This is not the posture of a man even considering the pullout of troops next year. This is a man just beginning something.
All indications are that the Commander-in-chief has handed Petraeus the keys to the war, relinquishing his Constitutional role as the civilian leader tasked to look out for the whole nation's best interests -- not just its militarists and imperialists.
"Imperial Grunts" maintaining the empire
All of us "professional leftists" tend these days to avoid use of the term imperial or imperialism when discussing why we are mired down in a place like Afghanistan. No one listens to a leftist using such words. So I'm going to let the unabashed militarist war-lover Robert Kaplan do it for me, since he makes the case much better than I could.
Kaplan's book, Imperial Grunts: The American Military On The Ground, is the first in a series of books unabashedly on the topic of American imperialism. It is an impressive body of work, involving years of world travel to many very rough and dangerous places. This is how he describes his project:
"I was less concerned with war and conquest than with imperial maintenance on the ground," he writes. In his journalistic travels, he says, "I wanted to cut myself off from civilians as much as possible." He wanted to live with American imperial soldiers "on the ground," to get to know the 21st Century American military he describes as "a worldwide fraternity."
Here's some of his thoughts on the subject:
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