Doug's Darkworld

Yes, the gentle reader read that correctly, Hillary Clinton and Obama responded to the Time’s Square bomber by doing their best to encourage Pakistani terrorists to launch attacks inside the USA. Hard to fathom? Let me explain. As most must know there was recently one of the most amateurish attempted terror in attacks in history in New York. An American of Pakistani origin attempted to set off a car bomb in Time’s Square.  Both Obama and Clinton were quick to pin the blame on the government of Pakistan, Clinton especially with this little gem: “We’ve made it very clear that if — heaven forbid — an attack like this that we can trace back to Pakistan were to have been successful, there would be severe consequences.”

Now granted the State Department spent the next week backpedaling furiously and clarifying that the government of Pakistan has the full support  of the USA, but it’s a good bet that insurgents and jihadists don’t pay a whole lot of attention to retractions, does anyone? Oddly enough this pattern has repeated a few times during the Obama administration in regards to both the governments of Pakistan and Afghanistan. We heap scorn and criticism on them, then turn around and put our arms around their shoulders and claim what a great ally they are. Um, what? As Mr Nasser said: “The genius of you Americans is that you never make clear-cut stupid moves, only complicated stupid moves which make the rest of us wonder at the possibility that we might be missing something.”

My point here, after all this circumlocution, is that plenty of insurgent/terrorist groups in Pakistan hate the government of Pakistan and are more or less in open revolt against it. And the government of Pakistan is pretty much propped up by US guns and money now.  In other words, there are plenty of died in the wool terrorists from OBL down in Pakistan that would love to see the USA pull it’s support from the Pakistan government and/or get involved in a ground war in Pakistan to support said government. So why not try to hit the USA with a nice car bomb or two and see if our knee-jerk reaction is to get more heavily involved in Pakistan and/or pull our support from the Pakistani government? Either result would be good for Al-Qaeda and other groups in Pakistan, failed states are the best source of recruits and support for insurgents of all stripes.

Which leads to something a lot of people on the right fail to appreciate, and apparently in the White House too … our enemies aren’t afraid of us. They are already at war with us, we are the ones who sent armies into their lands on pretexts that would have made Alexander the Great blush. So if attacking the USA would weaken the Pakistani government, they wouldn’t hesitate. So many people fall for the “if we were only tough enough they wouldn’t mess with us” fallacy. Our enemies will defend their homes as fiercely as we would ours. If Mexico was killing dozens of innocent Americans every week by launching missile strikes into the USA to kill Mexican drug lords, pretty sure most Americans would have a problem with that. And that’s what’s happening in Pakistan, and it’s a safe bet the locals aren’t cheering.

In any event, in summation: Whether by design or accident one can certainly make a case that we are giving our enemies in Pakistan, old and new, reason to believe that a 9/11 or Mumbai style attack on the USA will be in their interests. If it’s out of ignorance, which is possible, since much of America’s “foreign policy” is more driven by domestic political considerations than any real understanding of what we are doing overseas … not a good thing. And if it’s being done deliberately in order to give the administration an excuse to escalate the war further … not a good thing. Yeah, I guess a really short summation of our wars in Asia is pretty simple, are we nuts or what?

For any number of reasons I’m not looking forward to another 9/11, but I have a nasty feeling we’re in for something similar during the remainder of Obama’s term. It will further polarize the country and very likely lead to even further escalation of what is already one of the most counter-productive wars in America’s history. Doubling your bets when you’re losing is a terrible strategy at a gaming table, if it can be called a strategy at all. In a war it’s a recipe for catastrophe.

Tomorrow, something lighter: Fluffy Forever. Stay tuned.

(The above image of Hillary Clinton is claimed as Fair Use under US copyright law. Yadda yadda yadda. I tried to find an image of her that made the point of the post without being gratuitously insulting. Frankly I find the habit of modifying people’s images to make them look demented or whatever, the image of Obama as “The Joker” comes to mind, is disturbing to me. Caricature is one thing, but modern politics has become increasingly mean spirited. The rest of Obama’s term and the next election are going to see increasingly nasty politics. Yeah, that’s a productive way to fix America’s problems.)