room characterized the commander’s list more as objectives than promises.)

Are we really far enough past the financial industry’s free-fall in late 2008 that it’s safe to use “bankable” as a synonym for something meaningful (in a positive sense)?  You’d think, if nothing else, that officials from this politically hypersensitive administration would know better.  For most of us ordinary folks, to say that something is “bankable” still carries connotations of “You might as well cut out the middleman and flush it down the toilet yourself.”

Then again, especially given the immediate caveat that Petraeus’s assurances could prove illusory, maybe the anonymous official’s choice of words was unintentionally accurate.  Certainly our ongoing attempt at occupying Afghanistan would meet a worst-case-scenario definition of a “troubled asset.”

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)

Gingrich has been gradually creeping out from the shadows into the limelight since his fall from grace when leading the impeachment crusade against the very popular Bill Clinton.  But the Gingrich of the 90s seems relatively tame compared to the teabaggers and birthers of today – and even compared to Gingrich 2010!

In a recent speech to the reactionary American Enterprise Institute, Gingrich seems to have planted one foot firmly amidst the teabagger camp with his calls to forbid the so-called Ground Zero Mosque (which is neither a Mosque nor at Ground Zero), and the other solidly planted in the Wolfowitz/NeoConArtist era of never-ending war on Radical Islam:

“I believe [Bush] was right but in fact could not operationalize what he said. That is, there was an Axis of Evil, Iran, Iraq, North Korea. Well we’re one out of three. And people ought to think about that. If Bush was right in January of 2002 — and by the way virtually the entire Congress gave him a standing ovation when he said it — then why is it that the other two parts of the Axis of Evil are still visibly, cheerfully making nuclear weapons? And it’s because we’ve stood at brink, looked over and thought, “Too big a problem.”

“If Franklin Roosevelt had done that in ‘41, either the Japanese or the Germans would have won,” Gingrich said. The U.S. has to “over-match the problem,” he said, adding, “That’s what Americans are all about.”

I wonder if he got the memo that various Repug leaders were starting to bail on Shrubya’s Afghanistan Folly?  Palin/Gringrich in 2012 – the worst of 3 eras of Repug misleadership!  It would be kinda luck the Germans in WWII – invading a bunch of weak countries (Iran, N. Korea), then going crazy and attacking Russia from Palin’s house…I don’t even want to think about the hell they’d create.

GOoPer Senator Dick Lugar comes to the realization that Shrubya’s Afghanistan Adventure is unwinnable.  It’s about time, Dick!  Welcome to the Reality-Based Community.  Shame you didn’t figure that out before the invasion, or read Needlenose back in ’03 on Afghanistan’s slide into chaos – we coulda schooled you!  Now if we could only get Obama to take our advice and start the withdrawal immediately!

Seems like a risky gambit for the Reactionaries to remind voters of Shrubya in the lead-up to the elections, as well as split the Reactionary Jingo Consensus.

Related news, pundit Joel Brinkley writes off Afghanistan, Dumbass Gingrich cracks open a newspaper,  Michael Steele thinks Obama started the war (in his alternative reality shared by scary man-woman Ann Coulter) and our military continues to blow up Afghani civilians.

*Update 7/21/10* HuffPo has video montage of a bunch of Repug pols repudiating Shrubya’s Afghanistan Adventure.  Or is that refutiating?

Michael Steele on Afghanistan war:

“This was a war of Obama’s choosing,” Michael Steele said at the event. “This is not something the United States has actively prosecuted or wanted to engage in.”

WTF?  Here is some vintage Needlenose, predicting the path of Shrubya’s Afghanistan folly.

(Note: I had this title last night, when I read the New York Times article discussed below and started to write a post… then procrastinated until everybody else in the world had posted about it waited to consider other viewpoints.  So even though Spencer Ackerman and probably others have riffed on the same obvious gag, I’m not changing it!)

In an apparent burst of nostalgia for the bad old days of the Bush-Cheney administration, when anonymous “senior administration officials” would bluff high-profile journalists for major newspapers into peddling dubious propaganda (somehow puffed up into sounding like a major scoop), the New York Times reported last night:

The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself, according to senior American government officials.

The previously unknown deposits — including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium — are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world, the United States officials believe.

An internal Pentagon memo, for example, states that Afghanistan could become the “Saudi Arabia of lithium,” a key raw material in the manufacture of batteries for laptops and BlackBerrys.

Showing that a Democratic president is now in office it’s no longer the early 2000s, even mainstream journalists have reacted to the NYT “scoop” with skepticism bordering on outright scorn.  Meanwhile, among progressive bloggers, the reflexive hue-and-cry has predictably arisen: This is just a pretext to stay in Afghanistan forever to control its mineral wealth, just like we’re staying in Iraq forever to control its oil!

Which might be more persuasive were it not for the fact that we aren’t staying in Iraq forever (even as wrangling over forming a government continues, the withdrawal of U.S. troops is proceeding on schedule, with American influence fading concomitantly), and Iraqi politicians — who, unsurprisingly, covet the benefits of the country’s black gold for themselves — never have gotten around to signing over major oil fields wholesale to U.S. corporations.

Nor do I think Obama wants to stay in Afghanistan forever — certainly not long enough for him to reap the downsides of an endless, unsuccessful war while U.S. megacorporations in future decades garner the benefits.  To me, the president’s seemingly contradictory announcement last December of an immediate escalation combined with a hoped-for exit timetable was clearly designed to mimic Dubya’s 2007 “surge” in Iraq… that is, not so much a plan to win the war as an attempt to postpone the inevitable while being able to say we gave it our best shot (and, perhaps, take public-relations advantage of any unexpected lucky breaks, as occurred in Iraq).

In fact, although today’s NYT story is undoubtedly propaganda of some sort, its intent may be the opposite of what everyone is assuming.  Instead of providing an excuse for the U.S. to stay in Afghanistan indefinitely, what if it inspires other forces in the region to hasten our exit? Karzai is known to be greedy and dishonest; why would reports of vast mineral wealth encourage him to be a loyal and scrupulous American puppet rather than tempting him further to ditch his former benefactors and cut a deal with the Taliban to split the booty?

Even more intriguing is the Chinese angle acknowledged by the Times:

At the same time, American officials fear resource-hungry China will try to dominate the development of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth, which could upset the United States, given its heavy investment in the region. After winning the bid for its Aynak copper mine in Logar Province, China clearly wants more, American officials said.

Anyone else get a whiff of Br’er Rabbit from that passage?  “Oh, no, whatever you do, don’t push us out and entangle yourselves deeper in Afghanistan’s problems — please, anything but that, China!”

Hell, if we could get out of the business of providing armed security for Chinese-owned copper mines and lure the People’s Republic into taking our place, battling the Taliban and miscellaneous warlords for control of all those buried minerals, that would be nearly a best-case scenario at this point.  (It would be even more entertaining if the reported mother lodes turned out to be illusory… hasn’t someone written a science-fiction novel or something to that effect?)

That’s my conspiracy theory, and I intend to stick with it.

I’m with Karzai on condemning the recent NATO attack on a convoy that included women and children.  I seriously doubt we’re going to win this war anyway, but I’m positive we won’t win it by dropping bombs on civilians.

It didn’t work for the Soviets and it won’t work for us.  If we must pursue this war because of our Leader’s peculiar obsessions, then let’s do with with more (multinational) boots on the ground.  At least a sniper would be more likely to see the lil’ kid waving from the back of the mini-van.

*Update 2/25/10* It’s not just air attacks that are killing civilians.  Check out these statistics on the kids killed by both sides in the Afghanistan conflict.