And Now, A Second Insurgency

I was still in Colorado this weekend but was entertaining guests from Kentucky, of course, conservative. They used to be Bush fans, joining the 20-odd percent of us who never bought into the myth Good Ol' Boy President. Yes, even at the height of the Bush popularity wave, I distrusted him. And yes, I don't want to see him impeached. I want to see him impotent, tied firmly in place by a Democratic Congress investigating his misdeeds and overturning his laws.

But in my loathing of Crawford's absentee idiot, I digress. It seems we're now fighting the war on a tactic on two fronts as Afghanistan erupts into an Iraqi-style insurgency. This was supposed to be the one the Shrub and his Shrublets did right, this was supposed to be a democracy (and if you count only a 50-km radius of Kabul, it was), this was the war I supported. Like almost everything the Shrub has touched, it's not going according to plan. Apparently the "Hope" strategy doesn't work well. Of course they fired in self-defense. The Marines at Haditha probably thought they were prosecuting the war in a fine fashion as they gunned down civilians in revenge for a roadside bomb attack probably not even perpetrated by their victims. Furthering our woes in the two countries we so easily took and so easily screwed up, soldiers in Iraq shot and killed a pregnant woman as she was going to the hospital. The soldiers claimed they were firing to disable the vehicle. Don't you usually do that by shooting the tires or the engine? The battle for the hearts and minds of the Iraqis is lost. Declare victory and bring the troops home.

And Bush, well, he's troubled by it all. And he now has a mistake more costly than Abu Ghraib to point to, if he acknowledges his fallibility at all.

As is the battle for the hearts and minds of the Afghanis.