Democratic Party Support for Afghan War Waning – A.P.

Reported on AOL News this morning the Associated Press’ (article here) writer Lara Jakes outlines the facts relative to American involvement in Afghanistan. Most Democrats do not think we can afford it or the war in Iraq. They apparently are fairly solid that they want the troops home very soon. The article outlines all the big dog Dems who oppose the wars and want Obama to move asap to get things wrapped up and get our people home. But not everyone in Congree agrees.

Here is a partial quote from the article:

I am particularly interested in what Representative McKeon of California says. He is worried that our mission will be lost without further troop increases. If we have a clearly defined mission in Afghanistan, I have never been able to discover what it is. In Iraq, it appears to be something along the line of "supporting the efforts of the Iraqi government to build democracy". You cannot nation build with aggressive troops killing the population and Americans do not believe in nation building as a general principal anyway. It does not work.

In short, the American people have been asked to underwrite two very expensive and open ended conflicts for reasons that have either been completely false (no WMD’s, Iraq was never a national security threat to the U.S., etc.) or are completely unlcear to me to this day (we entered Afghanistan because of the attack on 9/11 in NYC, the Pentagon and on an airplane flying to D.C. ?). I am completely befuddled.

After all the death and woundings we have suffered, after all the death and grief we have caused, after endless debate in Congress over the past nine years or more on attempting to discover a clear and sensible mission (or at least a clear operating plan) for Iraq and Afghanistan, we are obviously still lost. We still have no clear idea of why we are there, what we are doing and how we should pay for it all.

We spent untold billions on these wars. Why? What was the mission?

Like any other criminal event, one must always look to the money trail to find motivation….so I ask you fellow veterans, who gained from these wars? That is not clear either. Like any crime scene an investigator has to dust for prints to see who was at the scene at the time of the murder. So, I ask you , who was at the scene?

We still do not know…it seems to be an aggressive coalition of Republican lawmakers who were reluctantly but thoroughly backed by a slovenly majority of Democratic lawmakers who all agreed we needed to wage two wars in western Asia for…..exactly…..what reason? We are now more than eight years into these wars and I cannot clearly explain to myself or anyone else exactly why they occurred.

We have dead people all over the place in western Asia.

We have killed and we have been killed. We have maimed and we been maimed. We have shattered lives and we have had American lives shattered. What was the goal? What was the end plan? What were we trying to achieve? And to make matters worse we drug NATO troops into Afghanistan and we hobbled together some sort of ‘coalition of the willing? in Iraq. Why? What was all the death supposed to achieve?

I have yet to see a proper explanation as to why we foisted all this death and destruction on these two nations.

Iraq seemed to have something to do with replacing Sadaam so that Western style democracy could flourish…or something like that. Any student of western Asian culture would have seen the absurdity of that. Essentially that is like driving your pick up truck to the bakery and demanding that the baker give you an oil change. You have wrong address for what you want to accomplish.

The war in Afghanistan seemed to be some sort of retribution for the Taliban being involved in the attacks on 9/11. But have you noticed how flimsy that evidence was? Have you noticed that what we seem to be talking about is following an evidence trail that is a bit foggy to say the least? It seems to concern mostly Saudi and other Arab violent Wahabists whose base and origin is in Saudi Arabia who have accepted Taliban hospitality in Afghanistan and Pakistan to hide from America for their supposed role in those attacks.

Did I get that right? That was the general story right? Are you following me here?

What I am saying is this, if this were an American crime spree it would never see prosecution by the D.A.’s office. No detective third grade in any major city in the United States could convince himself that this crime happened the way it has been laid out for us. A detective sargeant would follow all political leads and look where the money was spent and who earned it. A detective lieutenant would want to know the very specific timelines for everything that happened and by the time the old and craggy detective captain got involved in this case he would be down the mayor’s office demanding a list of all the mayor’s friends who contributed to his last campaign and their whereabouts that night and the following day that all this happened.

There are too many loose ends here for the stories that we have been told to be credible. And all the flag waving, and the "American right or wrong" and all the nonsensical jingoist goofiness that the Bushites played to when all this happened only makes this entire tragedy more confusing.

And years later we are still not completely convinced that we have the basic facts and know all the players involved in these tragedies. And large numbers of American politicians seemed to want this support to continue. I don’t care what party they represent, why are we spending money over there?

I ask again, what is the real mission over there and who gains from all this American money being bled out of our national treasury?

Why are these young Americans dying and killing? What is the reason?

CWO3 Tom Barnes, USCG (Ret.)