No, it is not sweet and decorous (noble or right) to die for Afghanistan--or for any of these benighted territories in the Middle East that only most kind would call nations ... patriae. And what is morbidly ironic is that THEY don't want us too, either. Over and over the polls show that our military presence is almost universally reviled, always by a majority, and usually topping the 80% mark throughout the areas involved. That's true even in Saudi Arabia, our specious "ally," where the presence of US military directly caused 9/11. No, I'm not taking that back ... we shouldn't have had bases there to begin with, and we pissed-off just "one" rich Arab too many.
Okay, but what about the OIL? Well, that's why we're there; that's what our mother's sons are fighting and dying for ... black gold, Texas tea. We must to our shame admit it. The various medieval tribes who sit on that oil know it too, and they don't--to their credit-- believe any of our bullshit about bringing freedom and democracy to their homelands. For good reason they consider us an occupying force, no less so than the Russians (Afghanistan) and the British (Pakistan) before us.
Besides that--and here's the fatal misconception (one that comes uncomfortably close to the truth) that puts us in an absolutely no-win situation all over the Middle East--they believe that we're also there to kill Muslims. How can we blame them, when Bush and Palin maintain that we're over there on a mission from God (the Christian one, I assume) ... when southern politicians proclaim that the best thing to do is convert them all to Christianity ... when one of our combat generals (with a bad case of pareidolia) sees the devil's face (no kidding) in the smoke rising from a ruined village. Most telling for them, though, is seeing innocent Muslim civilians being killed by the minute. Day after day.
They can do a good enough job of that on their own. And yet we read yesterday (AP) "July is shaping up as the deadliest month of the Afghan war for US-led international [Hah!] forces, with the number killed already matching the highest full-month toll of the nearly eight-year conflict ...." In fact, says the report, the death toll for American troops--about three per day--is now equal to what it was at the height of the Iraq war. Not to mention--and they did not--the "collateral damage" in civilian casualties. Madness.
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