Is it time to get out of the Middle East?

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"Negotiated settlement with the Taliban?"

How does that work? What does that look like? What do we do when they blow through any agreement like this was 1870 and we'd just signed a treaty with the Indians?

If we could, or if anyone could, do business with the Taliban, we'd be doing it.

But you know as well as I do that the moment we leave, that giant sucking sound will be the Taliban, the Pakistanis, al Qaida and Iran fighting over Afghanistan's corpse.  Then what?

We take care of the "poppy problem" the same everywhere. When we find those fields, we destroy them using defoliant.

Meanwhile, our uselessness in staying in Afghanistan is obvious. Our leaving, however, strengthens terrorism around the world and re-establishes America as the country that can be out-waited into military defeat.

It worked in Vietnam, now it will work in the Middle East. It's our history. It's what they're counting on. It's what the democrats worked so hard to achieve in both wars.  Now it's the outcome they want in every war.

It's the dichotomy of our history. It's based on a lack of will that stretches back decades.

We had a 5 year window of being the world's only nuclear power. We should have used that power to keep anyone else from getting nukes.

We failed in that responsibility. Look at us all now.

Would their have been a Korean War if we had been the only nuclear power?  A Vietnam War?  Would oil be $108 a barrel and climbing? 

What are we to do when Iran gets nukes?

In Afghanistan, however, we must do what must be done. That means replacing the Karzai people, of course, but with who?

Our so-called leadership is already viewed as milquetoasts of the highest order. They showed rank incompetence in the Libyan situation; those people... the rebels... are hung out to dry as much as we hung the Kurds out to dry under Bush 1.

Sometimes, Obama is just too damned much like Kennedy.  And by that, I mean, too much like the thought process that resulted in the Bay of Pigs fiasco, where we made all these promises, including air cover; we let the invasion start, and then pulled the air cover, dooming thousands to death and imprisonment.

Trump is right.  When it comes to oil, the time has come to make these people pay for our effort... or we withdraw and let them duke it out with Iran and the terrorists. Meanwhile, our economy teeters on the brink because, once again, we lack the testosterone to do what must be done... and now events control us, instead of the other way around.

We seem to be enmeshed in flypaper: the more we struggle to get out, the more we're stuck.

I don't have the answers. I just have a lot of questions. And the people we're paying to answer these questions?  Like Ridgefield Barbie? Are you kidding me?
 
Nothing but cricket chirps and more death.
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