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Edited on Sat Dec-05-09 12:38 AM by akbacchus_BC
"AngusTheGodOfMeat"
Comment 1
Obama did not get “rolled.” He made a very tricky and difficult decision, and I have never seen one person here whose ability or judgment I would rate as being superior to his, and that includes mine, and yours, John Cole. Not one, not even for one day.
This decision is not about hippies, or Vietnam, or weak Democrats, or any of that other bullshit. It’s about the realities of the situation in Afghanistan, and whether I agree with the exact assessment profferred by the president last night (and I don’t know whether I do or not) I certainly would not consider for a second that I have enough information or enough good advice from other people who do have enough information to overrule Obama’s decision.
Here’s the bottom line for me. The war in Afghanistan was voted for by all but one member of Congress, between the two houses, back in 2001. Most people supported it. I am pretty sure John Cole did. I know I did. I didn’t know anyone who didn’t.
So, we made a bad call back then, as a country. The whole country, not a defective few. Basically, almost all of us. We didn’t forsee the mess we are in there now. We were blinded by anger over 911 and wanted to go do something, and that is what we chose to do.
And as a country, we sat by and let this war turn into a trainwreck over the years, and then we hired a new guy to come in and try to get things back on track. And that new guy has shown himself to be pretty competent and pretty careful, and this is the course he has chosen to take under the authority we gave him.
Okay, I support his decision and I hope that this new course produces a beneficial result for all stakeholders to the greatest possible extent. That’s a tall order, but I am willing to get behind it and give it a chance to work.
The amazing thing about this decision and situation is that they are not the biggest problems on our plate right now. Economics and other domestic issues are bigger, in my view. We must stabilize the situation in Afghanistan in order to give ourselves space to move ahead, just as Obama stated that we need to give Afghanistan room to make progress. We have a lot of things that need to be done and fixed.
As for the whole war/antiwar thing in general, I’ve been generally antiwar consistently for just about 5 years here, and continue to be so. But that is not license to just pull the plug on an ongoing war situation, running away, Sarah Palin style, because it’s too hard. That’s a fucked response and I won’t support it.
I agree with you, Cole, that this is a sobering moment we have here, but I tend to be bullish on the prospects for America, not a gloom and doomer. So we’re a flawed country. We are also the best country on the planet, so that tells you a lot about the rest of the world out there by comparison.
If they gave me one rub of the magic lamp to get one thing changed in this context, just one, what I’d ask for is that the US go back to the Constitutional version of declaring wars and being honest with ourselves about wars before we get into them. This weasely way of getting a war going without a formal declaration of war, and the protocols that go with that, gives us the opportunity to fall sideways into these trainwrecks (Vietnam, Iraq, to name two) that just become quagmires. This quasi-state-of-war thing that we try to do is dishonest, and destructive to our system and its core principles. Fuck the warmongers for letting us get into that condition.
AngusTheGodOfMeat"
AngusTheGodOfMeat Comment 2
America, the idea, is a dichotomy. On the one hand, we love being able to tell our government what we think it should do. No kings for us, please.
On the other hand, there are times when the country functions best when it can get behind something, even, or especially, when that something is hard, and very imperfect.
I think this is one of those times. We were pretty unified as a country as we walked, dicks in hand, into Afghanistan, with a pretty silly view of what we were going to accomplish. We can best clean this up by being somewhat unified now behind the best of many possible, and mostly lousy, courses of action. Not because we are Dems, or Obamabots, or Republicans, or whatever. Just because its the best thing to do, it needs to be done, it will be hard, and we can best do it working more or less together. After we get it done, we can resolve to never let ourselves get into this kind of muck again.
And another thing I didn’t say in my earlier post: Obama is taking basically the approach to Afghanistan that he seemed to be talking about as a candidate. A war of necessity, requiring new and better direction. So here we are. It seems to me totally dishonest to come along now and say, oh, I am only going to support this guy if he handles it exactly as I would if I were in his shoes. For one thing, there isn’t one person here who knows exactly what he or she would do in his shoes, despite the glib rhetoric you hear on the ‘Tubes. For another, even if one did know, it doesn’t matter, because he has the job, and we tasked him with getting it done. So, let him do it.
As a country, we basically erred badly by going into Afghanistan with a juvenile and simplistic view of our goals and prospects. I don’t see the point in compounding that screwup now by trying to undermine the guy we hired to straighten out our mess. It’s our mess, not his, he didn’t create it. But he obviously is willing to do his level best to clean it up. That’s what I voted for him to do.
Amen,
Mr. President Barack Obama, you are trying your best and I am supporting you 100%, no matter am in Canada. You know what you are doing and I trust your intelligence!
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