Kabul Cabal

--Money, Andy Warhol

There 's no success like failure
and failure is no success at all
--Love Minus Zero, Bob Dylan
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For those who like their Sparkle Ponies mint green: "Invoking the 9/11 attacks, Obama proposed a major push to expand Afghan security forces, improve the responsiveness of the Kabul government, reduce corruption, fight drug trafficking, and combat the Taliban. He'll also boost Pakistan's counter-terror capacity and encourage detente with India" (Slate: Return of the Benchmarks).

In a war that still has no end in sight, Obama said the fresh infusion of U.S. forces is designed to bolster the Afghan army and turn up the heat on terrorists that he said are plotting new attacks against Americans. (Obama: 4,000 Troops to Afghanistan.)

If a war has no end in sight, it is not a war. It is an exercise in national futility. Wars have endgames which can be defined and articulated. This clarity is lacking in the Phony War on Terror (PWOT ©)

"President Barack Obama on Friday ordered 4,000 more military troops into Afghanistan, vowing to "disrupt, dismantle and defeat" the terrorist al-Qaida network in Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan."

Is there in fact an al-Qaeda terror network in Afghanistan, or is it simply Taliban resistance to the U.S. occupation? This is a poor mission statement as al-Qaeda in Afghanistan was defeated long ago. However, it is evident that the Taliban is resurgent.

Taliban and al-Qaeda are still not the same dog, regardless of close linkages in the past. What do current intl estimates say about the relationship, 2009. U.S. policies today cannot be based upon 2001 relationships.

Where will the increased funding come from --"Obama's plan will also cost many more billions of dollars"? And whose pockets will it line, once disbursed? A good guess is the leadership of the Kabul Cabal will tuck these Billions into their escape duffle bags for future contingencies. (After all, the Overseas Contingency Operation can't go on forever, can it?)

"Obama bluntly warned that the al-Qaida terrorists who masterminded the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks were actively planning further attacks on the United States from safe havens in Pakistan."

Fear-mongering at its finest, taking a page from Condi Rice's mushroom cloud play, albeit with a softer touch. Give us facts, Mr. President. This is no change, this is feed from the same trough of hysteria. It is a worn out record. Maybe you don't know from vinyl, being as your 48-year-old self is so Ipod. But the needles starts skipping grooves once scratched, and one ultimately cannot hear the song; not groovy at all.

Obama is now expanding the U.S. goal as being the removal of al-Qaida from Pakistan as well as Afghanistan, "and to prevent their return to either country in the future." Talk about mission creep.

If President Lincoln is Obama's template, he should take a page from Lincoln's approach to the Civil War. He tried to contain the hostilities rather than expand them, endeavoring to keep many of the states out of the war. Expanding theatres of operations is not an economy of force measure.

Not wanting to look like a wuss, Obama says his cause is "just," "And to the terrorists who oppose us, my message is the same: we will defeat you."

O.k., Commandante O.: Assuming the U.S. defeats the Taliban and kills every al-Qaeda dipshit in the theatre of operations, there is but one question which persists:

How is the victory to be paid for? Are we planning to extract their gold teeth?

How's the Weather Underground?

Got some, dirt on my shoulder,
could you brush it off for me
--Dirt Off Your Shoulder, Jay-Z
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The New York Times' MoDo of all people picked up on Obama's unspoken reference to Jay-Z's rap recently but I don't think this one is so easy to brush off (Brush it Off), despite the urging of the press that anything negatively related to Obama really is insignificant.

Once upon a time in a long ago and far away place called America there was a revolutionary organization called the Black Liberation Army (BLA). A terrorist organization, their purpose was nothing less than violent overthrow of the government.

People named Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn had organizational and operational links to the BLA. People who are now associates of presidential hopeful Barack Obama. The WaPo even wrote an apologia for the two last week, replete with dorky picture of Ayers with wife and unrepentant fellow revolutionary, Bernardine Dohrn (Former 60's Radical is Now Considered Mainstream.)

Ayers and Dohrn were also members of the radical leftist Weather Underground Organization (WUO). In the WUO position paper, signed by Ayers and Dohrn, they described themselves as a "white fighting force" to be allied with the "Black Liberation Movement" and other "anti-colonial" movements, to achieve the goal of "the destruction of U.S. imperialism and the achievement of a classless world: world Communism."

(With their racially separate but equal "fighting forces," I guess they didn't quite get the idea that Plessy vs. Ferguson needed to go, too. I'm sure as the victorious, racially divided armies stood around, they would have figured that one out.)

They carried out a domestic terror campaign of bombings, jailbreaks and riots. However, the WaPo depicts Ayers and Dohrn as the most assimilated of 60-year-olds. Silly to make a flap over. Surely they wear Birkenstocks on the weekend and probably drive a Prius and drink soy lattes at the corner Starbucks.

They portray the WUO as a bunch of largely ineffectual white dweebs. But what these dweebs had planned was anything but mild.

WU Member Brian Flanagan said a planned bombing of U.S. military non-commissioned officers' dance at Ft. Dix had been intended to be "the most horrific hit the United States government had ever suffered on its territory." How does that strike you? It was foiled only due to an earlier explosion at their safe house.

Bill Ayers, now a respectable university professor said in a New York Times piece (9/11/01) that he does not "regret setting bombs. I believe we didn't do enough."

Yet the WUO seems to have acquired a patina of inexplicable respectability today. Something quaint and nostalgic for a colorless time. And though WUO never killed anyone outside of their group with their bombs, the BLA with which they were affiliated, did. Specifically, two police officers and an armed guard in a Brinks robbery near Nyack, NY, in 1981.

The memory of the WUO's extreme left wing ideology seems remote. Obama opts out by saying he was only 8 years old at the time, and attending a madrassa in Indonesia.

The MSM never raises the linkages and crossover activities of Ayers and Dohrn, people with whom Obama has enjoyed personal home visitations.

Does this make Obama a BLA terrorist or supporter? Maybe -- maybe not. But it is worth exploration before this election proceeds further.

The press ignored President Bush's purported drunken driving, and it is now evident that he has been driving this country while drunk.

Do we want Obama to drive the country while being black and sympathetic to Black Liberation Army ideology? His rageful mentor of 20 years, anti-American cleric Wright, is not encouraging. Obama had a choice between mild-mannered preacher and revolutionary, and he chose the latter.

We as a nation are acting as an individual leaping into a rebound relationship, and those rarely work out well. This is a time for considered introspection, not flip-flopping over into the thing that looks to be the opposite of the pain-inducing relationship [= the past eight years of George W. Bush & Co.]

We are in a Phony War on Terror [PWOT©] and fear is the daily product sold to the American taxpayer. We are told that al-Qaeda sleepers and undercover agents are in our very midst.

If so, then is it not possible that Obama's associate Ayers -- who has never recanted his violent activities -- and Dohrn are long-term BLA sleepers?

Their linkage with Obama needs to be explored.

--Jim and Lisa