Ace poker player Barack Obama (the man who gets fleeced almost every time he has to negotiate with American politicians) made a ploy to bluff Hamid Karzai, the wily Con-Man-In-Chief of Afghanistan. Obama had one or more of his minions plant in the press the notion that Obama may leave no U.S. troops in Afghanistan at all after 2014 (the "withdrawal" date for U.S. forces) if Karzai doesn't soften his negotiating position.
Naturally, Karzai wasn't fazed. This is a man who's spent much of his life in the cutthroat environs of Afghan society. Obama is a man with a record of caving in and making hollow veto threats. The idea that Karzai would be snookered for one second by Obama's bluff is laughable, and pathetic. Obama is like a tourist in the casbah, haggling with a bazaar merchant over some trinket. He thinks he's getting a good price but the merchant has played him for a sap.
Obama's well out of his depth dealing with the likes of Karzai. Karzai has gotten away with running a gigantic scam on the U.S. for over a decade, and calling it a "government." The truth is, the U.S. doesn't dare let its Afghan client-crooks fall. The Democrats don't want to face GOP screams of "WHO LOST AFGHANISTAN?" (That crap started with "who lost China?" in 1949. Most recently we had a mini-example of it in "Who lost Ambassador Stephens?" in Libya.) The Wall Street Journal is already doing it on today's editorial page!
At issue is immunity for U.S. troops to commit war crimes. That was the sticking point in Iraq, which prompted Obama to pull out the U.S. troops there. Obviously it's intolerable that U.S. troops not have license to commit crimes where they're stationed, since it is their habitual behavior to commit them. (See Okinawa, for example.) And in Iraq, the U.S. military blessed those crimes, even the most notorious ones, like the Ramadi massacre by U.S. Marines storming homes at night and slaughtering the residents because they'd hit a mine. (That's a tactic the Nazis used in World War II, slaughtering civilians in retaliation for attacks by underground guerrillas.) The Marine Corps exonerated the murderers in that one. Or the helicopter slaughter by chuckling U.S. flying butchers in Baghdad, who killed Reuters journalists and snickered cynically over the children they shot in a van that stopped to offer aid to the victims. (A double war crime.) The upshot of that is Bradley Manning is being prosecuted and will be sentenced to life in prison for leaking the video evidence of the war crime to WikiLeaks. This "aids the enemy." That's true. When the world gets informed of U.S. atrocities, it does provide grist for enemies' propaganda mills. Hence the war against truth by the U.S. government. (Note to Idiots who support Obama: this vileness is what you back, and what you rabidly demand that progressives vote for like sheep. Not me.)
The U.S. is also miffed that their Afghan "partners" apparently intend to free the various Afghan prisoners the U.S. is hoarding at the Bagram Air Force base prison. Maybe they should stuff them into Gitmo, if they're so valuable. Since Gitmo is down to 166 prisoners (86 "cleared for release"- yet the U.S. still won't release them!) from 750 or so, there must be plenty of spare cages there. Since they're never going to close it anyway. Not until "the war on terror" ends. And if "the war on drugs" is any guide, that means not for decades, or maybe until people wise up and overthrow this evil system.
Not that I'm a fan of Islamofascism. But an oppressive Imperialist power that has effectively rescinded 500 years of progress in human rights and thrown us back into pre-Magna Carta days is actually the more dangerous enemy. Al-Qaeda didn't strip 300 million Americans of rights, the U.S. government did. Al-Qaeda isn't "rendering" innocent people all over the world and torturing them, the U.S. and its lackey nations are. Al-Qaeda isn't spending trillions of dollars on an exorbitantly expensive military and secret police apparatus while sharpening the knives to slash spending for human needs, the U.S. is. So I submit to you that the U.S. government is much the greater enemy of the American people, even counting 2,800 deaths over a decade ago in an attention-getting act. (One facilitated by the FBI and CIA watching carefully and letting it proceed.)
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