bin Laden is Dead

I am so relieved Osama bin Laden was killed. Because, you know, I never knew when I might be brutally killed. By him. In a plane.

I decided that it was high time I say something about this subject, especially since I haven't blogged in, oh, a month. I'm quite sorry. Really, I am. Life has been ridiculous. You see, my mother has this annoying habit of constantly surpassing my high scores in various Facebook games. So, it has become one of my quests in life to beat her scores. It's a long quest. On top of that, I currently have a very large stack of reading material, including "Our Man in Tehran," by Robert Wright, which I believe shall prove to be quite interesting. Oh, and I'm trying to read through my Bible in 90 days. I'm currently near day 50, and it's...going well. I haven't missed a day yet.

But you don't really care about that all that, and I don't know why I'm rambling on about my personal life, because if you wanted to know about that, you'd go read my other blog. So.

Yes, Osama bin Laden is dead. Yes. A great menace...threat...thing to humanity et al has been removed. Because...he managed to kill...so many other people after we started chasing him. With thousands of soldiers.

There's something ridiculous, to my mind, about expending literally trillions of dollars, thousands of soldier's lives, and ten years of time to catch one man. Of course, that's not including the hundreds of thousands of Afghani civilians we've killed, nor the other hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians we've killed. Although Iraq had nothing to do with Osama bin Laden.

So basically, not much is new. We're still not going to pull out of Afghanistan, because the big bad insurgency is still there. And God forbid the Afghanis like...try to defend themselves. That would be horrible. We're also not leaving Iraq anytime in the near future, and since we've just invaded Libya - while, of course, making it very clear that we haven't invaded Libya - there's still going to be plenty of Middle Eastern ridiculousness for me to comment on.

So yes, Americans. Osama bin Laden, our Emmanuel Goldstein, is dead. You can go to sleep now, and let the government take care of you. Because it knows everything.

"Oops, We Goofed," and Other Infamous Last Words

The NATO forces goof. A lot. There was our "complicated" air-strike last year that killed several Afghan soldiers, Yemeni schoolchildren being killed, nine Afghan boys being shot...it's just not good. The latest goof strikes a bit close to home for one of our "friends." We accidentally killed Hamid Karzai's cousin, and he's understandably a bit miffed.

Now, I'm willing to give the benefit of the doubt to the NATO soldiers involved. I mean, obviously, when you're out in the dark on an Afghan side-street, your trigger finger is going to be a bit tense, and you might see one man as a threat. Unfortunately, Karzai isn't taking it so lightly.

""The president sees this as another lamentable case of loss of life," Omer said. "This was the result of an irresponsible and unnecessary night raid. His message is that they have to stop these irresponsible night raids that kill innocent Afghans.""

Karzai has apparently often condemned the night raids, and has decided that he's not going to stand for it anymore.

I think that within five years, our actions are going to drive Karzai over the edge. He's going to try to kick us out of his country, with the support of most Afghans. Of course, we're not going to be able to stand for that, because we can't just leave the Afghans to their own governance, now can we? They might degenerate into chaos. (But hey, at least it would be their chaos, and not ours.) So then, naturally, our forces will have to unseat Karzai, because we can't leave the Afghan people in the hands of such a brutal, freedom-hating man.

Irony, enter stage right.

In the News...

Lots of fun stuff is happening, as usual!

Airstrike "Complications" (Yeah, I'd call it a complication)

So for starters, we just killed five Afghan soldiers who were *gasp* actually doing their jobs! In our defense, it was an accident. So McChrystal instated new rules that made it difficult for soldiers to call in airstrikes on unidentified personnel. God forbid we actually like, exercise discretion before we go in, guns blazing like we're in the Lone Ranger or something. Totally unacceptable.

Yet those rules are loosened and we instantly see an uptick in deaths. Um...yeah. I'm thinking McChrystal's approach was better. The article put it this way-
"Yet other [soldiers] say there have been few cases identified where it is clear troops have been harmed because they were prevented from properly defending themselves – and that the drop in civilian deaths from airstrikes and night raids has also meant fewer enraged cousins and brothers who themselves become insurgents and kill Americans to avenge the deaths."

Can we learn this principle of "blowback" people? We let our soldiers kill civilians, our soldiers die. It's that simple. (Of course, we could avoid both parts of that equation by just getting the heck out of their country, but since it seems nobody outside of a village in Afghanistan seems to think that's a good idea, I don't think it's going to happen.)

As one of the commenters said- "Has any army since Alexander the Great successfully subdued Afghanistan? If not, what makes us think we can?"


Excuses, More Excuses

That's the title of a song BTW, written by a Christian evangelist person who is now dead I believe. He was hilarious. But anyway. That is irrelevant to this section.

What this portion is about is the fact that we keep finding more and more reasons to attack Pakistan and take over their government and stay there for decades and kill their people and harass their military and their government and ruin their infrastructure and all that fun stuff we've done in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Yeah.

Sure, it looks all nice on the outside- we've caught terrorists! We've charged them with crimes! We know who they are! We're going to put them in Gitmo and uh...use interrogation techniques that may or may not mentally and/or physically harm them, and find out all their secrets! Then we're going to put them in jail for a long, long time!

Mm-hmm.

"Newly unsealed charges against Adnan G. El Shukrijumah...present the government's clearest case to date that the main al-Qaeda organization remains active in trying to attack U.S. targets, alongside similar efforts by al-Qaeda affiliates."

"The court filing comes as President Obama and senior national security aides have increasingly cited recent domestic terrorism cases as justification for the war in Afghanistan, noting that country's border with uncontrolled tribal areas in Pakistan where al-Qaeda is based and from which, U.S. officials say, threats continue to emanate."

Yeah. So the next logical step is, of course, to attack Pakistan and continue our quixotic search for these evil terrorists.

Tea Party Exceptions

So now Sarah Palin is trying to get the ardent members of that Tea Party populace to not engage in their deficit-reduction fervor quite so much. Why? Well, it just wouldn't do for us to stop spending 3-11 billion every time we bought a ship. Entirely unacceptable.

...


Last time I checked, we were in the midst of a major recession. When people are going through hard times, what do they do? Well, they might just decide to scale back, not just on that new gadget or on their food budget...but usually, they might also fire that extra security guard if they have one. Y'know. To save money and all that good stuff.

See there's this amazing thing about the Declaration of Independence, that thing we celebrated just a few days ago. One of the complaints they lodged against King George was that he had a standing army. Remember that? Yeah.

Kind of amazing, that little fact, right? ^.^


So yes. Just a little foray into three things that caught my eye. There's more, of course- lots of oil-spill drama, even more economic drama. However, I'm not going to cover it here...

As a quick note- I'm going to be leaving Sunday for church camp, and will not return till the following Sunday. I'm going to enlist my mother to post comments for me again. Play nice. ;)