The Narnia 3 Blog

Senator Bill Frist: Are You Out of Your Mind?

Senator Bill Frist, the outgoing senator from Tennessee and one of the most ineffectual majority leaders in Senate history, is probably going to run for president in 2008 on the Republican side. Well, hopefully, potential voters who are serious are the war on terrorism will read and remember this story. Read the full text here.

Here are the lead paragraphs of the story:

U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist said Monday that the Afghan war against Taliban guerrillas can never be won militarily and urged support for efforts to bring "people who call themselves Taliban" and their allies into the government.

The Tennessee Republican said he learned from briefings that Taliban fighters were too numerous and had too much popular support to be defeated on the battlefield.

"You need to bring them into a more transparent type of government," Frist said during a brief visit to a U.S. and Romanian military base in the southern Taliban stronghold of Qalat. "And if that's accomplished, we'll be successful."

Now, let's see, I think we have the Taliban and Al Qaeda on a list somewhere that calls them terrorist organizataions, a lot like Hamas (we refused to recognize and deal with the Hamas led Palestianian Authority because of their terrorists designation). Now, Frist, who is clearly trying to posture a moderate position as a political manuver, declares that we can't win the war on terrorr in Afganistan so we need to politically engage the Taliban and their supporters, allowing them enter the govenmental structures of Afganistan.

This is perhaps one of the most absurd concepts I've heard recently. I don't think even democrats have proposed such an idea (knowing that if they did they would be skewered, and rightly so, by the American public and the Republicans). Frist apparently does not remember that we fought a small war in Afganistan to get the Taliban out of the govenment, at the cost of American lives and no small amount of the public treasury. So how the United States', Afganistan, or anyone's interests served by allowing them back into the govenment (where, of course, like Hamas, they could take control again) is beyond understanding.

Hopefully people will remember what the Taliban were and what they did to Afganistan the first time they took over. Their ideology and their Facist interpretation of Islam is what we need less of in the world, not allowing them power within a government.

Thankfully for the Republican Party Bill Frist will soon be out of office. Hopefully, it will stay that way.