Obama doubles down on $3 trillion with blank check in AfPak

That’s Ted Rall’s take on Obama’s Afghanistan “surge.”

Actually, that’s not quite right. Rall says Obama doubled down on $10 trillion, which he says is more like the real cost of Iraq and Afghanistan wars with compound interest.

Rall, who was against the invasion of Afghanistan when it was first proposed, a VERY lonely voice then, explains why:

President Obama and the Democrats always asserted that Afghanistan was the “good war” — the one thing George W. Bush did right before he "”ook his eye off the ball” by invading Iraq. Not me. I realized that the invasion and subsequent occupation were doomed from the start. My Paul-on-the-road-to-Damascus moment came while watching Afghan villagers sobbing outside a house being searched by U.S. troops. “The Russians never violated our homes,” an old man told me. As in many societies descended from nomads, Afghan culture dictates that a man’s home is truly his castle. “Even when they came to kill you, the Taliban knocked on the door and waited for you come out. They didn't touch your wife or daughter. They never came inside. Never.”

I stared at the house’s front door, smashed and splintered after having been kicked in, and thought: They’ll never forgive us. Women were shrieking inside the house. The soldiers yelled at them: “Shut the f--- up!” At least they did it in English, so they couldn’t understand. Hearts and minds.

When you’re worse than the Russians or the Taliban, you’re pretty bad.

And, that’s why I have less and less truck with “war hawk light” Dems-only quasi-progressives who still support this war, especially with someone like, say Blue Girl, who’s gung-ho pro-military.

Frankly, even aside from recruiting standards being lowered, I think that’s another bit of detritus from an professional Army, explosively mixed with the “American exceptionalism” held by about 98 percent of people to the right of Rall and 99 percent of people to the right of me.

Or, to put it another way, and to see a significant portion of today’s armed forces in light of today’s celebrity culture, I have this feeling that many an American soldier door-kicker has the attitude of, “Don’t you know who I am?”

Is everyone in the military like that? Of course not.

Is a majority? I honestly don’t know.

Is a fairly large plurality, say 20 percent or more, like that to some degree or another?

I’m pretty damned sure that answer is yes.