Given trillions of dollars, Pentagon brass like to think that no military mission is too difficult.
So it's rare when a congressman–especially a conservative Republican politician–will openly tell the Pentagon that it's impotent: that no matter how many soldiers its sends or bombs it drops, it won't win.
But that's what Orange County Congressman Dana Rohrabacher (R-Costa Mesa) has done.
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According to Rohrabacher, the U.S. military is incapable of winning in Afghanistan.
“There is no military solution [in Afghanistan],” Rohrabacher said this week at a Washington, D.C. symposium touting business investment opportunities in the embattled country,
The Orange County Register reported.
Of course, that's not what Rohrabacher said when he praised President
George W. Bush for sending the U.S. military into Afghanistan in the first place. The occupation move apparently sent tingles down the congressman's spine when a Republican was in the White House. He pretended at the time that
Bush was channeling a mixture of
Patton,
Nostradamus and
Christ.
Rohrabacher–who avoided military duty during the Vietnam War–now argues that U.S. taxpayers should regularly pay Afghanistan warlords for their loyalty and also spend billions of dollars more to build that country's infrastructure.
Though he fancies himself an expert on numerous topics including Afghanistan, during the
Clinton Administration,
Rohrabacher openly lobbied for American concessions to the
Taliban while the group harbored
Osama bin Laden and the terrorists plotting the 9-11 attacks. He strenuously claimed that the U.S. media had smeared the group by falsely portraying it as anti-woman and anti-U.S.
Oops.
But you won't find that shameless fact in Rohrabacher's bio.
–R. Scott Moxley / OC Weekly
CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.
