Well, it all begins to make some sort of sense now. Frank Rich is writing about the horror of Fort Hood, or from his take on it the horror of the right being horrified by Muslim extremists, just shows how screwed we are on Afghanistan.
In fact, according to Rich the military’s inability to foresee this action basically means we need to get out of Afghanistan right now!! Give me a moment while I try to illuminate how on earth Mr. Rich arrives at this conclusion.
First of all, Rich ridicules the right (surprise, surprise) for it’s attacks on the Fort Hood shooter as a terrorist and then goes on to say “Whether he was an actual terrorist or an unfathomable mass murderer merely dabbling in jihadist ideas, the repeated red flags during his Army career illuminate a pattern of lapses in America’s national security. Whether those indicators were ignored because of political correctness, bureaucratic dysfunction, sheer incompetence or some hybrid thereof is still unclear, but, whichever, the system failed.”
Here Rich like most left wingers finds it convenient to avoid speaking about political correctness and who the champions of political correctness might be, other journalists (who apparently have more courage then Rich) state “The cold, hard truth is political correctness has not only run amok, it is now clearly responsible for a murder rampage on our turf at one of our top military bases,” writes the columnist David Ruthenberg at Oklahoma’s EnidNews.com. “That is terrorism, and PC thinking made it possible.” he is joined by others such as “Liberal scribe Joel Mathis at RedBlueAmerica who agrees. “As much as it pains liberals like me to admit it … political correctness probably played a role in letting Maj. Nidal Hasan continue his career in the Army,” he writes”
Of course this is far from Rich’s take on the situation “Fort Hood didn’t happen in isolation” he states “It unfolded against the backdrop of Obama’s final lap of decision-making about Afghanistan. For all the right’s jeremiads, its own brand of political correctness kept it from connecting two crucial dots: how our failing war against terrorists in Afghanistan might relate to our failure to stop a supposed terrorist attack at home. Most of those who decried the Army’s blindness to Hasan’s threat are strong proponents of sending more troops into our longest war. That they didn’t mention Afghanistan while attacking the entire American intelligence and defense apparatus in charge of that war may be the most telling revelation of this whole debate”
So basically Rich’s position is that it was the ‘rights’ particular brand of political correctness that was at fault. Well now everything is perfectly clear, but just in case it’s not Frank Rich continues to spell it out for us.
Rich contends that the right misses the boat on McChrystal’s evaluation as he primarily wanted the 40,000 additional troops to win over Muslims. “As their Fort Hood rhetoric made clear, McChrystal’s most vehement partisans don’t trust American Muslims, let alone those of the Taliban, no matter how earnestly the general may argue that they can be won over by our troops’ friendliness (or bribes). If, as the right has it, our Army cannot be trusted to recognize a Hasan in its own ranks, then how will it figure out who the “good” Muslims will be as we try to build a “stable” state (whatever “stable” means) in a country that has never had a functioning central government? If our troops can’t be protected from seemingly friendly Muslim American brethren in Killeen, Tex., what are the odds of survival for the 40,000 more troops the hawks want to deploy to Kabul and sinkholes beyond?”
So now we come to the heart of the matter. “In a week of horrific news, it was good to hear at the end of it that Obama is dissatisfied with the four Afghanistan options he has been weighing so far. The more time he deliberates, the more he is learning that he’s on a fool’s errand with no exit. After Karzai was spared a runoff last month and declared the winner of the fraud-infested August “election,”
There it is, we are supporting a failed regime who hate us in Afghanistan and need to leave immediately. Funny, but I thought that we were fighting the Taliban, not as Rich states dying for the corrupt Afghanistan government.
So now we are supposed to believe that Obama’s habit of doing nothing rather than implicating him as non-decisive really shows us what a brilliant President he is. That explains so much, now we know why he has also done nothing about jobs. And come to think of it, when Obama does try to do something that is when things go horribly wrong, witness health care, witness climate change, witness czars.
But all of these things pale in comparison to Frank Rich’s view that we abandon the mission in Afghanistan, the one that the Greatest President ever called the “Right war at the right time”. I just wonder if our enemies feel that one of their own can bring down the mighty American military, how much will Rich’s ‘cut and run’ strategy embolden the enemy? If one such attack on American soil can destroy our countries will to fight, what about 1,000 such attacks?
And what does ‘cutting and running’ say to those who have fallen? What message does it send to their families who believed that their sons and daughters were fighting to stop an enemy that needed to be stopped? How does Rich’s plan effect them? Surely the left will say that Bush left Obama such a mess that no one could have won there. But is that true, or just something that the left will say to make itself feel better? Just a reminder to Frank Rich and those like him, Bush is not the President and he has not been for quite some time. Were he still in the White House would these same pundits be praising him for doing nothing? Probably not.