Chupacabra Report

Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen started talking last week about putting off the planned withdrawal of US troops in Afghanistan from next year to the year 2014.

Last week-end Afghan President Hamid Karzai called for an end to night raids and a reduction in the numbers of NATO troops saying that “the time has come to reduce military operations.”

The US commander in Afghanistan, General David Petraeus told Bob Woodward “I don’t think you win this war. I think you keep fighting. This is the kind of fight we’re in for the rest of our lives and probably our kids’ lives.”

-This is from retired U S Navy Commander Jeff Huber, on his blog Pen and Sword..
“America’s finest military minds (heh) have committed the best-trained, best-equipped armed force in history to an unending, ruinous war against an enemy that doesn’t have a single tank or airplane or ship and is led by a handful of cave dwellers who don’t even have a fort to fart in.

“We have to give Robert E. Lee credit for one thing: in charging uphill at Gettysburg, he was at least trying to gain a decisive victory because he knew his country didn’t have the strategic depth to fight a long war. Petraeus and his extended entourage in academia and defense think tank-dom not only want to charge straight up every hill they encounter, they want to make absolutely certain that their Long War lasts long enough to accomplish what Lee could not: the collapse of the Union.”

-Had enough bad news yet? Today Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl said that the New START nuclear arms reduction treaty signed by President Obama and Russian President Medvedev will not be ratified by the lame duck Senate, kicking it down the road to the next Senate, which will have seven more Republicans to vote against it. This would be the fourth START treaty; the first three were negotiated by Republican administrations.

This treaty would make our world safer by reducing the number of nuclear weapons, of which the US and Russia have over 20,000; twenty times the number held by all other countries put together. It would give us better ties with the Kremlin, which could be helpful for us in dealing with Iran, as the Russians (unlike us) have some leverage there. And it would provide some leadership for the rest of the world by moving to eliminate, rather than proliferate, this existential threat.