"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." - Mark Twain.

Fred On Everything:

"Oh lord. Oh lord. I can’t stand it. Somebody get me a drink.

Recently I saw an interview with General McChrystal...

The guy was Westy, I thought. They’ve dug him up and added animatronics. He had the same statistics, drew the same comforting graphs showing the same progress in pacification, the same decline in Bad Things and rise in Good Things. Yes, he thought, we really should stop killing so many civilians, but we would stop. We were going to help the Afghans...

So now we are invading Marjah, a city, to build schools and hospitals. Schools and hospitals are characteristically built with heavy artillery. As soon as we have destroyed the place, they will love us and see the virtues of the American Way. (The first thing we did was to blow up a house, killing twelve civilians including the mandatory contingent of children. If that’s not a hearts-and-minds move, I can’t imagine what could be...)

The strategy makes perfect sense, really. I mean, if Afghans killed your tyke, wouldn’t that make you want to adopt their form of government, and let them improve your life? It would me.

All of this is so eerily familiar. Westmoreland, the Ghost of McChrystal Past, was also a pacifier of hamlets. Kill their kids, give them five hundred bucks and a lollipop in compensation. Explain voting. What a plan.

Sez me, officers should not be allowed to try to think...

Protestant Reader’s Digestism doesn’t transfer to Kandahar. “We’re here to help you” suggests to most of the world, “run like hell.” The sense of righteousness among field-grade officers is strong. They are doing God’s work. It doesn’t occur to them—can’t occur to them—that devout Moslems don’t want any Christians at all in their country, much less Christians who kick in doors and humiliate their women. The colonels think they are trying to extirpate evil, and that six robotic-looking alien troops hand-cuffing a man in front of his family is a small price to pay for democracy...

What McMoreland doesn’t get is that people just don’t like being invaded. Yes, yes, it’s for their own good. We, of course, will determine what constitutes their own good.

Such is the ingratitude of these people, and their lack of respect for borders, that we find ourselves forced to expand the war into Cambod—Pakistan, I meant. Pakistan. And so the Predators fly..."