Needlenose

Leftover US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates learned some important lessons from Shrubya’s Iraqi Quicksand:

“The lessons learned with the failure to find the weapons of mass destruction and some of the other things that happened will make any future president very, very cautious about launching that kind of conflict or relying on intelligence,” Gates told PBS television in an interview.

Any future president is “going to ask a lot of very hard questions and I think that hurdle is much higher today than it was six or seven years ago,” he said.

Oh come on, lessons learned? Maybe he was an idiot, but anybody with half a brain didn’t believe for a second the attack on Iraq had anything to do with faulty intelligence and everything to do with Wrong-Wing hubris and idiocy.

The only ‘lesson learned’ is Republicans are douchebags and shouldn’t hold higher office. Oh and it’s probably time for Obama to start vetting Gates replacements.

True to his campaign promises, Obama is moving ahead with his broke-ass ‘surge’ in Afghanistan.  And Shrubya left-over Gates will continue lobbying militarily ineffective, civilian-killing missiles into Waziristan. 

I’ll give them credit in that they understand that the real ‘insurgency’ is in Waziristan, where the Taliban and Al-Qaeda leaders are laughing at us, fueling the insurgency with drug and weapons smuggling while living large in their Wazi safe houses.  I’m sure they are also aware that the Pakistani government has zero military control over the region (having gotten their asses kicked by the Waziban several times over the last few years).   And finally it should be apparent to them that unless the Al-Waziban are defeated on the ground, the insurgency will continue.

So Obama is indicating that he is signing up for a long-term ‘containment’ quagmire, hoping that by keeping some critical mass of troops in the country and by blowing up the occasional Waziri household, he’ll be able to prop up the Karzai government at a low-enough cost that people will ignore the conflict.

Not much of a plan.  NATO troops will still die.  The conflict will gradually heat up.  The missiles will undermine both Obama’s new pro-Muslim ‘messaging’ as Al-Jezeera airs pics of dead kids, and the Pakistani central government (such as it is).  It will drain money out of the economic reconstruction.  And guess what?  We haven’t withdrawn from Iraq yet!  Who knows what might develop there that could slow down or halt our withdrawal?

Long-time Needlenose readers may remember that while I opposed the Iraqi debacle on both ethical and practical grounds, I largely opposed the A’stan invasion largely because it was a fucking stupid idea – there is no way we can prop up Karzai if we can’t stem the flow of Hashshashin and weapons from the hostile and anarchic Waziristan.

Obama would be better off biting the bullet now and starting the withdrawal when he has significant political capital, rather than at the end of his 2nd term, when his legacy will be tainted by the abject failure of his escalation policy.