Big jugs and justice

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Lindsay Lohan and perspective

You may have noticed that I haven't written much since the May 2 federal election here in Canada. I meant to. Really, I did. I was having more fun with the blog (and getting more hits) than I had in a long time during the campaign.

Of course, I'm a celebrated student of the Deeply Strange and the 41st Canadian federal election was Deeply Strange in ways that we'll tell our grandkids about someday. I actually wrote a few pieces about the campaign that I'm proud of, and that almost never happens. I figured that I'd come off the election with a continuing burst of wonderfulness that would carry me through at least a few months.

Instead? Meh. I find myself overwhelmed with ennui, the striking inability to give a shit about anything. I've looked at my writing, such as it is, with a total sense of apathy. Don't get me wrong, there's no shortage of interesting topics out there. Ordinarily, I long for news cycles like those we've enjoyed over the last three weeks. I just can'r bring myself to write about any of it in an entertaining or interesting way. Everything I've put up has been forced and it shows.

But the Dawn might be breaking through the Dark Night of My Soul. The sun is, as I should have suspected it would be, Lindsay Lohan. I'm pretty sure that girl is a Saint, or at least should be. Even her continuing trials before the demented, vile and repulsive California justice system are unequal to her ability to bring a little extra bounce, both to my step and in my pants. I just don't know where I, and my writing, would be without her.

Case in point: she was doing a photo shoot in Miami this weekend and, free at last from the corrupt clutches of the Los Angeles District Attorney's Office, she opened her robe to reveal her majestic mammaries, almost as if to let them luxuriate in the sweet, sweet air of Freedom. I Imagine the salty sea air caressed, soothed and liberated her tiny pink nipples just as those tiny pink nipples did my Inner Child.

Every child feels safest when sucking on a magnificent teat, knowing that's where the Milk of Life flows from and that doesn't change in adulthood. The Inner Child must be sustained, and Lindsay's unbelievable udders sustain mine.

Life and Freedom, my friends. Those are the things that matter. And sometimes Lindsay Lohan is the only person who can remind me of that.


Picture ruthlessly ripped off from What Would Tyler Durden Do

'67 borders and national interests

I've been meaning to write about the Israeli security situation for some time now. In all honesty, I've been reluctant to do so because it is an issue overrun with emotion, as opposed to a clear-headed, dispassionate analysis of national interest, including the national interests of Israel, the Arab Middle East and the United States.

I'd love to be able to take the position of "Israel first, last and always." It sure seems to make the folks who take it feel good. Unfortunately, that position ignores the way the world works and accomplishes absolutely nothing when it isn't actually counterproductive. As a matter of fact, that position serves neither the security interests of either the United States or Israel insofar as it perpetuates a status quo which might eventually lead to the destruction of Israel as we know it.

One of the things that I've noticed over the years is that far too many pro-Israeli commentators aren't pro-Israeli as much as they are Likud Party partisans. This is especially true of those affiliated with or sympathetic to the Republican Party or Conservative Party of Canada. Oftentimes those commentators are well to the right of the average Israeli, and one should be leery of anyone who considers themselves more Israeli than the Israelis, particularly when they happen to be a Baptist from Tennessee. Or a Mormon with a Fox News program who plans to spend his impending retirement as the new King of the Jews. I would suggest that if you believe that the Holy Land is actually in Missouri, you need to work a little harder than everyone else to establish credibility on the Middle East.

Any objective observer - and the majority of Israelis themselves - will agree that Israel's security is dependent on a deal with the Palestinians. Once that happens, it follows that Tel Aviv can establish diplomatic relations with the remaining Arab powers and the wider Islamic world. Israeli security also requires strong American relations with both sides.

However, for a deal to be a deal, it must be acceptable to the Palestinians and the Arab world. Anything short of that is an exercise in wishful thinking and not the basis of serious negotiations. More importantly, it places the United States in an intractable position where it has only the options of fully supporting Israel, fully supporting the Palestinians, or withdrawing from the region entirely.

Interestingly, many foreign Likud enthusiasts are also subscribers of Mark Steyn's America Alone theory, which is predicated on a demographic Islamification of Western Europe's democracies. Yet for reasons that I can't determine, they believe that Israel is somehow exempt from this demographic shift, despite its geographic position within the Muslim world. At some point, the growing Palestinian presence in both the Territories and Israel itself makes the continued existence of the Jewish state untenable. There will almost certainly come a day when they simply say, "Let's vote." If Jerusalem accepts such a vote, it ceases to be Jewish. If it ignores it, it ceases to be a democracy. Either way, Israel as it was established ceases to exist.

Because of the demographic realities, time is probably not on Israel's side and a final status deal is in its vital national interest. All of the militaristic posturing in the world is not going to change that fact. Indeed, the Arab Spring democracy movement makes an agreement more imperative rather than less because Israel may no longer have the rhetorical tool of castigating Arab tyrannies.

President Barack Obama made a speech this week about the state of the Middle East which has practically everyone going insane. The political-media-Internet outrage machine has been in hyperdrive since Thursday, all of it to the benefit of Benjamin Netanyahu and Republicans generally, but contrary to the national security interest of the United States and Israel.

Obama essentially has said out loud what everyone in the international community, including the last eight American presidents, have recognized privately: that any final peace deal is going to have to be based on the pre-1967 borders. The Occupied Territories are precisely that, occupied territories, and with that comes some legal responsibilities. This President also seems to understand that the policy tilt toward Israel since '67 has accomplished nothing and made American Middle East policy an intractable mess for decades.

Obama wasn't the first person to recognize this. President Truman's secretary of state and personal hero, General George Marshall, opposed the recognition of the Jewish state precisely because it would make relations with the Arab world unmanageable. Truman made clear that American recognition was based on moral considerations rather than strategic ones.

Nor is Obama, as some deliberately ignorant or dishonest commentators called him, "the most anti-Israel president in American history." In fact, Obama hasn't been all that tough on Netanyahu, particularly given the provocations on the Likud government's part. The Obama White House made the prime minister enter and exist through the back door only after he deliberately announced a West Bank settlement policy that Vice President Biden was in the country to lobby against. How do you suppose that the United States would respond to such a premeditated humiliation from any other country? If that happened to Dick Cheney while he was in, say, Jordan or Saudi Arabia, how do you think George W. Bush would react?

Dwight Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan and George Herbert Walker Bush were immeasurably tougher on Israel than Obama when circumstances warranted it. Eisenhower was furious that David Ben-Gurion had lied to his face in the month leading up to the Suez Crisis and threatened to cut off all aid to Israel, going so far as to say "If those fellows start something, we may have to hit 'em - and, if necessary, with everything in the bucket."

During Israel's 1982 siege of Beriut, Reagan twice described the military offensive to Menachem Begin as a "Holocaust" and said that if it continued "our entire future relationship (meaning America and Israel's) was endangered (see The Reagan Diaries, page 98.) It was perhaps the most controversial and confrontational communication between an American president and an Israeli prime minister. It was also one that Reagan was deeply proud of, highlighting it in his memoir, An American Life.

When Yitzhak Shamir's settlement policy threatened the Madrid Conference that President Bush promised in return for Arab participation in the first Gulf War, Bush cancelled Israel's loan guarantees. Less than a year later, Likud was defeated by Yitzhak Rabin and Labor.

Obama has done nothing even approaching the severity of those three actions. Compared to Eisenhower, Reagan and Bush 41, he has been absolutely timid in his Israel policy. The only difference is that Eisenhower, Reagan and Bush were Republicans. There is some precedent in the Obama-Netanyahu relationship in Begin's dealings with President Carter, although Begin was far too smart to condescend to any American president in public the way Netanyahu did on Friday.

Netanyahu's contention that the '67 borders are "indefensible," which has subsequently become a major Republican talking point, is simply silly. They were more than adequately defended in 1967, which is how Israel came to occupy the territories in the first place. There isn't an Arab military in existence right now that Israel can't defend against, especially with its nuclear deterrent. If the borders are, in fact, indefensible, the United States would probably do well to ask what all of its military aid to Israel is accomplishing in the first place.

Contrary to the popular opinion of most bloggers and media types, the United States has no explicit duty to ensure Israel's survival, nor does even Israel suggest that it does. Were that the case, there would be mutual defense treaty or an extension of the "nuclear umbrella," such as Japan or South Korea enjoys. Indeed, Israel has been steadfast in not asking for an American security guarantee. Nor has any president mentioned committing U.S troops in defense of the Jewish state. American policy, at least until 2001, has been to supply Israel with aid and support negotiations of a final settlement.

Prime Minister Netanyahu, in his Oval Office exchange with Obama, referred to "certain changes that have taken place on the ground, demographic changes that have taken place over the last 44 years." These "demographic changes" are the settlements, which were seemingly designed to make serious negotiations impossible. That is the "facts on the ground" tactic, which is why building settlements on occupied territory is illegal under international law. If an Arab army somehow captured Israeli territory and began effectively colonizing it, the United States wouldn't tolerate it, nor would they ask Jerusalem to.

Netanyahu ignored a very important historical reality on Friday in Washington, that Israel's intractable enemies are always replaced with something worse. The PLO was replaced with Hezbollah in Lebanon and supplanted by Hamas in Gaza. There is a very real possibility that Hamas could be overtaken by an al-Qaeda inspired or affiliated group in the near future. Waiting for a more agreeable negotiating partner is an exercise in folly, if only because one has never appeared before.

On the other hand, I could be wrong. Problematically, that could be even worse for Israel. That would be widespread blooming of democracy in the Arab world. There is no reason to believe that democratic Arab governments would demand anything less than their autocratic ones do now. But they would have a great deal more credibility with the international community generally, and the United States in particular.

It should be remembered that America's great democratic ally, Iraq, does not recognize Israel, nor does it denounce Hamas and Hezbollah as terrorist organizations. There is no reason to believe that any other democratic Arab government would behave any differently, but their positions might seem a tad more reasonable when unattached to names like Bashir Assad or Saddam Hussein.

Add to that the possibility that the Palestinians might have learned from their mistakes and come to understand that violent resistance isn't going to get them anywhere. A peaceful intifada might be an irresistible force in the international community and could very well isolate Israel, especially an Israel with a hardline Likud government. There's no way of knowing how even Israeli public opinion would react to demonstrations like the ones in Tahrir square, but it's virtually certain that the American consensus in support of Israel would fracture.

Another danger is the continuing financial disintegration of the U.S government. Americans are traditionally an isolationist people and the if the current fiscal crisis gets much worse, there is likely to be a fundamental review of U.S foreign policy and a return to the practices advocated by the Founding Fathers. It is entirely possible that the United States will not be a guarantor of Middle Eastern security a generation from now, and no other world power would be as favourable to Israeli interests. In any event, it's hard to justify American foreign policy continuing to be hobbled by the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, especially with South Asia emerging as a flashpoint.

The fact is that the '67 borders are the only serious basis for negotiation, both politically and as a matter of international law. No, they almost certainly won't be the borders in any final agreement, but there isn't any other realistic starting point.

What Netanyahu and his supporters don't seem to understand is that the choice isn't necessarily between a political settlement and war. It could be a choice between a political settlement and simple demographics accomplishing what war couldn't. The status quo, particularly when you factor in the possibility of democracy breaking out in the Middle East, doesn't favor Israel in the long term.

Destroying the Senate to reform it

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"That's it, fight amongst yourselves" The Devil and Alf Apps

For the last two years or more, I've been predicting the ultimate death and burial of the Liberal Party of Canada. If you read closely enough through my many essays on the topic, you'll note that I never said that it would be a single bad election that would do them in. Rather, they would be finished off by everything that happened afterward. I also thought that the LPC's decline and final fall would occur over the course of a decade or more. The fact that it's happening so quickly is the only surprising thing about recent events.

Amazingly enough, no one in the blogosphere, the Goddamn Liberal Media or the party itself has yet bothered to trace back the chain events that has brought ruination to the most successful party in the history of democracy. And it all began with one of the Grits' winningest prime ministers, Jean Chretien.

In the early fall of 2000, it had become clear that Chretien's finance minister, Paul Martin, was organizing to wrest the leadership, and therefore the government, away from Chretien. Chretien used an idiotic challenge to call an election by the dim-witted Stockwell Day to isolate and neutralize Martin. If he won a third majority in the process, all the better.

Of course, it only worked for a short time. By the summer of 2003, it had become clear that the writing was on the wall and Chretien's days were numbered. The pressure within the party for change became unbearable and Martin was ascendant. As one of his last acts, Chretien passed a debilitating campaign finance reform bill into law that banned the lifeblood of the Liberal Party, corporate donations, replacing it with a per-vote government subsidy. It was as if  le petit gars de Shawinigan were denied the leadership, he would ensure that the leadership wasn't worth having.

Then came the ticking time bomb that Chretien left behind. The Sponsorship Scandal that ran throughout the Chretien years crippled Martin's government just as it had begun. His entire tenure was dedicated to dealing with Chretien's mess, not unlike Gerald Ford's presidency was consumed by te continuing fallout from Watergate and the Nixon pardon. Adscam first reduced the Liberals to a minority, then defeated them outright.

And that's where Alf Apps enters this sad and depraved tale. When it became clear that Paul Martin wasn't long for the world, Apps was part of a sad, depraved and incompetent troika that was looking for a saviour. Their quest took them to Harvard, where they convinced Michael Ignatieff that only he could save Canada's Natural Governing Party, and therefore Canada itself. And yes, Liberals really do think like that. Their hubris has always been endlessly entertaining to watch.

Iggy, already convinced of his Christ-like personage, returned to Toronto from his 34-year odyssey abroad. Winning his seat in Etobicoke-Lakeshore was easy enough and considered a mere formality. He would establish himself as Jesus Trudeau shortly after the final humiliation of Paul Martin.

Then something unexpected happened. Ignatieff lost the 2006 leadership campaign to the longest of long shots, Stephane Dion. What happened next is a story almost as old as the Liberal Party itself.

I heard things, I saw things. And it wasn’t pretty. I was in the office of Bill Graham, interim Opposition leader when Stephane Dion beat Michael Ignatieff for the leadership in 2006. The grassroots of the party rejected Ignatieff at the Montreal convention.

It was a stunning upset, and the start of nasty backroom games to undermine Dion, led by the gang that went to Harvard to convince Ignatieff to return to Canada to lead the party in the first place.

Ignatieff was their messiah. To others, he was an English version of Dion.

For two years, Dion’s leadership was under constant threat. He was pressured to name Ignatieff as deputy leader, a fatal mistake he was warned to avoid — but didn’t — which left the rival for his job gunning for him from the office next door and partisan soldiers lurking in the open reporting every move back to the Toronto generals.

I watched with fascination the bullying, the backstabbing, the threats and the neverending plotting.

Most disturbing were the bloated egos, the power-hungry who put themselves before their party. It was already on life support after the Chretien-Martin feud, but these zealots wanted Dion gone even if it meant further destruction of an institution already in a death spiral.

Dion was done away with during the coalition crisis that followed the 2008 election and Ignatieff was installed in the leadership without a vote. It was seen across the country as a stunning victory for both Iggy and Apps, who was named Liberal Party president.

Except it wasn't. Ignatieff and Apps never appeared to understand the party they now headed. Alf, in particular, had spent the last three decades backing losers in the leadership wars. And Ignatieff had spent so long outside the country that it was miracle he could still find it on a map, let alone properly navigate the treacherous waters of the Liberal Party.

"The bullying, the backstabbing, the threats and the neverending plotting" never ended under Iggy. Forces in caucus loyal to Bob Rae constantly questioned Ignatieff's continuation of the Dion strategy of constantly supporting Harper to avoid an election. I believed that Iggy could very well have formed a minority government had he defeated the 2009 Tory budget. When he blinked, I was certain that the Grits had another genetic loser in charge.

Armageddon didn't come as quickly as most folks think it did. As I demonstrated at the beginning of this missive, it began back in 2000 with Chretien's Samson Option. Since then, they've lost over half of their seats and their geographic and electoral bases are evaporating. The Conservatives first won Ontario, them Toronto itself. Quebec is now NDP country and will likely stay that way for some time.

This isn't, as some commentators and wishful thinkers like to believe, like the fracturing of the Progressive Conservative Party from 1988-93. The old Tory vote was intact, it was just divided three ways. But their national support was still there waiting when the factions reunified under the Conservative banner in 2003.

More importantly, the Progressive Conservative Party rump neer went to war with itself. What's happening now in the LPC more closely resembles the last days of the Canadian Alliance under Stockwell Day's disastrous leadership.

The PC's under Jean Charest and Joe Clark had no choice but to rebuild from the ground up. They were so thoroughly discredited in '93 that the party structure itself was completely rebuilt. Specifically, there was no one like Alf Apps lingering among the ruins.

The Ignatieff faction - unelected and unaccountable to anyone, much like Iggy himself - is still calling the shots. And they're not letting trivialities like the the party Constitution get in their way. First, they established criteria for an interim leader, usually the domain of the elected parliamentary caucus, that seems designed to specifically exclude Bob Rae from consideration. Now they're violating their own Constitution in delaying a leadership convention until late next year. Under the LPC's rules, they are supposed to hold one within five months.

As you might expect, the caucus, the rank and file membership and every Liberal blogger in the country is being driven bouncing-off-the-walls nuts by Alf's machinations, and they're all doing so in a very public way. The civil war that began under Trudeau and John Turner and continued through Ignatieff and Rae, is exploding, even in the absence of any leadership at all. Virtually everyone is calling for the head of Alf Apps, but there isn't anyone capable of delivering it.

Oh, the media is covering this, to be sure. But this is hardly the kind of coverage the party wants or needs. I've always said that the Liberal Party only exists because they like winning elections more than they hate one another, but that was a pretty lonely thing to say before this month. Now the national media and the parliamentary press gallery is starting to echo my thoughts.

Would you give people like this your hard-earned money? Would you place your name as a candidate for such a motley crew? Would you even want to assume the leadership of  a party like that, knowing that you'll spend more time watching your back than looking forward? If Apps gets his way, it'll be 18 months before the party can even begin to redefine itself. And if those people should have learned anything from the Ignatieff leadership debacle, it's that if you aren't willing to define yourself, someone else will be more than happy to.

Under these circumstances, it's only a matter of time before we start seeing Liberal floor-crossings to both the Conservatives and the NDP. Once that starts happening, there will be nothing left to rebuild. It'll all be over.

But I'll bet you anything that Alf Apps will still be there.

The lobbyists won't stop whining

By listening to them since the Canadian election writ was dropped at the end of March, you would think that zillionaire lobbyist assholes are the most put-upon people in all of Christendom. They want you to know that they're wounded and bleeding to the point that even their giant piles of money can't help them sleep at night. It's an almost spiritual ache that they feel, and they won't be satisfied until you're annoyed into feeling it too.

This is because Prime Minister Stephen Harper - a guy not famous for doing things I approve of - placed a number of restrictions on the political activities of registered lobbyists in the federal Accountability Act.

As much as I detest the Liberal-lite governance of the Harper Conservatives and their inability to hold on to a dollar, I mightily approve of his lobbying reforms. If I were to make any complaint about them at all, it would be that they don't go far enough. The role of lobbyists in government and politics is one of the single greatest drivers of the Great American Death Spiral and I would prefer to avoid that in my country, if at all possible.

In fairness, I should be more specific. It isn't lobbyists generally that I take issue with. It's folks who go from either government or political campaigns into lobbying. If it were up to me, that would be ended immediately and forever. I would pass - and strictly enforce - a law that disallowed entirely a former Member of Parliament, their staffs - both governmental and political - and anyone from a political campaign or the civil service from registering as a lobbyist for at least twenty years.

Registered lobbyists would continue to have their public political activities curtailed, meaning that they couldn't contribute to or work for political campaigns or transition teams, even as volunteers (which I would define to be an illegal corporate contribution in kind), and the law would probably be extended to include their spouses. They would only be allowed to serve in government if they managed to get themselves elected. If a lobbyist de-registers to engage in political activity of any kind, they would be prohibited from re-registering for twenty years.

Violations would be punished with actual jail terms, let's say exactly the same ones that the Tories are proposing for drug offenders or white collar criminals in their omnibus crime bill..

As a general rule, I oppose and all campaign finance laws for the simple reason that the bad acts that they are designed to prevent, such as bribery and influence peddling, are already illegal under the criminal law. What campaign finance proponents will tell you is that these extra laws are supposed to preclude the appearance of impropriety.

All right, then. Since I'm not probably not going to live to see the entirely sensible repeal of campaign finance laws, then it's entirely appropriate to extend "the protection of appearances" to lobbying. If anything, the potential of lobbying abuse is more insidious than is the act of giving money to a politician because lobbying serves no other purpose than to shape the way our laws are enacted and our tax dollars are spent.

During the campaign, Liberal and Conservative lobbyists alike bitched endlessly about what they believed to the unconstitutional curtailment of their political speech. And you know what? My heart bleeds for them. It really does.

Having said that, there are any number of legal curtailments in political speech these days. Ask anyone in the military or the civil service. Corporations and unions can no longer contribute to campaigns.You and I can't spend our own money to promote or oppose a candidate during an election campaign. Political speech in this country is limited all the time and the courts have found it constitutional, making my philosophical objections to those limits quaint and immaterial. The arguments cut both ways.

Amazingly enough, you don't see politically connected lobbyists frequently complain about the speech restrictions placed on any other Canadian, just themselves. This is because, as is not the case for everybody else, partisan activity furthers their careers, maximizes their profits and serves the interests of their past, present and future clients.

Again, I'm not speaking about lobbying in and of itself. I'm specifically referring to the revolving door between politics, government and lobbying. Yes, you absolutely have the right to seek redress from the government. However, you do not necessarily have the right to trade on access. There are any number of other careers for former political hacks to pursue, particularly if they're as bright as they say they are. There is no shortage of honourable career lawyers that can take up the work that washed-up politicians, campaign slugs and political appointees to the bureaucracy do now. God knows, they'd almost certainly be cheaper.

There is no reason for clients to hire politically connected lobbyists other than their political connections. Period. The real scandal isn't what's alleged in the Rahim Jaffer and Bruce Carson affairs, but what is actually considered "business as usual." More importantly, the only reason the Jaffer and Carson stories got any media juice at all was that both abounded with the tits and asses of women of loose virtue, not because of the conflicts related to lobbying.

While there is a right to lobby, there is no specific right to be a lobbyist. And no one is telling them that they cannot engage in political activity, as is true of the military and civil service. They're just being told that they can't do both. Like everyone else, they're free to choose.

I've spent the last five years bitching about Stephen Harper in the most forceful language imaginable, going so far as to even suggest that he be deported to Chad. But this is one thing that I can congratulate him on. It's far from perfect, but it's a hell of a good start and far preferable to way things in Ottawa used to work.

The fact that lobbyists won't stop whining about the law means that the law is actually accomplishing something.

"It's all the same. Only the names have changed" : The Great Game anew

In the week after the much-deserved execution of Osama bin Laden, I wrote a post about the state of Pakistani-American relations that upset a good number of you. My most recent ex-girlfriend went so far as to categorize my views as "appeasement."

What I'd like to point out is that my little essay was largely drawn from the modern history of the region, as opposed to the criticism of it, which wasn't.

Look, I get that everyone's all emo about possible the possible complicity of the ISI in hiding bin Laden, but I find that amusing from a country that can't find D.B Cooper within its own borders after nearly forty years of trying. Having said that, foreign policy isn't usually a tool of emo release. It's a cold study and implementation of national interest. And if you want a case of national interest, ask yourself this: "How does the United States rotate men and material into the Afghanistan without the cooperation of Pakistan?"

It's also important to remember that Pakistan's cooperation with the alleged War on Terror existed only out of fear of an American invasion, if former President Pervez Musharraf's memoir is to be believed. Musharraf went so far as to actually war-game how a military confrontation with the United States would play out before pledging his fealty. After the misadventure in Iraq, one can safely say that it'll be a good long time before the U.S invades anyone without a great deal of thought beforehand.

However, there's a great difference between avoiding a ruinous war and pursuing your national interest. Pakistan's strategic interest vis-a-vis Afghanistan is pretty simple to figure out. They want anything other than massive Indian influence in Kabul. Anything - including an actual al-Qaeda government - is preferable to that.

That might sound like a crazy thing to say until you take a closer look at the recent history of American foreign policy. The United States went to any number of seemingly insane lengths to contain Soviet influence in regions as far flung as Central America, sub-Saharan Africa and, yes, even Afghanistan itself. The Kennedy administration risked ending the world over a couple of dozen Soviet intermediate ballistic missiles in Cuba, despite the fact that the United States had stationed at least that many on the Soviet border with Turkey.

To take the current argument of the Republican caucus, Fox News and every shithead blogger known to man seriously is to suggest that America had a vital national interest in furthering a civil war in, say, Angola, but Pakistan doesn't in Afghanistan. While I guess that you can suggest such things, I should warn you that you'd look like a blathering moron doing so.

Oh, and guess what happened yesterday in Kabul?

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has pledged a further $500m to Afghanistan over the next six years.

Mr Singh made the announcement in Kabul. The money is in addition to $1.5bn already promised.

The Indian prime minister also said he strongly backs the Afghan government's efforts to reconcile with the Taliban.

His visit comes just over a week after al-Qaeda chief Osama Bin Laden was killed by US commandos in the Pakistani town of Abbottabad.

India and Afghanistan share concerns over militant networks in Pakistan.

Correspondents say India's promise of more money is likely to raise Pakistani fears about Delhi's influence in Afghanistan. India is the biggest regional donor to the country.

"India's [total] development assistance commitment is approximately $1.5bn, but there are still gaps," Mr Singh told a joint press conference with President Hamid Karzai.

"We now have a better idea of where we can do more... We have made a fresh commitment of $500m over the next few years."

The money will be spent on agriculture, schools and roads. India is already building the new parliament in Kabul - at a cost of $19m

A new parliament building for free? Fancy! I bet that it comes without strings attached, too.

Indian diplomats say that any rapid reduction of the US presence in Afghanistan would cause them concern, because the country could become dominated by a Taliban-influenced government friendly towards its arch-rival Pakistan.

Yeah, go figure.

Delhi is playing an interesting game here. They really don't want to see a "rapid reduction of the US presence in Afghanistan," but they aren't willing to do what it takes to reach a lasting settlement with Pakistan that would make Afghanistan irrelevant to everybody.

The late Richard Holbrooke noted this when he was named Special Ambassador to Afghanistan-Pakistan in early 2009.

According to several sources, Holbrooke thought that India and Iran, which played essential roles in the regional conflict, should also be part of his portfolio. (Holbrooke denies this.) But Iran was taken away by the White House, which appointed Dennis Ross to be the special adviser on the nuclear issue and other matters, and India was taken away by the Indians, who refused to be included in an office set up for fragile states beset with Islamist insurgencies. Obama had mentioned the conflict in Kashmir twice in the weeks after the election, and the government in New Delhi “went berserk,” according to someone familiar with the situation. Holbrooke later turned the setback into a quip: he was going to get through his new job without ever uttering the “K-word.”

As I've repeated stated in this space, absent the Kashmir conflict, Indo-Pakistani tensions almost evaporate. If you resolve Kashmir as a geostrategic issue, Afghanistan becomes irrelevant in so far as neither major power would much care who governs in Kabul.

Having said that, it's at least nice to know that American foreign policy in the region is being determined by New Delhi Washington is being at the waist even more deeply than London did in the last days of colonial rule, and the results are likely to be just as disastrous.

But let's get back to the BBC report, shall we? It's fascinating.

The two leaders held discussions on Thursday about regional stability, counter-terrorism and the India-Afghanistan strategic partnership, built on what correspondents say is largely a shared mistrust of Pakistan.

The BBC's Quentin Sommerville says President Karzai's desire for talks with the Taliban has not in the past sat easy with India.

But standing by President Karzai, Manmohan Singh said he now strongly supported those discussions.

"We wish to see a peaceful, stable, democratic, pluralistic Afghanistan. We strongly support Afghan people's quest at peace and reconciliation," Mr Singh said.

"India supports firmly the unity, integrity and prosperity of Afghanistan. 

Analysts say that India may now accept that the Taliban has to be part of any political resolution to the war in Afghanistan. But it also dearly does not want its arch-rival Pakistan leading any reconciliation process, our correspondent adds.

There's only one problem with Prime Minister Singh's statement: He's lying out his ass.

A "peaceful, stable, democratic, pluralistic Afghanistan" would almost certainly be dominated by the plurality Pashtuns, which are allied with Pakistan and most sympathetic to the Taliban. Even if it wasn't, the laughable border Afghan-Pakistani border, most commonly known as the Durand Line makes it impossible. For all intents and purposes, there is no border to police.

Anyone who knows anything about anything has been driven to distraction about the constant complaints from the United States and various asshole bloggers about "Pakistan's unwillingness to control the border," which is hilarious coming as it does from the United States, resplendent as it is with tales of safety and all-around wonderfullness from its own southern border.

The fact is that no one - not the pre-colonial Indian, Persian, British or Soviet Empires were able to control that territory - but Islamabad is magically expected to, without a tenth of the resources and while being consumed by paranoia about its eastern and southern borders. The United States can't do it, and they've had a decade of uncontested air superiority with which to try.

If Manmohan Singh was all that interested in  democratic pluralism, he'd give it a shot in Kashmir. Seeing as he's specifically prohibited American policymakers from even muttering about that under their fucking breath - despite getting a cherry nuclear deal that even Israel doesn't have the stones to ask for - there's little likelihood of that happening anytime soon.

No, my friends. What we're seeing here is the beginnings of a new Great Game in Afghanistan. India will dump huge amounts of money - and eventually weaponry - into a policy of strategic encirclement with the brutishly corrupt Karzai regime, and Pakistani-supported Pashtuns will respond with mindless violence. And the United States will be forever stuck in the middle, trapped by its own cowardice and stupidity.

As much as I despise and fear quoting Bon fucking Jovi in regards to anyting relating to foreign policy "It's all the same, only the names have changed." And American troops are going to be the pawns in the new Great Game.

Have fun and don't say that I didn't warn you.



Thanks to an anonymous commenter for the BBC link.

Jennifer Aniston reconsidered

Everything about Brad Pitt indicates that he's an idiot. The dude can barely complete an unscripted sentence without muttering like Harrison Ford and he's frankly just to pretty to be very smart. But that shouldn't be taken to mean that he's not a man that can't learn from his mistakes and take decisive action to rectify them. He clearly is.

For example, he was married to Jennifer Aniston once upon a time. Then he figured out that she's a needy pain in the ass and not great in the boudoir. So he dumped her on her perky little ass and hooked up with Angelina Jolie, who is naturally superior to Jen in every way. There's only one reason that any rational man would stay with a woman that's trying to build the U.N General Assembly in the living room: because she's the greatest fuck in the world.

I too have a complicated relationship with Ms. Aniston. Simply put, I can't figure out why she has a career. I loathed Friends with every fiber of my being and Courtney Cox is hotter than Jennifer by several degrees of magnitude. Her films open about as well as a poorly produced snuff movie, but the studios keep giving her millions of dollars to make new ones. She has a cute face, a hot little body and an enormous bank account, but she can't keep a man for longer than a few months. That woman defies the laws on common sense. By almost any metric, she should have been exiled from Hollywood to a South Pacific colony for uptight spinster dykes years ago, yet she remains a huge star.

But every once in a while, she'll don some smouldering hot lingere and deepthroat fruit, as she does in the trailer from her upcomining film that no one will see, Horrible Bosses, and I fall in love all over again. I know that I'll be miserably frustrated sexually by the lack of ass play, but I just can't resist the way she coos at my beautifully circumsized tool.

Maybe it's just me. I'm a complicated man and chicks seem to dig it. They think it makes me mysterious, rather than just a misanthropist and an asshole.



Link and trailer ruthlessly stolen from the Superficial

Who is Kat Dennings and why am I devoting my life to her?

How Do I love thee, Kat? Let me count the
ways. Two! That was wasy!

I had just turned eleven when John Hinkley Junior shot President Reagan in front of the Washington Hilton. John Lennon had been killed a few months earlier, so I grasped the concept of someone firing a few bullets into the trunk of someone I liked, but the events surrounding the attempted assassination confused me as the days passed and more information became public.

We very quickly learned that Hinckley wanted to bag a commander-in-chief so as to impress actress Jodie Foster, who was then a student at Yale University. As it happens, Hinckley had been communicating his sadly unrequited love to Foster for several months and generally creeping her the fuck out.

And that's where my confusion began. Sure, I liked Taxi Driver as much as the next guy, and I had already known love and loss more than you would expect of someone of my youth. Plus, I was already in sexual hyperdrive. My eye was already drawn to women of every description and the boiling in my balls that haunts me even today had been a constant concern for several years. By the time of the Reagan shooting, my right hand was approximately twice the size of my left and my grip was already so strong that I could snap a 2X4 between my fingers. At eleven years old I was as well versed in l'amour and uncontrollable sexual desire as any three men four times my senior and was already doing push-ups with my tongue. What can I tell you? It's a gift.

But Jodie Foster? I guess she's cute in a mousy kind of way, but hardly worthy of assassinating a sitting president over. There had only been forty of them at that point, and not a romantic resource to be wasted lightly. Had Hinckley taken at a shot at Reagan over, say, Raquel Welch, I would have understood him completely. That he did for Miss Foster - who no man worth his sexual salt would shoot even a former White House chief of staff over - convinced me beyond any doubt that he was profoundly sick and determined to give sexually frustrated losers everywhere a bad name. The state was right to put him away. It simply couldn't have happened any other way.

I hadn't heard of Kat Dennings until a few months ago, when a series of her naked pictures leaken online. Because the concept of a loving god is laughable to anyone with even a modicum of common sense, her legal team harassed, badgered and cajoled any website that published the pictures into complete submission. I saved copies of them and everything, but they're very difficult to find online. Her shysters are nothing if not thorough. You know who else was thorough? Hitler. I'm not saying that you necessarily have to go to law school to be a genocidal fuerher, just that it doesn't hurt.

I still haven't seen a movie that she's been in or even heard her voice, but I'm increasingly convinced that Kat is perfect in all the ways that truly matter. Lindsay Lohan will always have a special place in my soul - and God knows that I love any woman who manages to look and sound forty by the time she's 24 - but Kat Dennings might just be better.

There's just something about a smoky brunette with sultry eyes, pouting lips and gigantic fucking titties that touches me in a profoundly spiritual way. While I've always walked through life with disturbingly large and swollen genitals, Kat Dennings makes them feel as though they have a renewed purpose. The constant aching between my legs is distracting, to be sure, but just knowing that it's caused by her makes me feel alive in ways that had eluded me of late. Constantly writing about Canadian politics for five weeks has a way of deadening a man's soul, as Paul Wells can probably tell you.

Verily, those giant knockers can change a man in ways that he probably didn't possible. I'd be deeply and profoundly disturbed by the emotions running through me if I didn't already feel this way 37 different times a day for over four decades. But these are professional tricks, performed by a professional and not intended for home use.

The moral of this little essay is that John Hinckley needs around-the-clock professional supervision because his poor taste in women make him unpredictable to himself and others around him.

And yes, I'm devoting my life to Kat Dennings and her majestic mammaries. But I'm not so deeply smitten that I would pay nearly twenty bucks to see her in Thor, which looks like the ultimate lemonparty.

In praise of Ruth Ellen Brosseau

You know how politicians like to rhapsodize about the "common man" and how democracy only works when the people govern themselves? Liberals and conservatives alike are cheered whenever they mouth platitudes like that.

Well, it just so happens that they're magnificently, hypocritically full of shit. Most of those assholes wouldn't know the truth if it blackjacked them in an alley, sodomized them roughly and took their fucking wallets before leaving them in a pool of their own goddamn blood.

How do I know this? Well, I saw it firsthand in the treatment NDP MP Ruth Ellen Brosseau received from Liberals, Conservatives and the ghoulishly stupid media during the last couple of weeks of the last election campaign. On the matter of Ms. Brousseau, all three displayed the charm, grace and intellectual consistency of Robert Mugabe.

In any given federal campaign, there are only ever maybe a few dozen races that are truly competive. The parties, however, want to show us all how important and "national" they are by running candidates everywhere. Most of them are what are commonly called "ballot placeholders" or sacrifical lambs. No one really expects them to win, so nobody thinks of their qualifications to govern.

On the other hand, it doesn't really matter if you're qualified these days, not unless you're a party leader (and only occasionally then), a "star candidate", or someone destined for Cabinet. Even if you win, you're only going to be a backbencher. And everybody knows what they are. Pierre Trudeau, prime minister of this good land for sixteen years, referred to backbenchers as "nobodies." They vote how the party leadership wants them to, and if they don't, they very quickly find themselves thrown out of the party. Trudeau began the concentration of power in the Prime Minister's Office, and its only gotten worse over the last forty years.

That being the case, who really gives a shit if Ruth Ellen Brosseau is a bartender that lived outside the province she was elected to represent, doesn't speak the language, had never set foot in her riding and jetted to Vegas in the middle of the campaign? What possible difference does it make? She's just going to wind up doing whatever Jack Layton tells her to anyway. Christ, Stephen Harper could have a backbench loaded with unrepentent child molestors and not only would they still vote for his backward and silly crime omnibus bill, they'd do it with a non-ironic smile. Is a friggin' astronaut any more or less qualified to do what some well-heeled special interest asshole tells them to do than a bartender?

Look, if you shot your average politico or journalist full of sodium pentathol, they'd tell you that to be a player in democracy you need to either be an asshole lawyer, a union thug, a criminal banker or scumbag lobbyist. Anyone else who applies is ruthlessly mocked and easily marginalized. Sometimes an academic like Stephane Dion or Michael Ignatieff will accidently win a position of influence and they inevitably prove the politicos and journalists right.

But if you're Ruth Ellen, you had better watch the fuck out, particularly if you win. The lobbyists and lawyers, so eloquent about the "little guy" during campaign season, will go out of their way to ridicule you. All you've got to do is read what the professionals have been saying about her in the press and on their vanity blogs for the last couple of weeks. Sure, they'll pat you on the head and lie right to your face, but they know what time it really is. They know who's pouring the drinks and who's drinking them. And to them, Ms. Brosseau is always going to be on the wrong side of the bar.

But she's a pretty cute girl who I'm willing to bet has a tight little body, which is more than I can say about the 99.9% of Parliament that isn't Rona Ambrose.

And in the great sham that our democracy has become, that's more than enough for me.

After bin Laden, part two: "There goes the neighborhood"

If there's one thing that cable news excels at, it's whipping up a frenzy of populist stupidity without taking the time to think through the consequences of what it proposes. Moreover, there's never a shortage of politicians out there willing to give a helping hand. That's bad enough when the topic is something like deficit reduction, but it can be deadly when we're talking about foreign policy, as we have been all week.

I've been keeping a pretty close eye on the cable networks - primarily Fox News and Sun News Network here in Canada - since last Sunday, night when it announced that bin Laden had been taken out in Pakistan. I had a pretty good idea what was coming and I knew that no good could come of it.

If you've paid any attention at all to the networks, you know that their personalities have a much more profound relationship with their goddamn blow dryers than they do with international affairs. As a matter of fact, they're only slightly more informed about the topic than their audience is, and that's only because the audience doesn't have the benefit of a research staff and a teleprompter. As for the political types, they lie. A lot.

When I first saw Geraldo, of all people, first report the rumors that bin Laden had been located and killed in Abbottabad, I found myself thinking "wait for it, wait for it ...."

I didn't have to wait long. First thing Monday morning, every half hour started with the same question from some blond-headed anchorbot: "Should we cut off aid to Pakistan?"

"Great," I thought. "The stupidity is starting to take over, and it's eventually going to bite us directly on the fleshiest part of already ample asses." Stupidity, especially in foreign policy, is a lot like a malignant cancer. If it isn't aggressively countered early, it destroys the systems that keep us fully functional. As the body retards itself, an agonizing death becomes all but inevitable. I'm terrified that this is what's starting to happen with South Asian policy.

One of the thoughts that immediately gripped me upon hearing about the hit on Osama is that it pretty much means the end of the war in Afghanistan. I've supported getting out for since December of 2009, but only because it had by then become crystal clear that the United States and NATO had never taken Afghanistan seriously and never would.

In my opinion, that's a terrible mistake and one that we might live to forget, but the only thing worse than abandoning a war is fighting it by half-measures. And anything less than a full counterinsurgency strategy, complete with approximately 300,000 - 500,000 troops on the ground, is a half measure. If we're going to keep throwing our kids into the meat-grinder of Afghanistan, we had damn well better accomplish something for the trouble.

That's never going to happen, and I can't continue to ask kids in their late teens and early twenties to get dead by the thousands just so that we can lose a little more slowly than we otherwise would. The so-called "light footprint" strategy means that we have to overly rely on bombing, which is contrary to the purpose of counterinsurgency and primarily serves to create even more insurgents. For domestic political reasons, we're never going to have a larger force there than we do now, and that's pretty clearly not enough.

Political support for the war has collapsed over the last three years. And that was with bin Laden alive. Now that he's not, most folks will see 9/11 as having been avenged and the remaining popular support for the Afghan mission will evaporate completely. I'm guessing that it'll take less than six months for it to drop below 20% in the United States.

The death of Osama bin Laden may have the perverse effect of ensuring our ultimate failure in Afghanistan, which means that, yeah, he won. He might not be around for the trophy ceremony, but he achieved his strategic goal of getting the United States bogged down and humiliated in Central and South Asia. Bin Laden saw the Soviet Union beaten and bankrupted in Afghanistan and, although he won't survive to see it, he knew that the United States was headed directly in the same direction.

Having said that, we'll be able to ignore Afghanistan once again, letting it spiral into chaos until it again explodes in our face. That's not true of Pakistan and it never will be. It's simply too dangerous. South Asia makes the Koreas look like the more boring parts of Northern Europe. India and Pakistan have already fought four wars and nearly fought three more since both countries successfully tested nuclear weapons in the late 90s. Unless some sort of strategic accommodation is reached, there will be a full scale nuclear war, sooner rather than later.

With very few exceptions, American foreign policy over the last six decades been conducted on the mistaken premise that everyone shares the same interests with the United States. That's definitely not true in Pakistan and never was. Americans were concerned first about Soviet expansionism, then global terrorism. Pakistan's first, last and only concern is India.

And they aren't wrong, necessarily. Imagine if the Soviet Union was ten times as powerful as the U.S, but was situated where Mexico is and had cut America in half as recently as forty years ago. Do you think that Washington wouldn't be every bit as paranoid as Islamabad is? Now imagine that America's closest and most powerful ally had deepened relations with Moscow and made the unprecedented move of exempting it from the nuclear non-proliferation rules that bind everyone else. Looked at that way, Pakistan's conduct makes infinite sense.

Afghanistan matters to Pakistan only because it provides Islamabad "strategic depth" in the event of an overwhelming Indian invasion. Because the native terror groups in Afghanistan and Pakistan (as opposed to the Arab imports) are primarily Pashtun and tribally allied with the Pakistanis, they aren't Islamabad's primary strategic concern. Their military has been, just as it always was, mostly deployed to the east and south, to deter New Delhi. As long as they face an existential threat with severely limited resources, they have no interest in fighting America's wars - which happen to be against what Pakistan considers strategic assets - for them.

Islamabad has also been down this road with America in Afghanistan before. During the Carter and Reagan administrations, Pakistan was the conduit for American, Saudi and Chinese aid to the anti-Soviet mujaheddin. This was of great benefit to the Pakistanis, in that the aid allowed them to build influence with various groups in Afghanistan and allowed them to build training camps that could later be used in their own anti-Indian campaign in Kashmir. An unknown amount of the Afghan aid (I've seen accounts that put it at as much of half) was diverted to Islamabad's nuclear program.

Well, after the Soviets bugged out, the U.S abandoned Pakistan and imposed nuclear-related sanctions on it. Worse, the Clinton and second Bush administrations moved to strengthen ties with Pakistan's mortal enemy, India, which had been a Soviet ally during the Cold War. From this, Islamabad concluded that Washington cannot be trusted. It shouldn't surprise anyone that events in South Asia truly began to spiral out of control; with the jihad in Kashmir, the nuclear tests, Indo-Pakistani brinksmanship and the ISI's sponsorship of the Taliban, between 1989 and 9/11.

After September 11, Pervez Musharaff rightly concluded that he couldn't overtly obstruct the United States without running the very real risk of being wiped out. But he did know that he could hedge his bets so that Pakistan's options would be preserved when America inevitably betrayed Pakistan again. As we're seeing now, he wasn't entirely wrong.

To understand the situation, you need to understand the political dynamics in Pakistan. Because the threat from India is so grave, the military and ISI don't answer to the civilian government and the population likes it that way. There have also been eight military coups in Pakistan's sixty-five year history, none of which were broadly protested by the people. And if my analogy of the Soviets being on the U.S border was a reality, the same would probably be true of America.

Long story short, Osama bin Laden was able to hide in the suburbs of the Pakistani capital because finding him was far down on the list of Pakistan's national priorities.

The government of Asif Ali Zadari, which succeeded Musharraf's military dictatorship in 2008, is wholly dependent on American aid, but it only has so much room to maneuver with the army and ISI. if Zadari oversteps those bounds in ways that the military thinks compromises Pakistani security, they'll depose him. And if the United States withdraws from the region, abandons Pakistan again, or even tilts further to India, they'll depose him.

Either way, the situation returns to what it was between the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan and 9/11. If that happens, the United States will have spent a trillion dollars and thousands of lives for essentially nothing. Within months you'll see exactly the same dominoes lined up exactly the same way, except that this time you won't see Arab terror groups like al-Qaeda threatening American interests, it'll be South Asian groups, trained and armed by the ISI, which will be more dangerous by several degrees of magnitude. And that ignores entirely the possibility that a threatened Iran could seek to expand its influence to their east, just as it has to the west.

Had the United States not abandoned the region after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan 9/11 probably wouldn't have happened. The change in policy set into motion that made the rise of al-Qaeda and the attacks on New York, Washington and Shanksville all but inevitable. And now congressional idiots and cable news ghouls want to do exactly the same thing again.

Put another way, the United States needs Pakistani stability a lot more than Pakistan needs the United States. Hopefully, someone will sit Bill O'Reilly and the Republican congressional caucus down and explain that to them.

After bin Laden

As of Monday morning, the picture to the left is what you'll see if you look for Osama bin Laden on the Ten Most Wanted Fugitive list at the FBI website. That boy is, to paraphrase, Monty Python, an ex-terrorist. That Norweigen Blue isn't fucking resting. Not this good eve, friends. he's on thelongest squat of them all. This might be news to some of you folks, I know. The story really didn't get much press.

"Deceased," my friends! The bad guy has finally lost, blown directly into Hell's fireiest circle by the brave boys of Seal Team VI. The fixed his little red wagon for fucking good. And you know what? I hope it hurt. If there actually is a God, he'll have felt the pressure of his brain exploding against the back of his eyeballs before his skull blew apart.

Bin Laden may or may not have met his great reward hiding behind a girl, which should really surprise no one. Terrorists are rather famous for their ignominious ends. Abu Nidal was found dead in Baghdad seven months before the U.S invasion. Iraqi officials reported that he had committed suicide by shooting himself in the head ... multiple times.  The regime of Saddam Hussein had a deeply ironic sense of humor that was never really appreciated by us in the West.

Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, formerly known as Carlos the Jackal, was captured as he was recovering in a Sudanese villa from surgery that fixed a varicose vein in his nuts. It happens to the best of us, but few os us deserve it like he did.

It's humiliating, to be sure, but nobody signs up for the game without knowing that the dice ain't gonna roll their way forever. At some point, most terrorists are going to be taken out in the most unflattering ways. The job description almost demands it.

Osama was different from those that came before him in that he succeeded where Nidal and Carlos failed. Only geeks like me know who the latter two even are these days, but bin Laden is going to live forever. That son of a bitch changed history. He succeeded beyond what must have been his wildest dreams and, in the end, he might very well have won.

Bin Laden always overplayed his role in the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan. He was an engineer and a money man. He built roads and hidey-holes. He moved construction equipment in and out of the country and provided medical services. The only time that he was known to have engaged the Russians, he nearly got his ass shot off.

But what he saw there informed the rest of his life and his three-quarters wrong, misunderstood view of history; combined with his being charismatic and a gifted manager, changed the way the rest of us live. He changed the way we're going to live for a good long time, and his newly ventilated cranium really does nothing to change that.

He and his twisted brethren saw the imperial Russian bear storm into a Muslim neighborhood and how his coreligionists from across the globe answered the call to jihad. It took nearly a decade and untold carnage, but that bear was beaten back. Three years afterward, it vanished from the face of the earth entirely. How could they not conclude that this was Allah's divine vengeance? It doesn't matter that the mujaheddin were almost uniformly illiterate goat-herders with a profound nostalgia for the 7th century. That's what they believed. And they weren't wrong, at least not completely.

After the decline and fall of the Soviet Union, bin Laden's new group, al Qaeda,  turned its lonely eyes to the other great atheist superpower, the United States.

Being as they were, seventh century nostalgists, al Qaeda never really understood that the guns, money and Stinger missiles that they used to bring the Russians so low were provided by the Americans, Saudis and Chinese. They thought that they came from the Pakistanis, which in a roundabout way, they did. The ISI controlled the operation and they alone determined who would enjoy the weapons and the power they brought them. It should surprise no one that the mujaheddin forces of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar went into battle against the Soviets yelling "Death to America."

After the Soviet takedown, it was only logical that the jihadis would take a poke at the other great power that supported, financed and trained the apostate regimes that repressed and tortured believers. It wasn't just a failure of imagination that no one saw it coming, it was a failure of common sense.

The U.S government, being the U.S government, misrepresented the new threat almost from the minute it took shape in the street of Lower Manhattan in February of 1993. "They hate us for our freedom," we heard from Presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama. And virtually no one is willing to point out that they were lying. These people weren't willing to die because they were overly aroused by the way Britney Spears looked in her early videos. Slutty Catholic schoolgirl outfits are famous for a few things, but war isn't one of them.

The jihadis are pissed at American foreign policy. Period. But if a president actually had the balls to go on TV and say that, most Americans - who are genuinely peace-loving to point of having an almost  studied ignorance of the rest of the world - would say "Well, why don't we change our foreign policy?" And that can be problematic for a people who like buying their oil at fifty cents a barrel.

If the Bush administration knew anything, they knew that anything worth doing was worth overdoing. Even after 9/11, they never relented in telling us that we were making war to ensure that girls were going to school eight times zones away, which had never before happened in all of human history. The inhuman incineration of nearly 3,000 innocents in New York City was just no longer enough. The war in Afghanistan wasn't long about retribution. It became, by the military' s own branding, a "just crusade."

The historical problem with a crusade is that they tend not to go well unless they're won quickly. If they aren't, they tend to become problematic. Assuming that you're going to forcibly change anyone's religious virtues is about as silly as thinking that they'll change yours.

And that's really what the "War on Terror" comes down to. "Terror", in and of itself, isn't an enemy. It's a tactic. The United States didn't win the War of Independence by fighting against outflanking maneuvers any more than they'll win a War in Terror. If you think about it really hard, you might just understand that you're an idiot for even having thought very hard about it in the first fucking place.

Al Qaeda is the enemy today, every bit as much as the Nazis were in World War Two. Well, when you kill bin Laden, you defeat the enemy. Unless you don't. Then you're fucked, just as you would be if you thought that killing Boy George would have prevented the 1980s.Then you're you're in a position where you think that you're a hero, until Kajagoogoo rises in to destroy us all and there's no one to defend us because you're off collecting your trophy.

Yeah, we got bin Laden. But when you really think about it, that's like thinking that murdering Donald Trump is going to cancel The Apprentice. No one ever counts on NBC's bringing Warren Buffett out of the darkness, do they?

Doing a Fredo on Osama is important, have no doubt about it. But in the grand scheme of things, he's only Fredo. It doesn't matter how many times that you dump him off of the rowboat if his ideas survive.

I was going to go into great depth about the international ramifications of this story, but I've already gone on for a long time, and more importantly, I'm bored. Maybe I'll come back to it tomorrow. I'm still exhausted by the goddamn Canadian election.