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assume that you've been appointed head vassal in some imaginary court and the queen has died.
she died during the administration of your predecessor as head vassal, who in turn was bumped outta office during the process of arranging for the funeral.
now you have to arrange the rest of the funeral.
you are boxed in by the fact of when you come into the office.
you might wonder whether the queen should have died, but basically the fact is that you are stuck in place during the funeral arrangement process and even that is not entirely under your control.
so yeah.
speaking for myself, i find that the afghanistan adventure was amazingly ill-considered even by the low standards one has to apply to the bush administration in order to get the meter of competence to bounce at all.
i don't think the united states should have gone there in the first place.
i don't see what possible end was served by it, and given the way that conflict has played out, a parallel view seems to have been held by the bush people for a period of 3-4 years, during which it was largely on the back burner while the other massive display of short-sightedness and incompetence in iraq played out at the center.
but i also don't buy anything about the "war on terror" as a rationale for anything.
but those are my personal views which i in a sense have the luxury of holding because i am not in a position of trying to figure out materially or strategically how to extricate the united states from the mess that the bush people left behind.
were i in that position, i imagine that my main goal would be to get out of afghanistan.
how exactly one would go about that is not obvious.
the obama administration is boxed in that way.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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