The United States of Mindlessness

U.S. policy makers are now deep in discussion about how many troops to withdraw from Afghanistan—5,000, 10,000, 30,000? But, as Diana West points out, even if the full 30,000 that Obama added in his “surge” of late 2009 are withdrawn, that would still leave 68,000 American soldiers in that God-forsaken country, and no one in the political establishment is discussing—no one in the political establishment has even raised the question—whether this is a good idea:

No one seems to notice that the one crucial question goes unasked—whether the Bush-Obama policy that has injected 68,000 troops plus the 30,000-troop “surge” into Afghanistan is a good one …

Is Western-style nation-building in the Islamic Umma in any way a practical policy?

Are basic American concepts of governance compatible in any way with a culture based in religious and sexual supremacism?

Should Americans be dying for people who, for example, practice child marriage? Pederasty? To whom women are chattel? To whom corruption is as much a part of their lives as air? Whose allegiances, whose belief system, whose natural reflexes default, in the end, in ways subtle and not subtle, to the ways of jihad against infidels?

Whether the pullout is five thousand or thirty thousand, the disaster continues.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 21, 2011 09:31 AM | Send