Keith Olbermann recently came the closest he has ever come to saying something intelligent since he stopped annoying me on Sports Center. While he touches on a viable solution the road he took to get there was wrong. He says we should leave Afghanistan and bring the boys home.
We have been in Afghanistan for around 8 years now and what do we have to show for it? Not much. The heroin trade is still thriving, the terrorists keep coming, our guys keep dying and we do not have Osama bin Laden’s head. The sacrifice of our soldiers over there has not been for naught though. Many key terrorists have been captured or killed and the fight was taken to their doorstep instead of in the homeland. But as we sit now it is just a bad position to put our troops in. We should unleash their full power and obliterate the enemy from off the map or we should bring them home. Since we are now bringing Navy SEALs in for court martial because one of their prisoners had a fat lip it might be safe to say that they are being hampered from using their full force. In this case we should pull them home. To say that we need the country to be stable and the people to be free before we leave is a nice dream but will not happen. The founders of our country had a concern that the people of this country might not be “fit for liberty”. I propose that most people in the middle east are not fit for liberty and have need of masters. They are too far in vices, ignorance, anger and hatred to be fit for self government. Until the people who are fit can grow in numbers and overtake those who are not, there will never be a free and non-corrupt government over there and we should check ourselves in those areas too, of course.
Where Olbermann goes astray, this time, is in his insistence that the generals and the pentagon want the war because it is good for their business. He even goes so far as to say that it makes the generals “happy” when their soldiers “suffer”. While the military industrial complex can be a huge problem, I do not believe that generals are “happy” when service men and women are harmed or in danger. He makes a decent point about credibility after the disgusting Tillman debacle, although he is attacking McChrystal and it is not fully clear to me who is to blame for the lies about Pat Tillman. Then he makes the very accurate connection between what happened to the Soviet Union in Afghanistan before their collapse and the U.S. today. He also gives us the obligatory attack of Sarah Palin, which is very blatantly out of place and obviously in there only because he wanted yet another jab at someone he hates. You don’t have to subject yourselves to the torture of watching this video but here it is:
There were some other things that Olby said that amused me. First off, he said that Obama was greeted by a “Three Mile Island of an economy”. Three mile Island was an easily contained, quickly defused and overly reported incident. The current economic situation we find ourselves in is much larger, more dangerous and grossly under-reported, which is quite the opposite. He also states that Obama took a “biblical flood of finance” and turned it into a “cloudy day”. I feel sorry for people who watch this man to be informed. They know nothing of how the economic damage that was predicted to be the bad road, if no taxpayer money was used for stimulus and bailouts, has actually been surpassed with the bailouts and stimulus packages. They also know nothing of the ridiculous amounts of debt we have heaped upon ourselves which could very easily collapse our country.
The second amusing thing was his insistence that “We cannot afford this” referring to the Afghan war. This is amusing to me because he supports every other waste of taxpayer money under the sun and the only area he thinks to cut back is military. It’s just a little glimpse of his priorities.
In short I don’t really agree with him except in the fact that we don’t want our troops to be hanging out over there. Where I part with him is that I believe they should be swiftly destroying our enemies. If they are just going to be targets then let’s get them home.