Kucinich makes a speech in the House about the war in Afghanistan.

But really now, everybody outside the USA knows he’s already dead and that the name Osama bin Laden is just a boogey man, to use like in Orwell’s 1984 novel.

I really do believe him to be long since dead, as most other non-Americans do.

I have seen several people link to this article.

Not once in the article does the U.S. admit Osama is dead. The article simply claims that current leaders don’t talk about him anymore.

Don’t mislead people with propagandistic statements such as, “U.S. now admits Osama bin Laden is dead,” unless they have actually, clearly, admitted such.

Else you are just playing the same “twist the information to fit my political agenda game.”

Even if you are right.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24157.htm

All this without even mentioning the idea of private citizens promoting change throughout the world through charitable and other organizations. I think we would be doing so more often if we weren’t waiting around for the government to fix all the problems.

Since the President’s announcement, I have been bothered by much of the rhetoric coming from both the pro and con factions. Most of it has seemed to be based on nothing but loyalty to a party or faction within a party. Your post has helped me understand my unease.

While there is value in the none-of-my-business/non-interventionist arguments, at another level, we are all members of a global community. Tyrants by their very nature are always seeking more power, and cannot continue long without reaching beyond their borders. Unstable nations harbor terrorists and pirates who attack us and our people.

It is absolutely in our interest to diplomatically promote good principled governance in all nations. Our Declaration of Independence certainly gives us the guiding directives to support any large group’s desire for natural rights and self governance. We should use military force to defend our coasts and borders. We may choose to use it when requested by a group of people from another nation. We might also choose to use it against an immediate threat.

It is unfortunate that our executive lied about Iraq being an imminent threat. We need to fix our government to prevent the executive from twisting intelligence and meddling with the media before we can ever attack another nation again. Of course this is as much a part of our duty as citizens to hold our elected representatives accountable as any laughable attempt of government to control itself .

As for Afghanistan, like our failed banks, it’s time to stop throwing good money after bad. As we push the corrupt central government into autonomous provinces, we find ourselves promoting one tyrant over another ( http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/26/AR2009102603394.html ).

I don’t blame Chaffetz for being against THIS war, especially if he were generally against long term foreign entanglements . I do blame him for ignoring natural rights. All men are created equal, so taking the gloves off and counting foreign life less than our own certainly puts him on the path to tyranny.

Towards the end, he makes this point about welcoming Chaffetz’s stance:

Unlike Larison, I am willing to give advocates of withdrawal such as Chaffetz the benefit of a doubt, for two reasons. One, it is clear that a great many conservative Republicans are undergoing a transition: faced with the consequences of eight years of dangerous and debilitating militarism, some are beginning to question the basic premises of interventionism, as Chaffetz does with his insistence on limiting the goal of the “war on terrorism” to simply taking out al-Qaeda.

Which brings us to the second reason for cutting Chaffetz a little slack, and that is the political importance of an emerging anti-interventionist caucus in the GOP, especially at the congressional level. The political rationale for Democratic hawkishness is always that the Republicans will supposedly beat up on Obama and the Democrats in Congress if they show “weakness.” With a strong anti-interventionist tendency in the GOP, the Democratic Leadership Council and its “centrist” allies will have to come up with a different excuse.

Though I have harsh words of warning against this pseudo-anti-war stance, I agree with Raimondo: Chaffetz’s opposition to the war should be embraced and welcomed (though ideally assisted in growing some principled roots so it extends to other and future scenarios). I made this point in the above post as follows:

We of the Old Right and current (real) Anti-War Right happily welcome all those who wish to unite with us in opposition to war, empire, and international intervention.

Inasmuch as Chaffetz is willing to bring our troops home and pursue a more humble and constitutional foreign policy, I support him. I just hope that he picks up steam along the way and broadens his anti-war views a bit.

This is a great article that reports on the probable death of Osama bin Laden.

yeah that made me smile. I think it was actually a problem with getting emails through from ‘Connor’s list’ or ‘Liberty Lunch’ or something, but you were like “wait, ‘Connor Boyack?’ — I read his blog” :)

@jake

i don’t know that i’m convinced that when we went in with guns blazing into Afghanistan that it was just in any sense . . . it sounded better to me before I understood as much as I do now about it. (i do agree — and it seems like Connor and most people that comment here do too — that there *is* such a thing as a just and defensive war . . . out of context, I can see how you could respond to Connor’s post with a concern he wouldn’t support any war *ever*, but that simply isn’t the case)

it’s a tough question for a common citizen like me to properly address exactly how we clean up our mess in Afghanistan but my limited knowledge thus far convinces me that any ‘bad’ effects of a supposed ‘vacuum’ resulting from a hastened US departure are far outweighed by the continued ‘bad’ effects of our continued “missions” there.

What *really* concerns me is that the leaders we elect who seem to keep rubber-stamping our continued foreign policy (House Reps, Senators, the President, etc.) often seem to have incredibly thin reasonings and postures on these questions. I think we have some sort of civic duty to get through to Bennett and Hatch and Chaffetz and crew though. I guess I’m glad that Chaffetz is any less ‘hawkish’ than he used to be — even for the probable poor reasons that Connor points out. I’m still hoping it’s a positive step towards something more principled.

Finally, another thing that scares me are all the detractors that think the regular citizenry has ‘no right’ to question our military objectives and foreign policy. The ones who seem to suppose that good and wise people always have it all figured out but just aren’t allowed to explain any of it (ever, I guess) to the masses. The last ten years have convinced me that simply isn’t the way things work. Evidence persuades me that we didn’t elect ‘good, moral, thoughtful, enlightened’ people to govern us *before* 9/11 . . . why does anybody suppose they all turned into super-wise, super-informed paragons of virtue the day after?

Unless regular citizens like Connor keep peppering our elected officials with thoughtful questions, I don’t forsee any positive changes with foreign policy. It seems heavily weighted towards ever-expanding, perpetual warfare in the absence of any serious political opposition.

In this century we had a brief reprieve of sorts from large-scale Imperial warfare with the revelations of the Church Committee Report which is one of those amazing things a country based on the principles ours is might still be capable of producing (an honest self-evaluation of domestic and foreign interventions) but man, oh man! it sure seems like the vast majority of our populace have completely forgotten the results of that report.

I wish more people knew about that report. [I only learned about it a couple of years ago.] The report detailed a great many surprising, illegal FBI domestic surveillances of citizens and a great many of the illicit, terrible ‘unforseen consequence riddled’ CIA-sponsored foreign activities as well. Amongst it’s chief opponents: Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. Big surprise that we’re so deep into those types of activities again, I suppose.

The details of how involved Osama bin Laden was in the actual hijackings and bombings on 9/11 and the questions about whether or not there were domestic groups besides the 19 Saudi hijackers that gave him support are actually pretty interesting inquiries but, as Connor already politely pointed out, somewhat peripheral to this thread. It might be worth pursuing that discussion over on the post he indicated since there are a lot of other questions more pertinent to this post that will get sidelined if that is pursued here.

I believe there is great pragmatism in being able to enter mainstream discussions of the Afghani question with a willing suspension of those other good questions. For instance, I was heartened that a good number of mainstream news sites were recently asking the question — ”hey wait, even if we accept the idea that the Taliban was becoming the de facto heavy in national Afghanistani politics [thereby representing a national government somehow], and even if we accept the idea that the Taliban committed an act of war by sheltering bin Laden [who we are also accepting as the master planner of 9/11 . . .], and even if we accept that therefore war was proper against the whole of Afghanistan somehow then. . . What is the aim of the war now that bin Laden is gone and the Talibani forces are estimated at less than 100?

That is my primary concern now. I continue to find op-eds, “news” stories, and even my own Senators using frighteningly ambiguous explanations to justify our continued presence in Afghanistan with the threat of “The Islamists” . . . are these simply veiled calls for genocide? Will the U.S. remain in Afghanistan and Iraq and Pakistan and Somalia (and move on to Indonesia, etc.) until every last citizen of those countries that practices Islam and/or prefers not to have a U.S. occupation of his nation has been killed? I mean what on earth are these pundits going on about? I’ve sometimes given up arguing about how we ended up there and simply been asking what we’re doing there now (ie, when we’ll be ‘done’).

So, yeah, I agree with Connor’s disagreement with Beck and Chaffetz on this one. It’s not just about whether we are committing enough resources or the right mix of resources . . . it’s also about *what* we’re doing over there ‘big picture’ and those guys, at least, don’t seem to want to touch that with a ten-foot pole.

Oh! and I just read Clumpy’s response which is right on the money. This is why I wish we were involved in police actions in an attempt find Osama bin Laden and hold him accountable (which might answer some of Kelly’s questions) instead of these all-out wars against entire populations of people — 99-100 percent of whom never opposed the USA until we took over their region and they got pulled into the fighting.

We were attacked first and that makes it a war of self defense.

I’ve gotta be honest – I totally understand this sentiment in principle, though in practice it seems to turn into just another war of escalation. Unintended nonmilitary casualties on each side, resentment leading to further terrorism or empire seem to be the result.

And because, at least in the mind of insurgents their attacks are the result of OUR previous actions, this philosophy, carried to an extreme seems to justify neverending retaliatory war as a result of a single incident. Not good stuff.

And the fact that one of the most prevalent current arguments for supporting the war in Afghanistan is that we are “fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them here” betrays the assertion that this isn’t pre-emptive war. I believe it is.

I agree with you that this is not fair if it is the motivation to go to war. Again, this was the argument with Iraq and I believe it is wrong. I don’t think it is the initial reason we went to Afghanistan. If it was just to go at first the problem becomes how the war was carried out which is the second part of just war theory. I agree it has not been carried out correctly, but this does not make going in the first place wrong.
Should we ignore the fact that America has given bin Laden funds, weapons, and training as well?

I understand that the US made some bad decisions with Afghanistan in the past. But I think that cannot control our actions of the present. Yes we gave them weapons/funds, but if they use them against us we still must defend ourselves.

The fact that the UN charter allows countries to go to war does not show that they are not war averse. When it is a council voting on something it is the ideas of the different voters that makes them war averse or pro-war. I would suggest that over the decade we have had a war averse UN- but this really has little to do with whether a war was just. Point is the whole world saw the relationship between the Taliban and Bin Laden to be strong enough to make them both guilty of 9/11.

I agree- what we have done with our CIA agents is wrong. It has hurt the places we have gone and in the end discourages democracy. But again whether we are perfect or not does not make our war in Afghanistan just or not. If we waited for perfection (or even close to it) before we defended ourselves we would have been dead a long time ago. And yes- if we go in with our CIA agents I think those countries have a legitimate reason for grievance against us. If they then wanted to try to solve it diplomatically and when that failed sent uniformed troops to try and fight our troops I would say they went to war for a just reason. I am not giving us any special treatment, anyone in our situation of being attacked by a group supported by a foreign government who was not helping when diplomatic means were attempted would have the same right to self defense as we did.