uvj at vsnl.com wrote:
>
>
> US must quit Iraq, no question about it. But US forgot all about Afghanistan after the Soviets left. You can see the consequences of subsequent evolution of Afghanistan after the super powers abandoned Afghanistan to its fate.
But it wasn't really "left to its fate" -- unless you assume they should have worked out arrangements to 'our' satisfaction in just a decade or two. The U.S. is back, and the results are not very pretty.
> Consequences for Afghans and their neighbours. US Left is lucky to be thousands of miles away from Afghanistan and Iraq.
If it weren't thousands of miles away it wouldn't be the u.s. left but something else, and something else yet would be the u.s. left. :-) One is born where one is born.
U.S. leftists, in any case, don't have much purchase (as of _now_) on anything happening anywhere. We can work at building ourselves up to something that _does_ have purchase, and the way to do that is to focus on our main task (other tasks will emerge from this focus) of saying _NO_ to u.s. interventions around the world.
Carrol
P.S. the metaphor of "the middle ages" is of course extremely misleading (it implies a linear view of history, with everyone following the same steps), but taken loosely I think it works.