Strange title, eh? Wait a bit please.

Hoh is the surname of a former Marine who fought in Iraq and became a diplomat in a Taliban stronghold in Afghanistan and who on September 10 this year resigned in a high-profile protest of the Afghan war. In so doing, Matthew Hoh became the first ever American official to resign in protest over Uncle Sam’s Afghan fiasco.

Hoh’s resignation revolves around one basic point. And that is that he had lost the ‘understanding of and confidence in the strategic purposes of the United States’ presence in Afghanistan.’ Three facts clearly manifest themselves by the time one reaches the end of Hoh’s resignation letter; the first two by their presence, the last by its absence in his long missive;

1. Matthew Hoh seems to be an honest and courageous officer.

2. He sincerely feels that United States blundered by occupying Afghanistan and continuing to remain tied in there.

3. Matthew Hoh does not feel the same about America’s Iraq debacle. He did not complain about America’s occupation of Iraq even once in his resignation letter.

The resignation itself, therefore, boggles the mind. What was Hoh thinking when he joined the Foreign Service of a government whose governance is seen more abroad than at home? Did he think that American presence in distant corners of the world was for some missionary purpose; or to distribute equitably the milk of human kindness?

He should have known that America had, even before the deployment of troops for the invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, around 750 military installations located in more than 130 countries with actual American military contingents stationed in 65 different foreign countries. And that like all occupying powers, Americans have around 70,000 U.S. troops in Germany, 40,000 in Japan and about 37,000 in South Korea, where they have been since 1951.

As an aspiring Foreign Service officer, Matthew Hoh should have long known that Iraq and Afghanistan are just the latest victims of the colonial behemoth in a continued saga of American imperialism and not any thing else. And that, historically, successive American Administrations have made homeless the Native Americans in their own home, conquered half of Mexico, occupied Hawaii, subjugated the Philippines and bullied a rather large number of smaller nations. He should have known that as far back as 1986, in Nicaragua vs. United States, his became the only country ever condemned for ‘international terrorism’ by the World Court (a foreign policy venture conducted by Foreign Service officers like himself).

Furthermore, while one salutes the courage of Matthew Hoh for not wanting to be a part of the bloody drama in Afghanistan any more, he only found out what most of the world had long known. That Afghanistan is a burial ground of Empires and was a bad choice for his masters to launch their dream of neo-colonizing of an impoverished yet honorable people. That many an invader lie buried beneath the fiery sands of Afghanistan’s desolate stretches.  That, in the words of Sir Olaf Caroe, “unlike other wars, Afghan wars become serious only when they are over.” But fuddled by majestic fantasies and self-adulation, the Empire seekers, whose representative Hoh was till late, went ahead and did exactly what they should have not.

Let us for a moment grant that Hoh erred by joining the Foreign Service and corrected himself later by resigning over Afghanistan issue when he saw things from up close. But then why not mention the Iraq flop too? He does after all remember with horror America’s involvement in South Vietnam and the ‘arrogance and ignorance’ of the then U.S. Administrations in perpetuating the disaster. Yet he somehow forgets to refer to Iraq’s occupation; a country where he served for two years and saw the results of America’s invasion first hand.

Iraq posed no danger to the United States, having neither the means nor the intent of waging war against her, never issued any threat to America, and never possessed even a single WMD. Yet while Iraq now lies in tatters at the hands of Hoh’s masters, the only mention that blighted country gets in his resignation letter is with rather a sense of pride of Hoh having ‘served’ his country there.

It is thus safe to assume, by natural corollary from the substance of his resignation letter, that he seems to have an ‘understanding of and confidence in the strategic purposes of the United States’ presence’ in Iraq. Why else would he not refer to America’s occupation of Iraq in his resignation letter?

But that is even more intriguing.

Did Hoh, an aspiring Foreign Service officer, never hear of something called the Downing Street memo that clearly shows that the two leading coalition members, the US and Britain, were fully engaged in “planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression” and “fixing” intelligence to suit these aims–prosecutable war crimes in themselves.

Having been personally present in Iraq, Hoh should have known that the Bush administration leaders, and military personnel following orders of these leaders, had committed barefaced violations of the laws and customs of war. They caused, directly or indirectly, the massacre of civilian populations of an occupied territory, murdered and ill-treated prisoners of war, pillaged public and private properties, wantonly destroyed cities, towns, and villages not justified by any military necessity and used depleted uranium weapons taking a ghastly toll in human lives.

Every canon of the United Nations Charter, the 1945 Nuremberg Charter, International humanitarian law and the Geneva Conventions was blown to bits by his government in Iraq. As a matter of fact, if he so wanted, Hoh could personally sue and prosecute his masters in a U.S. court of law. So blatant were these crimes that no legal genius is required to indict for war crimes some of his previous masters still strutting about in his great country.

And if he ever thought that ‘the strategic purpose of the United States’ presence’ in Iraq was to contain, or wrestle to the ground, radical Islam, then he needs to think again.  It is not hard to see that due to the absurd hubris of his previous masters, Islamic militancy is at present surging in tidal waves across the region. America has given Muslim fundamentalism a momentum so pernicious that it now threatens to devour entire nations. The whole area is currently in turmoil with America’s closest ally Pakistan in almost death throes.

And now to ‘oho’.

‘Oho’ is an interjection used to express surprise, comprehension, or mock astonishment as defined by the free online dictionary.

Though the scribe does appreciate the courage of the ex-marine, the comprehension part of ‘oho’, yet is surprised that it took so long for Foreign Service officer Matthew Hoh to lose ‘understanding of and confidence in the strategic purposes of the United States’ presence in Afghanistan’ while retaining the same for America’s occupation of Iraq. The scribe’s mocking astonishment is for Hoh to finally have ‘doubts and reservations about our current strategy and planned future strategy,’ and that his resignation was ‘…based not upon how we are pursuing this war, but why and to what end.’

Welcome to the club Matthew Hoh, the small club of we the rest of the world, who have been saying the same thing for a rather long time now.

Perhaps someday Hoh will enlighten the world with his ‘understanding of and confidence in the strategic purposes of the United States’ presence’ in Iraq. The scribe would like to see if it was any thing other than the hydrocarbon buried beneath the smoldering sands of Iraq