Your response is thought-provoking, unlike the tiresome mud slinging and personal attacks by some of the otherwise intelligent posters.

Well thanks.

If I still had my old job, I could sling a lot more mud. As it is, the recession has obliged me to restrict my writing, so I try to make it count more.

You're right, I don't care about your hubris or your intervention excuses. The simple fact of the matter is that we could leave, for good, at any time, and nothing is stopping us except for people like you, and others like you, who don't want us to leave and are working hard to ensure that we stay and complete this nation-building experiment. For "humanitarian" reasons.

If I were the war party I'd be toasting and boasting about how useful idiots like you are assets to the Military Industrial Complex. Even when the idiots claim to oppose the very same complex, or protest against specific perceived misdeeds, they will still give praise when it is necessary to provide the punch behind their humanitarian do-gooding.

You ideology is flawed and intellectually bankrupt, and you've said nothing to counter that, only increase my certainty of it with your obfuscating. All your interventionist "power" comes from the use of coercive force by the one doing the intervening, period, and so all of these bullshit humanitarian arguments mean dick because they are implicitly backed by US Military Power, which completely undermines all of your peaceful "humanitarian" feel-good bullshit.

It has nothing to do with semantics or any of the myriad of documents and facts on the ground you love to clutter everything up with, it has nothing to do with "reading more" (the typical fallacy you throw those that disagree with your). I've read plenty. It comes down to your flawed coercive ideology, how you choose to embody it (as a do-gooding "humanitarian"), and how your perceptions are ultimately exploited by the Establishment to gin of support for its racketeering and global domination scams.

In fact you've been calling for escalation and Pakistani sovereignty violating and civilian mass-murdering air strikes for quite a while. Drones killing women children from the sky, praising Kind David Petreaus for his "vision", some fucking "humanitarian" you are. That is the problem with all you do-gooders, you want to do all the do-gooding while ignoring all the unintended consequences (unless said consequence is perceived as good, then it will be praised, as we saw earlier, and used in moral math equations).

I have repeatedly stated that I didn't think the effort should be controlled by the military, I still think that.

Too fucking bad. That's the entire point, you and others like you will never be in control of the Empire. But you'll go along with its plan anyway because of all the perceived goodness you feel you can bring. And the way you apologize for and downplay the Militarist American Empire while claiming to be some kind of antiwarrior is just disgusting btw. But blind interventionists such as yourself always seem to miss the ironic, little things, such as military power undermining all of your bullshit humanitarian ideals. The Empire gets to continue the killing and you get left holding the bag and making excuses. Real smart move, smart guy.

You think about a lot of things. You should think more.

n/t

It's good to see that you have real arguments and not just mockery and establishment nut-hugging.

The USA military crushed the legal government of Afghanistan in a cake walk.

Prove it.

Or are you not going to spend the next few years preparing to be a teacher and then go to Afghanistan for a few more years?

Thankfully Uncle Sam will be there holding down the fort for the half a decade or more you're going to need to get your humanitarian rocks off.

Depends on what you mean by "being friends" with other nations. We can have diplomatic relations with all countries easily --- we did with the old USSR even during the cold war. Why not?

Being friendly would also mean trading equally with all nations without resorting to economic warfare as in the case of Cuba.

Being friends does not mean we would not defend ourselves if invaded. But who in the world would invade us? Who?

As to you comment about the tone here, I try to keep it at least as high tone as the person who starts it. In the case of a few two-bit twits, it is damn easy to say almost anything and still be above them. And this makes a point; you do sometimes have arguments with friends, and nations will also have arguments. If all nations (especially the evil empire) were to try for friendly relations then the arguments might get solved before armed conflict.

We have been demonizing Cuba all my life. What good has it done?

ondellette is Christopher Hitchen's deluded little bum boy.

They're just upset because they are so damn smart and have all the answers yet they still get played by the Establishment time and again, for decades, and don't like it when people like you and I point it out to them.

They are too smart to be fooled, and they are too passionate to be wrong, but yet when their plans are put on the big screen and their big ideas are undermined by militarism and mass-murder, you're the idiot.

We have been demonizing Cuba all my life. What good has it done?

Corn Syrup! Yum!

If you live in Texas you can get cheap Pepsi and Coke, made with real sugar and imported from Mexico.

Could that be considered a good thing?

I'm sorry, that wasn't fair. I just detailed to Chris, in a post he failed to understand, some of how long it took to ferret out the truth about what is and was happening in Afghanistan. He went all slogans on me, but I expected it. You should pick up Ahmed Rashid's book, though, as a place where a lot of it is in the same volume. It's an eye opener. And I meant what I said about South Asia's poor. You should go see them. If you can honestly stand in the slums by the Howrah Bridge and say you've seen anything like it in Florida, or know of a whole state the size of Florida where the maternal death rate in childbirth has been close to 25% recently, spit it out. Until then, I guess we just aren't on the same page.

None of this row about Afghanistan has been OT, as far as I'm concerned, from the subject of death by U.S. torture. And U.S. torture and killing isn't going to stop without solving our problems in South Asia. Us and everyone else with a stake there. Neither is the degeneration of the U.S. moral stance going to stop, or the arguments against torture get the strength they need without understanding the truth of what is happening and has happened there. Depend on it.

We didn't crush the Taliban militarily. We bombed, on information called in by a smattering of CIA and special forces people in the country, and on information and strategies handed to us by probably our biggest ally in that effort, the Islamic Republic of Iran, with whose people our people were meeting around the clock, seven days a week. Fancy that. Our bombing caused many casualties, it wasn't at all cost free in terms of human lives. But the war there had claimed the same number of lives in the previous year and a half, without us, too. Sometimes we don't run everything, or cause all of the destruction where our troops go.