Unlike GW, Obama is a good speaker and interesting to listen to. I managed to avoid all prime time addresses by GW for eight years. And I have managed to catch almost all of Obama's. But as the clock rolled to the time for the on-line broadcast I went instead to AARP's game site to play 3-Dimensional Mahjong.
This morning I got up and went back to ABCNews.com to at a minimum catch excerpts. Instead I watched the analysis. And as I did so I came to a startling conclusion about myself. An epiphany. I don't like to watch anyone talk about war. Especially wars that have gone on for longer than WWI and WWII combined. Enough already!
Charlie Gibson used the term "war weary." I am war weary, the nation is war weary. If we are all so tired of war why don't we just stop it? It is certainly well past the time. It seems as if my lifetime has been defined by war. I was born in the closing days of WWII. Dad, a bomber pilot, was missing in action (and found) during Korea. Then there was Vietnam, my generation's war. So many of my friends went and did not come back. Then Iraq I and now Iraq II. And we are the third nation to try and win in Afghanistan. I think we have proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that goal is impossible. Surge or no surge.
Obama did say one thing I can heartily back: The only nation I am interested in building is our own. So let's stop spending all those billions in countries that are not grateful and spend it here instead.
I have a bit of a problem today. Why is Obama sending 30,000 more troops in Afghanistan?
ReplyDeleteI do however realize that he wants to pull out of Iraq and concentrate on Afghanistan. he has always said that.
His general wanted 45,000 so I assume are are to be grateful. And he did set an end time - 18 months. Local troops are to be trained to maintain security so we can pull out.
ReplyDeleteHowever, I think it takes almost 18 months to get 30,000 troops and equipment in. The equipment likely stays but the first in begin coming out almost as soon as the last one get there.
But it is not a winnable war regardless of the number of men you send to die.
We (meaning the West) don't seem to be doing much good there. And the tendency to use drones in order to save Nato soldiers' lives is at the expense of Afghan civilian lives (once it goes up, who cares where it comes down). The horrendous treatment of women in that culture gets trotted out or ignored, depending on the politics of the day. So I say let's get out of there and let them wage war on each other in peace like they have done for thousands of years.
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