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nakedthinker -> RE: Should McChrystal be fired for the Rolling Stone interview? (6/22/2010 7:36:37 PM)
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When looking at Afghanistan, it is important to remember why we are there in the first place: Al Quada and the attacks on September 11th, 2001
Al Quada is not going to go away. Al Quada is not run by a bunch of nutcases as many people would like to believe. Al Quada's unalterable goal is to restore the power of the former Persian Empire (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Achaemenid_Empire) which represents the absolute height of power and cultural influence to people in the Middle East. Because a leader from western civilization (Alexander the Great) brought down the Persian Empire, Al Quada is convinced that restoration of the Persian Empire first will likely require the destruction of western civilization. Therefore, Al Quada WILL attack western civilization every single chance they get.
The best that we can hope for is to continue to keep them off balance and unable to maintain a safe ground so that it continues to be difficult for them to become sufficiently organized and trained to be able to execute another attack on the scale of what occurred on September 11th... or worse. Failure to maintain that sort of pressure guarantees that someday, the center of at least one U.S. city will disappear under a mushroom cloud. The nuclear genie is out of the bottle in too many places around the world, and as long as there is an organized desire to destroy western civilization, and a safe place for that organization to prepare, it is only a matter of time before major portions of U.S. cities start to go "boom."
So, we in the United States collectively have a simple question to answer: Do we prefer to have tens of thousands of Americans killed, lose billions in physical assets, and redefine our acceptable level of safety to compensate for these losses, as the centers of U.S. cities are leveled, or do we prefer to have at least thousands... maybe tens of thousands... of American service personnel killed in Afghanistan, and invest billions of dollars in attempting to build an actual modern country out of Afghanistan over the 20-100 years that it will take to force the cultural shift in that country's people necessary to sustain a modern country?
In spite of the wishful thinking that President Obama has sold to the American people, there really are no other choices.
General McChrystal is quite aware of those realities. He also knows that President Obama is not going to give him the time and resources that are required to get the job done effectively in Afghanistan, which means that the United States IS going to lose the Afghanistan battle in the "war on terror." Under Obama's watch, we are going to negate all of the sacrifice of the service personnel over the last nine years. The U.S. military has already started to scale back their objectives in Afghanistan, and destroy and abandon their own firebases because what is the point in getting killed trying to defend something that will be abandoned permanently in a year? Our enemies in Afghanistan are going to just lay low and wait for our departure, and then conditions for Al Quada will be able to revert back to September 10th, 2001.
After the next big attack in the United States, we will then be able to go back to Afghanistan to try again, and perhaps then we will have the political resolve to do what is required to negate the need for a third invasion.
So, there was a simple question that General McChrystal had to answer: Do I want to just go with the flow, and appear to support the Commander In Chief, knowing that I will be known for all of future history as the general who commanded the most powerful military in the world to a loss against what are no more than tribal thugs barely out of the stone age (which pretty much will end my military career), or do I want to go down while expressing in a very public way why we are about to lose the war in Afghanistan?
Either way, McChrystal's career in the military is over, and he knows it. So, he has chosen to fall on his sword and make it clear that he knows that Obama's leadership is going to force the most powerful military force that has ever existed on the planet to steal defeat away from what could have been a victory. Honorable men, when presented with nothing but unfortunate choices, usually chose the option that will be best for their fellow men and their country, and that is what General McChrystal has done.
I hope that some private company gives him a very lucrative position managing a substantial portion of their business.
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