Last night’s speech by Pres. Obama on Afghanistan was the latest disappointment from the Hope and Change President. Personally, I was hoping for a quicker withdrawal from Satan’s Catbox, er, I should say Afghanistan. By quicker, I mean “They’ll all be home by Christmas, bin Laden is dead, al-Qaeda has been marginalized, and hallelujah, we won.” Instead, we’re bringing home a measly 10,000 troops by the end of the year (how about by the end of the month, Mr. Prez? Surely they can pack up and get on a plane in that amount of time). The other 23,000 troops who are still there as part of Petraeus’ “surge” will return by the end of next summer, which will leave us with around 68,000 troops and 100,000 military contract workers. So much for a real change in Afghanistan. As Rachel Maddow pointed out last night, Obama’s so-called withdrawal will leave twice as many troops in the Catbox as there were before he took office. On top of that, he plans to leave 25,000 U.S. troops, pretty much permanently, it seems, even after we have officially “withdrawn.”
In other words, we will be spending around $2 billion per week in that hellhole for years, while our economy and infrastructure at home circle the drain. The only word that comes to mind right now to describe Obama’s “plan” is the overused term “insane” — but what else is there to say?
This article appears in Jun 21-27, 2011.
Having served in the Navy in 1966, 7, & 8. I have heard all these rationalizations before.
Remember the domino theory, where if we allowed Viet Nam to be communist, it would cascade around the world and we would all be swallowed up?
Viet Nam is now communist and one of our trading partners.
… and everyone my age knew someone whose name is on that wall in DC.
55,000 brave young Americans and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese died for nothing but President Johnson’s big Texas ego. Now we are doing it again. A war started by President Bush’s big Texas ego and continued by President Obama who doesn’t have the courage to stand up to his generals who don’t believe that we can ever really stop our incessant military adventurism.
I basically agree.
We have done our best to help these people after we invaded. They seem to have wasted our good will and now after 10 years I think enough is enough. Six months is a reasonable amount of time to bring our troops home. We do not even need to keep a base there for 100 years.
Hopefully General Betray-Us will get a phone call on January 20, 2013:
“Hello David? President Paul. Get everybody out. Oh, and David? You’re fucking fired.”