Believe it or not: one of the “litmus tests” for GOP candidates is for smaller government/deficit reductions - while another supports a surge in Afghanistan! Support for the surge has nothing to do with smaller government and even less to do with national defense. And expanded military presence in Afghanistan will not cut deficits. Unlike Desert Storm, nobody is bankrolling military operations and giving our president a budgetary “surplus”. Only a moron or news editor believes these two planks are compatible.

       The field manual for COIN was devised for Vietnam and revised by that outcome: we learned the wrong lessons. Counter insurgency operations necessarily involves the US military in a civil war. The exact equivalent is having police forces pick sides in gang warfare. Our police support pro crime policies that benefit all criminal operations in proportion to firepower available to each gang. We threw out the larger criminal gang, destroying infrastructure in Afghanistan while installing the lesser gang. Gangs win! Everyone else loses.

    This has nothing to do with curbing Al Qaeda. No country large enough to pose a military obstacle will align themselves with Al Qaeda. We can easily destroy that country's infrastructure with less than 10% of the firepower we currently have there. That's what military forces do best: destroy a defined enemy's ability to wage war against our country. Rooting out Al Qaeda is a legitimate police operation. Citizen taxpayers should recognize the differences even if the GOP and Faux news can't.

     Of course this has everything to do with “cost plus – spare no expense” military contracts to support our troops there on a fools' errand. Obama's excuse is that he is wimp who caves in to the same crowd of jingoistic authoritarians who whined about “losing China” and tarnished the careers of less jingoistic people who were less inclined to give big government a blank check for military operations. Even a respected general like Eisenhower caved in to the McCarthy crowd. We united as a country to defeat 2 authoritarian governments in the second world war. Ever since, those who crave military socialism and it's perks have been blaming withdrawals from “no win” military engagements on patriots who loved our country enough to stand up to their agenda. As a result we have over 5 times the military firepower necessary for defending this country – and close to half of that is parked elsewhere where we are unwelcome “foreign occupiers”. Anyone who threatens the gravy train is tarred with the “soft on defense” moniker. If only we could get a real patriot who would have the courage to face down these lowlife parasites and “just say no” to military interventionism and yes to our real national interests...

Anybody have a clue as what GW Bush's excuse for getting us into this mess? I don't buy the “dumber than cow manure” explanation.