Comment on "Defection Track", by David Brooks, NYT

This morning, during my usual review of the NYT editorials/opinions, the column by David Brooks, "Defection Track", caught my eye and raised my blood pressure. I felt compelled to submit the following comment:

Trust a conservative commentator to support another senseless, unwinable, expensive, war in a place where (other than oil) the US has no direct stake, and from which there is no direct threat against us. To imply that "the policy the Obama administration is actually implementing is more flexible and thought-through" is ridiculous. We are following the same old pattern, popular since the Vietnam war, of making one poorly thought-through decision after the other (CIA, arms deliveries, "advisors", "limited troops", ... and 50,000 casualties later watching Americans being evacuated from rooftops by helicopter) in order to make the previous dumb decision look less stupid. Again, like in Afghanistan and Iraq, we have no definitive goal or exist strategy, and again, unless we get very lucky, we will get in deeper and deeper, and in the end we will leave behind a devastated country.

It is amazing how conservatives get all fluttery with "humanitarian purposes" when it involves bombing the hell out of people in other countries, while at the same time they are cutting one "humanitarian" program after the other in our own country.