Mount 'n thrust??

I see in the news the name of our pending action in south Afghanist is... Operation Mountain Thrust. Mount... 'n thrust. Yes. Brilliant. Clever. Hilarious. Just who the hell are we getting to think up these names, anyway? The boys in grade seven health classes? Are Western operational planners really that juvenile? We're trusting our security to people who think military operations are an opportunity to poke one another in the ribs and giggle?

So the breakdown is something like three Brits to two Canucks to whatever number of Afghans are on "our" side. Seems to me the British Empire was running something like this in Afghanistan something like a century ago, weren't we? Man, memories are short. I think the best thing we could do for these people and our own is bring our troops home. Keep 'em home, till someone invites them. When two sides ask you to get between them, that's peacekeeping. When you go kicking in someone's door and firing democracy at them, that's not peacekeeping. That's an invasion.

I also notice that NATO is taking over the show this summer. 'Scuze me, but wasn't NATO about keeping everyone else out of our countries? Wasn't that the idea? When did it cease to be about collective security and become about empire building?