The U.S. Command: As Bad As It Gets

Lately, with insomnia, I tune into a Canadian Broadcasting Corp. station late at night (one of the few this close to Quebec that doesn't broadcast mostly/entirely in French which I speak in only a piddling way and understand even less in hearing it) which offers European news overnight after the classic music finishes. It's an amazing perspective, too, since it's easier to see how our European neighbors (and we should all consider others in the globe neighbors although we as Americans often do not) tend to have a better, less jaded-by-our-own-lala-land-interests view of things. For example, did you know that France's champagne producers are buying land in Great Britain because they are sure global warming will make it nearly impossible for them to produce champagne in coming years?

But here's what I heard last night from Radio Netherlands - and I've been trying to find a link on the Web to verify this unsuccessfully since my hearing at 3+ AM gets suspect:

That because the U.S. maintains "nominal" control of Afghanistan, although its almost exclusively NATO forces now trying - in futile fashion - to keep control for the U.S., the Netherlands is considering acting against its own parliament if that parliament agrees to send Dutch soldiers into Southern Afghanistan. This is entirely because Afghanistan - a terribly dangerous place before the U.S. landed in October 2001 to "get Osama bin Laden, dead or alive" - has gotten so exponentially worse under U.S. control. This is exactly what we heard several months ago when NATO, about to take over forces there, could not find any volunteers to send troops in because the U.S. maintains "occupier" status and no one wants to get themselves into a role of serving U.S. imperial interests.

What does that say? (Like, what happens if we have a real threat instead of the fake ones the Bush Administration has handed us time and again since before September 11th? We've so abused and bullied our "friends" let alone our enemies that we can't expect anything but the rest of the world to cheer if we get hit.)

And before you say, "What? Is this another barb at U.S. troops?" - Hell no!

Troops have to have a mission and they need supplies. Remember the Utah Olympics a few years back? Where it was bragged that, as soon as we had just arrived in Afghanistan, that we had more U.S. soldiers in Utah protecting the Latvian nose-bobbing team than in Afghanistan.

These troops then MUST be led by strong people who are not at the total control of complete neocon nitwits in Washington.

This isn't the fault of the world. This isn't the fault of NATO. This isn't the fault of our troops.

The fault lies with the persons pictured in this post: George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Condi Rice. Period.