What she said

On Time magazine and the war in Afghanistan:

I said during the campaign and I said when Obama announced his Afghanistan troop increase that everybody was looking for a way out of Afghanistan that didn't make us the asshole. That didn't make us the latest in a long line of countries that came in with great speeches and big guns and slouched out with a halfhearted "sorry we blew some of your relatives up, guys, our bad" parade. All we're doing now is trying to find something to drape some bunting over, to find a way to say, no, we're not those douchebags, we're a good country and we did this better than everybody else did.

It's a desperate search for pundit-meaning, a way to make David Brooks and David Broder feel good about themselves, a way for Joe Klein to write columns that don't make him feel like a dirty, anti-military, America-hating hippie. It's a way for Obama and his advisors to say they unfucked the dog George W. Bush fucked, did the war right, and made everything better. It's a passion play for the benefit of the American people, and I would be a little more tolerant of it as a piece of masturbatory theater if the benefit to our national psyche wasn't offset by LOTS AND LOTS OF DEAD PEOPLE.

I'm not discounting the plight of women in Afghanistan. Plenty of DFHs were all about kicking Taliban ass long before 9/11 focused the rest of the world on how much things fucking sucked over there. But I have a major problem fetishizing one particular group of women when a staggering portion of the world treats women like dogs or worse and does so without Time magazine using the victims of religious and political violence as arguments for prolonging war. We can hold in our minds at once the concept that what happened to Bibi Aisha is cruel and horrible, and that it does not obligate us to continue to wage a war that didn't stop her mutilation in the first place.