Bachmann a disappointment on Afghanistan

There were hopeful indications, suggestions, soupçons, that Michele Bachmann was an at least incipient dissenter from the Bush / Obama / neocon paradigm on nation-building and “democratizing” Muslim nations.

Alas, it was not to be. She tells a delighted Matthew Continetti at The Weekly Standard:

On Afghanistan, I firmly believe that we are at a point where we’ve got to stay the course, and we’ve got to finish the job. Reports coming out of Helmand right now are positive…. David Petraeus, who wrote the book on counterinsurgency and on the surge strategy, is successfully prosecuting the surge.

Now, President Obama has not told the story the way President Bush did. President Bush did let the country know where we were at, and I give him a lot of credit because when he was getting all sorts of invective pointed against him, he stood against the world for what he knew to be right in dealing with terrorism. And perhaps no other would have stood the way that he did. I give him great credit for that.

Now in Afghanistan, we are making great progress. We have to win southern Afghanistan, then we have to go on and win eastern Afghanistan. I believe that we will be victorious, and we’ll end it. I understand why people are frustrated. I completely understand. But I do trust General Petraeus in that effort and in what he is doing over there. And I think that they are doing what we need to do.

Bachmann apparently has no grasp, not even a tiny hint, of the essential hopelessness and insanity of what we have been doing there—sacrificing our men to build “trust” with our mortal enemies. Apparently the repeated mass murders of U.S. soldiers by their Afghan “allies” has not caused the slightest tremor of cognitive dissonance in the congresswoman’s comely head. And apparently she has never even thought about the fundamental questions asked the other day by Diana West:

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?

Could someone maybe arrange a meeting between Rep. Bachmann and Miss West?

—end of initial entry—

Diana West writes:

Such a disappointment—but what else is new?!!

Jim C. writes:

Is Afghanistan worth American lives and taxpayer dollars? Of course not.

JC in Houston writes:

One thing I’ve never understood is how do we “win” portions of these tribal hellholes? It’s been 10 years already. I think the tide of popular opinion IS turning against this misadventure. If only the politicians would get it as well.

Paul K. writes:

It’s unfortunate that in America today you have to spout a great deal of nonsense in order to be taken seriously.

It may be that Bachmann believes what she says about Afghanistan, or it may be that she knows what she has to say in order to maintain political viability. The other night I saw the panel of establishment conservatives on Fox News scoffing at Ron Paul’s view that we have no business in Libya—that alone was enough to make him politically irrelevant in their judgment.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 22, 2011 04:38 PM | Send