It was the reason why we occupied the Middle East from 2001 to today. The plan was simple: Catch or kill bin Laden. That was our promise: if we caught or killed bin Laden, we would leave the Middle East.
The mission is complete 8 years after Bonehead Bush announced it was completed. We confirmed bin Laden's death. That would mean our occupation is over, right? WRONG.
Robert Gates released a report that said the military will stay in Afghanistan past 2014. Whatever the reason may be, what we call an extended occupation the Middle East will call an invasion. We're breaking our promise to a group that already sees us as brutes and bullies due to the massive collateral damage we inflicted on them along with all the intentional civilian murders PMCs like Blackwater (now Xe) did.
It's powerful propaganda fuel for terrorist factions to use. Our solution to ending the war is the equivalent of the village idiot trying to put out a fire by throwing gasoline on it. When someone came along and threw dirt onto the fire, the village idiot threw more gasoline on the embers just to see if it really was extinguished.
There's a lot of reasons I can think of why we'd stay there until the year infinity. The first is based on what Bush said about the war; if there's a rise in violence, it means the surge is working, and if there's a decrease in violence, it means the surge is working. Nobody in charge knows how to differentiate the good news from the bad.
The second is related to what you said. Any kind of retreat, even if it's withdrawing troops like we promised equals absolute weakness. What's the worst that is going to happen if we leave? Will all the planes and nuke in the world suddenly crash down on all the major cities at once?
The third is even more distressing, and that's that the war has become a business. We spend more money in the military than any other country on the planet, and yet we can't take care of our own vets, most of whom end up on the street, some with debilitating injuries. Then there are also the politicians who get paid to lobby for perpetual war, who get paid to support a war that is more or less being fought by one side.
Related to this, as I said in the journal, Blackwater (Xe) and its members are guilty for war crimes. Some members have been reported killing civilians openly, even to the point of proudly boasting about it, equating them to feral animals or inferior creatures as they did so. The Iraqi government demanded that they be removed from the country, but that didn't happen.
Even more disturbing and distressing than that is some apocalypse-related prophecy about Israel taking back "The holy land", and how our own politicians are actively trying to bring it to fruition through this war. Again, being an atheist, it sounds like absolute horseshit, and anyone actually trying to fulfill a prophecy shouldn't be allowed to holdany hold of power.
Finally, there's the idea that we can police the entire world and prevent any terrorism attack from happening. This obsession with safety has already butchered the Bill of Rights. Becoming a police state will only cause damage to ourselves, and as a result do damage on a scale the terrorists could only imagine.
It's all very depressing. I'd rather not have to bother knowing this stuff, but I feel it's my obligation to know about all this, especially after I found out just exactly what happened during the 2008 elections and the recent ideological hijacking of the Republican Party. I don't know how we'd even begin to reverse 10 years of extreme paranoia, xenophobia and racism and demolish what is now an embryonic police state without immediately resorting to violence.
There's a lot of reasons I can think of why we'd stay there until the year infinity. The first is ba
