Left, Right, and Centered

Afghanistan is such a two-bit banana republic that they can’t even hold a decent corrupt election, since the only viable competitor to the tacit dictator says, in essence, “You can’t steal my votes again and declare yourself president…I QUIT”.  So Karzai, the guy left, is now who we have to deal with.  One of Obama’s criteria for deciding on troop levels in Afghanistan was the presence of a stable government.  If this is anyone’s idea of stable, then the term is more flexible than I’d imagined.  Next door, in Pakistan, the suicide bomber union seems to have lost a couple more stewards, with several dozen more vaporized bodies within spitting distance of Pakistani army headquarters and another twenty or so in a distant province.  Not to worry.  We’ve got the countryside covered with our remote sci-fi arsenal.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

The above behemoth is aptly named a “Reaper”, presumably after the grim one of the same name, and is the mutant giant offspring of the more commonly known “Predator”.  Please note the six hard-point attachments on the undercarriage, in this case carrying four “Hellfire” missiles (don’t you just love the charming military jargon?), two “Sidewinder” air-to-air missiles, and two “GBU-12 PavewayII” laser guided bombs.  The various sensors on the nose can see through clouds, walls,  and probably Romulan force fields.  With one push of a button at Creech Air Force Base in Indian Springs, Nevada, the pilot and his weapons officer can dispatch a Taliban Mullah perched on the throne in the smallest room in his hut 1.2 seconds later.  While we are all thrilled with the high-tech wizardry of remote controlled death, apparently the Pakistanis are not nearly so amused.  They repeatedly voiced their displeasure at Secretary of State Hillary Clinton during her recent visit.  It seems that what we refer to as “collateral damage” they regard as dead civilians.  Another minor semantic disagreement.

The Afghans don’t want us there anymore and the Pakistanis never wanted us interfering in their sovereign nation.  We’re spending tens of millions of dollars every day that could just as easily be used to pare that 1900 page health care reform bill down to one page…the one that establishes medicare-like national health insurance for all Americans.  How can anyone in good conscience support the cost of these insane wars and incursions and somehow maintain that we can’t afford to take care of our own citizen’s health?  It is, in fact, unconscionable.

BW