When did we agree not to disagree about the Mideast? I don't think I attended that meeting. When did we ever agree to disagree about anything? I read that Pompeo has been after that Quds guy for some time, and that the current cloud of flies buzzing about the yellow coif are very hawkish on Iran, but that thing about a mood was just speculation on my part. It just didn't seem like the sort of thing that Trump would do and that's why I speculated that he was in a mood.
After 911 I didn't favor going into Afghanistan, but the mood in the country was so strong that it was understandable. At first we were making great strides it seemed. There were photos in the paper of our guys riding horses in the mountains allied with those cool Afghan fighters. We toppled the Taliban government with surprising ease, and I was rather proud of these guys, I didn't know we had such a good army. We replaced him with the leader of the Northern Alliance we'd allied with in the overthrow. He was a murderous thug but then so were all the other guys leading the various tribes. But we did not get Bin Laden, he slipped right through our fingers.
I've told the story before about the guy who used to fix the pinball machines at House of Chin. What he actually did was set them up so that they'd work while he finished off his free beer and got out the door, but once he was safely out they would break down again. That is what we should have done in Afghanistan. But the neocons, who would later bathe in the glory of the Iraq war, were in ascendancy, and they wanted to make this reform and that reform and there were plenty of guys running around with sacks of money, some of our guys, some of theirs. We ended up putting in a series of corrupt guys who the Afghans in the street hated as much as the Taliban, only now they hated the US too because we were helping to keep that party in power. We're still doing that today. One of Trump's promises, like building the wall and having the Mexicans pay for it was to get us out of forever wars, and neither of them has come to anything.
It seemed ti me when I voted for Obama that he would get us out of Afghanistan. He didn't. He turned out to much more hawkish than I had thought he would be, that was a disappoint to me.
The president is not allowed to kill willy-nilly anybody he chooses But there are all kinds of war power acts and whatnot, and Obama and his lawyers patched together something and it was all legal. We had been hunting Bin Laden for years, every American knew his name. Myself I thought it was stupid, the guy was washed-up, why bother? But the crowd loved it.
Bin Laden was a major villain in the American eyes for years. Nobody in America ever heard of the Quds guy until after he was killed. When Obama killed Osama we had the whole story, the reasoning, the legality, the little movie in the basement. With the Quds guy we have nothing, the only legality is that imminent danger thing, and it's been proven there was no imminent danger. For reasoning there have been four or five mutually exclusive reasons given. And now they have just plain stopped talking about it all.
That's the difference.
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