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It was bad enough a month or so ago when a conflict roiled Afghan-US relations over the release by our clients of thousands of detainees who had been cleared of any wrongdoing by the local judiciary.
At the time, the embarassing formulation of the simple precept that due process matters for good reasons, brought me to my knees in shame at my government, and the peace laureate for whose continuation as president I had just recently (if reluctantly) been laboring.
Already, much earlier in the Obama presidency, his ancestral home of Kenya had achieved a level of citizen redress apparently unimaginable here in the land of the free.
That was bad enough.
Now, even as we shudder before the spectacle of high level nominees shucking and jiving around the issue of presidentially sanctioned citizen murder, here is Hamid Karzai, virtually a punchline ("Karzai Talk") for corruption based comedy, stepping up to declare "No mas" to ISAF air strikes being called in by the Afghan army to support their ground troops battling (alleged) Taliban.
Incineration of the innocent-increasingly isolating ISAF amongst the war lovers of the world.
5 Comments
As long as there are no consequences for the democrats they will never change. Consequences mean losing votes and risking losing to a republican. Consequences do not mean voting with less enthusiasm for LOTE. This applies to more areas than just civil rights.
you can only shame the decent, but in a world where the fundamental expectation of sanity has been shredded, what does that even mean? Someone must reestablish order, remind the insane and shameless that actions have consequences, such as pain, loss, and grief we have been smugly inflicting on the world without recognition of the law of symmetrical obligation, i.e. sauce for the genderblahblahblah
whew! you are sooooooooo whistling in the dark…
Everything you say is true, but I really could, at the end, not stomach Romney, and I certainly came earlier to the position you espouse. I suppose I lacked the courage of my convictions, or simply succumbed to tribal antagonisms. I don’t suppose I’m sorry, for all that, that Romney is NOT president.
I’m really more torn up about the detainee kerfuffle than the civilian murder, even tho the consequences of the latter are so horrible. When the flap arose about people being released where there was no evidence against them, someone is quoted as mournfully intoning “Afghanistan has no regime of administrative detention…”, like it was a FAILING. Not that we have any right to inflict death from above, and we will surely pay as a nation sooner or later, but the intentionality and casual, bureaucratic venality of shrugging ones shoulders after years of unjustified imprisonment and continuing simply because the inertia dictates it is so coldblooded.