True (Republican) Romance

This just in from the SF Chronicle:

A multi-pronged militant assault on a small, remote U.S. base killed nine American soldiers and wounded 15 Sunday in the deadliest attack on U.S. forces in Afghanistan in three years, officials said.

The attack on the U.S. outpost came the same day a suicide bomber targeting a police patrol killed 24 people, while U.S. coalition and Afghan soldiers killed 40 militants elsewhere in the south.

This is George W. Bush's version of romance.

Then again, George W. Bush suffers from what I call "Kipling Syndrome", which is an overweening, overarching, overmastering belief that the white man must nobly burden himself with the responsibility to help out savage, dark people who can't govern themselves.

And all whistled to under the smart strains of a jingoistic jingle, backed up by a compliant press that still maintains (including, unfortunately, Lara Logan on the Daily Show) we defeated the Taliban and are now suffering just setbacks.

Let's get one thing straight, people, including you, Logan: We did not defeat the enemy in Afghanistan. We dispersed them. Then we let them literally run for the hills, regroup, replan and consolidate their forces so they can attack us in multi-pronged assaults and kill and wound two dozen American troops while killing another two dozen people the same day. In other words, they literally lived to fight another day.

That does not sound to me as if that's a defeated enemy. A defeated enemy capitulates, surrenders, is captured or dies in combat. A defeated enemy stays defeated for at least a couple of decades. A defeated enemy is not allowed to reintroduce its ideology after getting briefly kicked out, is not allowed to take back key cities and whole provinces and not is allowed to finance its operations with opium that's grown under the nose of the alleged victors.

This is not victory.

And it's certainly not romantic.