"If Afghanistan is a war of necessity so is Somalia and Yemen."
~George Will, Aug, 23, 2009~

“Just because America declares something necessary doesn't mean that the rest of the world, and especially its victims, will believe it is just. The claim of necessity will not absolve the United States, and Obama, from responsibility for its actions. As Reinhold Niebuhr pointed out long ago, Americans find it hard to acknowledge this moral ambiguity of power. They are reluctant to face the fact that it is only through the morally ambiguous exercise of their power that any good can be accomplished. Obama is right to be prosecuting the war in Afghanistan, and he should do so even more vigorously. But he will not avoid the moral and practical burdens of fighting this war by claiming he has no choice. An action can be right or just without being necessary.”

Robert Kagan Washington Post

Obama is right to be prosecuting the war in Afghanistan, and he should do so even more vigorously.

We're broke and can't afford the 20-40 years of engagement it would take to fix Afghanistan. And hopefully we aren't now a genodical nation willing to kill millions of people in order to do it on the cheap.

Yemen and Somalia surely must be next. It's like a Bob Hope "On the road..." movie.

Good to know the Right are now "peacenik cut & run hippies" too...

of course it'll only last until there's a GOP President.

BigLR:

Center right.

Still, you were the "Silent Right" when it was Dubya pushing for war, though, right???

1) I was for getting Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda. At the time wasn't sure we could nation build Afghanistan. Plus, we weren't broke.

and

2)

I feel I was duped with the WMD argument but I didn't think that was the only reason to invade Iraq.

Obama was against the war because he comes form a liberation theology perspective. If Bush had gone in prepared to win the war and with numbers for a sustainable occupation Obama would have been wrong.

As a matter of fact he remains wrong. We were enforcing no-fly-zones and an economic embargo on Iraq. These policies hurt the Iraqi people and did not loosen the grip of Saddam on his country. These policies in fact damaged our prestige and good will with Muslims in the Middle-East. We had three choices:

1) Keep up our policies indefinitely at great monetary and political cost.
2) Walk away from the situation and leave Saddam to his own devices.
3) Invade and restore Iraq from rogue state classification

The no fly zones were deemed illegal and they were going to be sunsetted. Saddam, as his debriefer has recently stated on national television, was waiting for the pressure to subside and was going to return to gathering WMD's. His policies included various tactics that destabilized the world. Such as sending money to the family members of suicide bombers in Israel. His demonic sons were going to inherit the power at some point. Leaving the region with decades of a hellish reality.

We had to invade. We invaded poorly prepared and that is our disgrace.

BigLR:

I feel I was duped with the WMD argument but I didn't think that was the only reason to invade Iraq.

We had to invade. We invaded poorly prepared and that is our disgrace.

Yet, in 2004, why am I pretty sure it didn't stop you from voting for the guy who "duped you" and "poorly prepared" the invasion AGAIN for President????

Did you see the alternative? Hahaha.....

Besides I don't think I bothered.

You know you really are stupid. Bye.

"We're broke and can't afford the 20-40 years of engagement".

Having proven the other day that you have absolutely no idea what you are talking about my only response is this:

Although I am not exactly brimming with confidence in the current Administration I do have hope and will say Thank God such decisions are not up to you.

I've made a case for what I believe.

You haven't offered anything but jack.

1) I was for getting Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda. At the time wasn't sure we could nation build Afghanistan. Plus, we weren't broke.

We were always broke. Every cent spent in both OEF and OIF has been financed with deficit spending. That's not bad in and of itself, but don't pretend that we were sitting on a big pile of money in 2001 that we've simply burned through by 2009. There was never any big pile of money, and we were going in the hole from day one.

2) I feel I was duped with the WMD argument but I didn't think that was the only reason to invade Iraq.

Too bad for you. Before the invasion began, Tony Blair dispelled the last of my lingering doubt as to whether or not we'd find WMD. He gave a speech in which he said that Iraq had the ability to strike at London with a nuclear weapon. My thought was, "Really? And your solution is to put his back against the wall with no way out? Bullshit." See, nuclear weapons are intended to deter conventional invasions. I know we used them against Japan, but their primary utility since then has always been to factor the threat of overwhelming retaliation into the enemy's cost-benefit calculations. The fact that we were willing to invade was all the proof I needed that we never really believed he had a credible CBRN option, and given the state of his military it seemed logical that he hadn't been working on one for a while.

I would have gone with your second option, personally. Saddam was our ally for so long because having a secular power in Iraq was useful to us as a hedge against Iran. And while he did invade Kuwait, he was nice enough to ask our permission first. Also, given the demographics inside Iraq, with the Shi'ites outnumbering the Sunnis by such a huge margin, the Iraqi people themselves could have taken down Saddam's regime on their own if they'd felt like it. I would have favored supporting any internal revolution (that looked like it might benefit us) with weapons and money, but invading the nation ourselves was the wrong move. Imagine if France had invaded America in 1775 to get rid of the British, and then set themselves up as an occupying power. How well do you think we would have liked that? What the French did was help our own revolutionaries by sending money and ships and troops and some brilliant commanders, more to slap the British than anything else, and then they didn't hang around to try exercising any political control over the development of our young republic. The revolutionary spark was ours alone. And remember that our first government, defined by the Articles of Confederation, was thrown out after about a decade. And we had a Civil War! Imagine if the French had stayed around to try and stop those things from happening. See where I'm going with this?

I'm not saying that humanitarian intervention and military options don't have their place, but we chose the worst possible path in Iraq. We most certainly did not have to invade.

1) There's a difference between broke and able to borrow money and broke and NOT able to borrow money. Guess which of the two is where we find ourselves now?

2) I knew the WMD's were probably not nuclear. I thought they were chemical or biological and could have been used on us in war or in a terrorist attack in some European city. YOU would not know whether there were WMD's or not - pre-war. To claim otherwise is farce.

Going with the second option (walking away) would have led to a serious nuclear arms race with all the Middle East countries that have money. At the moment only Iran is belligerently going after nuclear weapons. Had Bush done a good job not even Iran would be pushing for these weapons.

As far as your apples and oranges comparison goes: Washington, Jefferson, nor Adams were Saddam Hussein. If they were maybe France would have made the mistake to hang around.

We most certainly had to invade. It delayed a regional nuclear arms race at the very least. But I'll take your advice on the French example and say lets LEAVE.

"There's a difference between broke and able to borrow money and broke and NOT able to borrow money. Guess which of the two is where we find ourselves now?"

OK, I'll bite. Which?