Meddling With Kinsley

This Michael Kinsley op ed at the WaPo is simply too simple to resist meddling with.

So, after more than a half-century of active meddling -- protecting our interests, promoting our values, encouraging democracy, fighting terrorism, seeking stability, defending human rights, pushing peace -- it's come to this. In Iraq we find ourselves unwilling regents of a society splitting into a gangland of warring militias and death squads, with our side (labeled "the government") outperforming the other side (labeled "the terrorists") in both the quantity and gruesome quality of its daily atrocities. In Iran, an irrational government that hates us with special passion is closer to getting the bomb than Iraq -- the country we went to war with to keep from getting the bomb -- ever was.

Kinsley goes beyond moral equivalence here on events in Iraq. Sentiments so expressed could only come from one so steeped in disdain for America and her ideals that the reader is left to wish the amoral reprobate that spouted them would simply move out. I imagine Mexico can always use some day laborers, though I doubt Kinsley could ever do an honest days work that required him to get up off his ass.

The big event in Afghanistan this past half-century was the Soviet occupation of 1979. After the occupation, some of the deposed thugs and others formed militias that roamed the countryside killing people and whatnot. These were called "guerrillas," because we were for them. During the 1980s, we spent hundreds of millions of dollars a year on weapons and other support.

The war we sustained in Afghanistan destroyed the country, turned half the population into refugees and killed perhaps a million people. In 1989 the Soviets pulled out. But, disappointingly, our guerrillas kept on fighting -- using our weapons -- against the government and among themselves. In 1996 one particularly extreme group, the Taliban, took power. It was even more disappointing when the Taliban established an Islamic state more extreme than the one in Iran and invited Osama bin Laden to make himself at home, which he did.

So we marched in and got rid of the Taliban. Then we marched into Iraq and got rid of Saddam Hussein. Now we're -- well, we haven't figured out what, but we're hopping mad and gonna do something, dammit, about Iran.

And they lived happily ever after.

All Kinsley does is shallowly recap about fifty years of American foreign policy, which I would point out, have absolutely nothing to do with the reality we face today, particularly in terms of the people in power. I'm surprised he didn't go back to the creation of Israel and lay that one on us, too. Perhaps he's more mindful of his Jewish readership than he seems to be about the security of Israel. It's a fair point to argue which would be the greater act of anti-semeticism. Or maybe he left it out as it was a Democrat in office at the time.

He mentions the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan as if it were no big deal, except for the fact that the US did something about it. Maybe that's Kinsley's real value, pointing out that if we all just saw America as evil - and ourselves as impotent, US loathing liberals, the Soviets would dominate the globe today and democracy would be one step closer to being a footnote in the history of man's governmental evolution.

Funny, but I've always pictured Kinsley in a funny fur hat and rubbers on his loafers. He'd probably fit right in at a Pravda, spouting off about a utopia which doesn't actually exist. What Kinsley consistently proves in his editorials is that he himself has no valid alternative, not even one worthwhile idea as to how to get anything done, let alone something as important and necessary as preventing Iran from getting nukes.

He's like the too skinny geek looking in through the window while some jock is making out. He envies it so much it turns to hate out of his frustration, his self and America loathing exaggerated from so much time home alone later meddling with himself. All he can manage to do is write pesky, superficial little editorials his liberal friends think grand, if a bit redundant, while the world goes about its way.

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[COLUMBO]

"In Iran, an irrational government that hates us with special passion is closer to getting the bomb than Iraq -- the country we went to war with to keep from getting the bomb -- ever was."

Now declassified, the CIA/Navy Seal operation in Libya called "Operation Rat Hole" began in February of 2003:

A U.S. Navy special ops team was sent in to do surveillance on a meeting at a villa in Libya between a group of terrorists and the Iraqi secret service. The meeting was taped and recorded while being sent to CIA headquarters in real time. The CIA ordered the Mukarbarrat agent and terrorists killed when the Iraqi agent ordered several terrorist attacks on U.S. targets in the U.S. as well as in Europe. All of the terrorists and the Iraqi agent were killed at the villa and the seal team confiscated a treasure trove of documents, cell phones and computers. They also uncovered plans to assassinate a Shia cleric in London. After warning the cleric two CIA agents shot the suicide bomber in London moments before he could detonate the bomb strapped to his body.

The invasion followed shortly thereafter. Evidence is now beginning to emerge in recently recovered documents:

http://powerlineblog.com/archives/013581.php

The day after Saddam was captured, Libya's leader relinquished 'Libya's' nuclear weapons program, and it is safely housed in New Mexico.