Taliban fighters dragging away their dead.
Friends,
A word about current events first before I share with you further reader-to-hogue dialogues about meditation as a remedy for a predictable slavery in tomorrow’s blog:
The first and most current event is the new and imporved HogueProphecy.com. We have merged the blog page with the home page. It has taken me some time to load up and format 23 articles from the older system. My web master should update the correct dates referencing these soon.
Yesterday (07 October, 2009) marks what may be a fateful date in the future of America and President Obama.
On this eighth year anniversary of the US invasion of Afghanistan to hunt down and destroy al-Qaeda, President Obama stands on the brink of his ship of state ready to fall overboard passing under the spell of the Lorelei siren’s call that had killed empires. If I may be forgiven for mixing my metaphors. He stands ready to answer or moderate the Pentagon’s call to deepen US involvement with up to an additional 40,000 US forces and billions in treasure thrown down the dusty and rocky sinkhole that is Afghanistan. It was an abyss that the British Empire could not conquer before it faded away with all the pomp and ceremony of a whimper by the mid-20th century. A ten-year occupation of Afghanistan was the final straw that broke the Bactrian Camel’s back of the Soviet Empire by the 1980s end.
The US Empire was a few days away from its eighth anniversary mucking with the sons of the same mujahadeen the Soviets failed to defeat in ten years when last week a Pentagon request for a major reinforcement was officially passed onto Obama’s White House desk. He had more pressing matters. He boarded Air Force One for Copenhagen to join the first lady of the White House, Michelle Obama, and the first lady of television, Oprah Winfrey, to talk up or trash talk out anybody else’s but Chicago’s bid for the Olympics. I was too busy upgrading the web site that day to write a blog about it, but my intimates are witness to the following prediciton. When it was reported that Obama’s women (wife-counselor Michelle and media king maker Oprah) had let it be known to the press, rather playfully of course, that they had come to “kick butt” for Chicago, I turned to my friends and said, “Well, Chicago just lost the Olympics to Rio.”
Paris lost its bid for the 2012 Olympics several years ago to London when at a state dinner in Paris then French President Chirac quipped to International Olympic Committee guests that food for a London Olympics would be terrible because we all know the stereotype that the British are terrible cooks. (I guess he hasn’t eaten in London for a few decades. The bland Brits of London have long ago gone gourmet international. I know first fork hand and taste bud when I passed through there in 1994 and 1998.)
The Obama vanguard moved from one hole to the exhaust pipes — from mouthing about food to the Chicago Bear Dick Butkus “butt kick.” It was no wonder to me that chance vulgarity cast to the press and received by the culturally sensitive members of the IOC would flush Chicago’s bid down the place where butts go faster than you could yell, “Yorkshire pudding after kidney pie with peas!”
So it goes, Rio de Janeiro got the Olympics for 2016. The Chicago bid was the first Butkus bumped and the President’s sports dream about change he at least believed in fell splat on the floor like a second-city deep-dish pizza.
However, I digress like the president did with his grandiose and Olympic sized distraction from his duties. He came back to his real job with the new week. He marked the eighth year since the opportunity to win the Afghanistan conflict was missed by the previous administration with secret meetings. He gathered the pent-up pundits of military Pentagon policy and the defenders of the military industrial complex seeking reasons and public funds to keep the war business alive for years to come in Afghanistan. They must have given Obama’s bargainer’s arm quite a twist to make years more war with the Taliban and build a tribal patchwork called Afghanistan into a nation as his best “new” strategy for a very long and expensive time.
What is lost by Obama and the Pentagon brass is the strategic context. It has been lost since the Battle of Tora Bora back in December 2001.
The strategic and moral REASON why US troops were supposed to be fighting and dying in Afghanistan?
Destroy al-Qaeda, not baby-sit Taliban tyrannized Afghanistan. Surround and destroy Usama bin Laden and the core of his terrorist organization al-Qaeda as righteous revenge for al-Qaeda’s attack on the Pentagon and World Trade Center Towers on September 11, 2009, a few short months before. Just such a rapid and biblically apocalyptic end of al-Qaeda’s leadership and elite fighters would have sent a chilling message into the hearts of all other jihadist wannabes: hit the US homeland and feel the bold, swift and terrible US sword. See yourselves banished, scattered and snuffed out in short, detailed order.
The core of al-Qaeda was allowed to escape. Usama bin Laden remains, at the time of this writing, still a key candidate for Nostradamus’ Third and Final Antichrist, who he calls the Arab Prince and hides as well his true name in the anagram Mabus. Back in the summer of 2008, I said the following in Nostradamus and the Antichrist, Code Named: MABUS about what military opportunity was lost at Tora Bora:
“A few months after 9/11, the man code named Prince was pauper, refugee, on the run to the Pakistani border, holed up in a network of caves dug into a mountain in the Hindu Kush called Tora Bora — a place he excavated wherein he successfully stood off ground attacks and aerial bombardment during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. He would escape the US siege, slightly wounded, trekking into Pakistan through a screen of Afghan tribal fighters in the passes he bribed‚Ķ
“Usama bin Laden desires to die a martyr, or soon be annihilated just like Mabus the Third Antichrist. He has achieved a destiny like a first cancer tumor lodged in the body of human civilization. The Americans can invade Afghanistan after 9/11 attacks, gouge out its al-Qaeda tumor, kill a multitude of cancer terrorist cells in the doing but bin Laden’s cancerous dream has metastasized since he escaped US military eradication in the caves of Tora Bora.”
After September 11 attacks, the US did not send units belonging to its Rapid Action Force, such as the 10th Mountain Division, the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions into Afghanistan in two weeks as the Pentagon has bragged for decades its trillion-dollar investment could do, anywhere in the world. One month, then two months passed. Then three. Token US forces were on the ground by the time bin Laden was cornered in his mountain network of caves inside Tora Bora: about 65 US advisors with a few hundred to a thousand Afghani mercenaries. Many of whom were in the employ of al-Qaeda the week before had been marshaled to guard mountain passes into Pakistan! Golly! I wonder why Usama and his jihadists got away?
Prophecy (future history) teaches, as does past history, that windows of opportunity open but briefly. Once they close no redoubling of forces or military might can reopen them. The future historians will tell you what I say now: America lost the war in Afghanistan at the Battle of Tora Bora. If Obama is seduced into thinking by a blast of CEOs-in brass at the Pentagon that he can win what was lost by digging in deeper into that broken chaos of a corruptly ungovernable country, he will fulfill my warning passed for the prophetic record in Predictions for 2009:
“I see in Obama a Kennedy-like obsession about going into Afghanistan and perhaps even Pakistan to hunt down Usama bin Laden. It smacks of Kennedy obsessing about Fidel Castro early in his presidency and echoes Kennedy’s inexperience with handling a CIA propagating its own agenda. JFK listened to bad intelligence and prepared the way to military blunders in the Bay of Pigs (1961) and the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962). Both by the way happened when Mars transited the Sign of Cancer and passed exactly over the country’s natal Sun position at 13 degrees Cancer (the number of the original 13 Colonies that represented America). This malefic aspect again and again has been the astrological sign of modern US military blunders and rushes towards strategic missteps.
“Is that sign of blunder coming to test Obama’s first year in office?
“Yes! Mars passes through Cancer from 8/26/09 to 10/17/09.”
We wait to see if Obama will Kennedy or L. B. Johnson himself into his own ill-aspected Mars in Cancer Vietnam. (The Gulf of Tonkin Incident in 1964 under Johnson’s watch, which became grounds for the Vietnam War, happened under the same aspect.) The other recourse is to ignore the rush of war and visualize Obama begin a methodical strategic retreat that will see US involvement in Afghanistan all but end in the next three years.
I am of the oracular mind that Obama will dramatically increase US military involvement for a time much shorter than the Pentagon chiefs want in hopes of dramatically seeking out and destroying al-Qaeda, even though it is no longer strategically significant and could very well be the cause of the collapse of Pakistan as I warned in Predictions for 2009.
John Hogue
(08 October 2009)