Ranger Reveries
_______________Ranger recently viewed a television show worse than U.S. policy: The Ghost Whisperer.
As a result, he had a nightmare in which someone whispered to him that the U.S. had only one year to live, after which we would be a ghost, too. Just like Benjamin Button at Year One. This led Prophet Ranger to thoughts on how we'd come to our terminal point.
The fault is not solely George Bush's, but rather a pervasive worldview that might is right, and the Great White God has blessed all that drops from the limbs of the tree of democracy. However, not the entire world buys into this dogma. Our counterinsurgency [COIN] efforts are seen as post-colonial wars of suppression and aggression.
What are the honest goals of the U.S. in Afghanistan and Iraq? What does it hope to gain, and what does it actually gain? Do we fight to make people free, and what if they refuse the gift?
Who is the enemy in these theatres, and what is the battlefield? The enemy is the people we are supposedly there to liberate, and the battlefield is the country that we are unrealistically trying to build.
A nation-building project must have both [1] a national identity which to augment, and [2] a historical basis for the effort. Neither of these exist in Afghanistan. While preconditions exist, the impulse to federate must be internal.
Iraq was a nation without a national identity, a fact which is still true, despite U.S. efforts to the contrary. Afghanistan will never be a beacon of democracy. Both countries have been by-passed by history, and rightly so.
If a country wishes to remain pre-literate, that is their right. COIN cannot impose values that the country does not embrace. We can kill them, but that doesn't make them buy into our world view. If the U.S. were truly democratic, these country's very backwardness should be recognized as their expression of freedom -- even if it is repressive and repugnant to our perception.
The U.S. has no right or mandate to impose its will on any group outside of its borders. Even if it did it should be implemented through means other than military -- an introduction, versus an imposition.
Soldiers are not social workers, nor do they deal in feel-good products.
Military operations in these arenas have not been based in reality, nor have they been faithful to our principles. By extension, COIN is ineffective since COIN is a subset of military operations.
The entire military equation cannot be dictated by one hastily written Field Manual, even if it does talk pretty.
As a result, he had a nightmare in which someone whispered to him that the U.S. had only one year to live, after which we would be a ghost, too. Just like Benjamin Button at Year One. This led Prophet Ranger to thoughts on how we'd come to our terminal point.
The fault is not solely George Bush's, but rather a pervasive worldview that might is right, and the Great White God has blessed all that drops from the limbs of the tree of democracy. However, not the entire world buys into this dogma. Our counterinsurgency [COIN] efforts are seen as post-colonial wars of suppression and aggression.
What are the honest goals of the U.S. in Afghanistan and Iraq? What does it hope to gain, and what does it actually gain? Do we fight to make people free, and what if they refuse the gift?
Who is the enemy in these theatres, and what is the battlefield? The enemy is the people we are supposedly there to liberate, and the battlefield is the country that we are unrealistically trying to build.
A nation-building project must have both [1] a national identity which to augment, and [2] a historical basis for the effort. Neither of these exist in Afghanistan. While preconditions exist, the impulse to federate must be internal.
Iraq was a nation without a national identity, a fact which is still true, despite U.S. efforts to the contrary. Afghanistan will never be a beacon of democracy. Both countries have been by-passed by history, and rightly so.
If a country wishes to remain pre-literate, that is their right. COIN cannot impose values that the country does not embrace. We can kill them, but that doesn't make them buy into our world view. If the U.S. were truly democratic, these country's very backwardness should be recognized as their expression of freedom -- even if it is repressive and repugnant to our perception.
The U.S. has no right or mandate to impose its will on any group outside of its borders. Even if it did it should be implemented through means other than military -- an introduction, versus an imposition.
Soldiers are not social workers, nor do they deal in feel-good products.
Military operations in these arenas have not been based in reality, nor have they been faithful to our principles. By extension, COIN is ineffective since COIN is a subset of military operations.
The entire military equation cannot be dictated by one hastily written Field Manual, even if it does talk pretty.
Labels: democracy, phony war on terror, post-colonial behavior, PWOT
posted by rangeragainstwar at 9:01 PM
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