American Muslim, is doubtless a sock puppet. Ace of Spades website does this all the time, fake mocking comments from Dan RaTher, Elvis, etc.
Wretchard — I think you need to look deeper. There is no real reason for France, Britain, and the US to wish to simply abandon either Iraq or Afghanistan. The casualties, regrettable, are not much compared to historical standards, including projected casualties in the first Gulf War. Only 17 years ago. Nor are the dangers (nuclear strike from an abandoned Afghanistan-Pakistan via deniable terrorist proxies, to advantage one faction internally over another) inconceivable.
Though no one wants to speak it, everyone knows it. Even Hollywood has been full of imagery of a nuked NYC (Heroes) or variations ala Japan thereof (Cloverfield). Everyone knows, well and good, that nuclear proliferation by Pakistan and North Korea, and now Iran, plus AQ and factionalism in failed states, means death of major Western Cities. It might be London, Paris, Amsterdam, Copehagen, instead of NYC, but it will come.
The reason the fight has been abandoned is two-fold: first the elites in all Western countries are “priests” who know they will cede power to the military, and industrialists, and machinists, and ordinary people who do the fighting and killing and dying, and those who supply them with ever-better weapons.
But the second is that society in the West as a whole has degenerated due to the rise of single motherhood. “American Muslim” is not that far off — only a middle class society can fight abroad (a peasant society can fight in it’s own country), and only a middle class society has more to lose from not fighting than fighting when long term survival is as stake.
Those with no children don’t care about the future. Why should they? They have no “skin” in that “game.” Single mothers, care about the future, but care in a feminine way, that precludes violence in defense of it, and clings to a fantasy of “peaceful” solutions. Europe is a society of singletons, mostly childless, the rest single mothers, with married couples a rarity. The US is not much better.
The West CANNOT fight in Afghanistan or anywhere else, until it is a matter of raw, physical survival. We lack the men, coming from two-parent, traditional families, with either their own or likely prospect of their own, families in turn.
Thus, Western cities will die. Not just one, several, as meek and mewling responses by a deeply feminized “priesthood” tries the rainbows, hugs, and puppies approach to hardened killers seeking their own advantage within their factions.
THEN, and only then, will people in a pure survival mode, flock to the idea of fighting. And it will not be a moderate, “hold-the-line” model as in Afghanistan, but rather a war of pure survival with no quarter asked or given. Best guess? Half a billion dead, with some ethnic groups ceasing to exist for all intents and purposes.
This was inevitable as far back as 2006. Perhaps even further back, as Bush refused to lay out straight for everyone the stakes and importance of adjusting to nuclear proliferation and failed states.
