Democracy?

Unhappy trails to General McChrystal. His COIN method he envisioned for Afghanistan should have disqualified him from the job at the start.

When I was in kindergarten the war in Vietnam was raging. As a child I always wanted to be a soldier when I grew up. Not just any soldier. I wanted to be a Green Beret. I even had a Green Beret uniform. A good friend of the family had a nephew that was a Green Beret. He would tell me of some of his "adventures" in Vietnam (keep in mind I was a 5 year old) in the same manner he would tell the adults (gruesome now that I think about it).

I thought it would be fascinating to live amongst the people of a foreign country and learn their culture and at the same time save them from the "bad guys". Now in 2010 we have a war that is longer than Vietnam, at the same time being fought for the wrong bullshit reasons like Vietnam, and also like the previous war, with no good way out.

McChrystal thought that we could take Afghanistan and be like the Green Berets in winning. He thought we could fight our enemies there, and live there and create a "democracy" from scratch. Of course he was wrong. Don't they interview for jobs anymore? Part of McChrystal's strategy sounded like others from the past. More and more men seems like something Napoleonic or like the Chinese during the war in Korea, or Iran during its war with Iraq. If it's down to that, we might as well do the right thing and quit. Is this really democracy if it begins with destroying a country so it can be rebuilt as a "democracy"? Seems akin to the Catholics converting Filipinos or Indians. And it is not democracy. How much of a democracy can something be if they have to do as we tell them? We sure didn't seem like a democracy ourselves when the Palestinians voted for Hamas under their own free will. Or when Hugo Chavez was repeatedly elected to our government's dismay. We kill in the name of Democracy yet we install dictators every chance we get.

One thing missing from the massive manpower strategies of the past that we have now is military technology/weaponry, which has to be counted as a positive for us but we're still not winning. We may not be losing (which is debatable) but we definitely are not winning. Have we ever considered that our opponent might have their own possibly superior "special forces"? We've faced special forces before: Native American, Filipino, German, Vietcong, even Noriega's special guards, who handled themselves pretty well against our SEALs. When we were behind the Taliban against Soviet forces did we give them instruction in combatives so that down the line if we had to deal with them we might be able to analyze their strategies and methods to our advantage? It doesn't seem so.

Anyway it goes military actions that aren't for the benefit of a people being slaughtered seem to be for the greedy agendas of the corporate overlords that rule our governments.