uExpress : Democrats Flunk Wartime IQ Test

Democrats Flunk Wartime IQ Test

by Ted Rall | August 29, 2006

NEW YORK--The war against Afghanistan is no different, no more justifiable, and no more winnable than the war against Iraq. Both were underfunded, poorly planned and based on lies. Neither had anything to do with 9/11. And now, finally, the American public is starting to learn the truth.

George W. Bush's war against Iraq, most Americans believe, was a distraction from the war on terrorism. But so was Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden has been in Pakistan since before 9/11. Bush knew that. Nevertheless, he bombarded the military dictator of Pakistan, who financed the Taliban and Al Qaeda's training camps and hosted bin Laden, not with cluster bombs but with millions of our taxdollars. He never tried to catch Osama.

In Iraq, we won the invasion, but lost the occupation because Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld refused to deploy the "something in the order of several hundred thousand soldiers" that then-Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki told the Senate he needed to pacify the country. (Rumsfeld rewarded that accurate assessment by forcing Shinkseki to quit.)

Two years earlier, military officials had put in a similar request for the conquest of Afghanistan, a nation about the same size as Iraq that had in the past defeated both the British and the Soviets. Out of the 400,000 troops requested, the Pentagon received 8,000. Because of that decision in 2001, Afghans today are terrorized by bombings, kidnappings and murders by radical Islamists waging all-out civil war against the U.S.-backed puppet regime of Hamid Karzai. Afghanistan is every bit as much of a mess as Iraq.

In order to sell the invasion of Iraq to the American public, Bush and his cabal of ideologues stooped to all sorts of grotesque lies: WMDs for which they had no evidence, linking Saddam Hussein to 9/11, calling him "a grave and gathering threat to America and the world," claiming that we would be "welcomed as liberators" by rose-petal-flinging throngs, and that we'd liberate so much oil that the war would pay for itself. And why wouldn't they have lied? They'd used analogous propaganda to con us into bombing 18th century Afghanistan back to the 14th. The Taliban, Bush lied, had refused to turn over Osama. (Actually, they had. But the Taliban were lying too. Since bin Laden was in Pakistan, the Taliban couldn't turn him over.) We came to liberate Afghans from Sharia law and the burqa, yet both remain. Life for Afghan women today is just as harsh as before, only more dangerous.

Five years later, the canard that Bush neglected the good war against Afghanistan to start a bad one against Iraq is beginning to unravel. "Nothing that [Afghan puppet president Hamid Karzai] promised has materialized," Ahmad Fahim Hakim, deputy chairman of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, told The New York Times. "Beneath the surface, it is boiling." Afghans chant "Death to Karzai!" in the streets of Kabul. "Corruption is so widespread, the government so lethargic and the divide between rich and poor [are] gaping," reports the Times.

"A lack of electrical power and other services constrains large-scale job creation, and hundreds apply daily for visas to find work in Iran or Pakistan. Poverty and joblessness are among the among the factors pushing people into the arms of the Taliban, local leaders in the south say...Afghan and international forces find themselves fighting daily battles across five provinces of the south, while casualties are rising sharply among civilians, foreign troops and government forces alike. The scale of the insurgency has virtually wiped out the government's ability to provide services in many places."

These reports aren't new. I've been filing them since 2001. Yet Democratic leaders and media allies continue to beat the classic eye-on-the-ball talking point into the ground. Their argument is that we should pull out of Iraq so we can fight harder in Afghanistan:

· Howard Dean, passionate and so right so often, messes up here. "The President has taken his eye off the ball in Afghanistan," he said in 2003. "I supported the invasion of Afghanistan and the elimination of the Taliban. I thought that group was a clear and present danger to the United States, and I supported what the President did." [I'm still waiting for someone to explain to me exactly how the Taliban planned to attack the United States. With rocks? They did have lots of them.]

· "They have taken their eye off the real ball," John Kerry said, with characteristic clumsiness, during the 2004 presidential campaign. "They took it off in Afghanistan and shifted it to Iraq."

· "This administration," said Senator Joe Biden in 2005, "took our eye off the ball in Afghanistan and diverted our attention and resources to Iraq."

· "I think we're less safe," ex-Clinton Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said. "It happened when we took our eye off the ball in Afghanistan after having made so much out of the need to capture Osama bin Laden." [Who was, of course, in Pakistan.]

· A few months ago liberal-come-lately blogmeister Arianna Huffington wrote: "For all the disastrous consequences of the Iraq invasion...one of the most devastating has been the way it caused us to take our eye off the ball in Afghanistan. You do remember Afghanistan, don't you?"

· Ned Lamont, who exploited anger over the Iraq war to defeat Senator Joe Lieberman in the Connecticut primaries, gets it just as wrong as the others: "I think the invasion of Iraq took our eye off the ball in Afghanistan, took our eye off the ball when it comes to Osama bin Laden and, as I said before, destabilized the Middle East."

A person's stance on Afghanistan has become a national litmus test on one's political intelligence. That includes semi-antiwar Democrats like Hillary Clinton. Anyone who can't see that Afghanistan is as much of a distraction as Iraq from the war against those who attacked us on 9/11--political and religious figures in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt--is a fool. They don't want peace. They want to replace one pointless and distracting conflict with another. Republican or Democratic, such people deserve neither our respect nor our votes.

(Ted Rall is the author of the new book "Silk Road to Ruin: Is Central Asia the New Middle East?," an in-depth prose and graphic novel analysis of America's next big foreign policy challenge.)