| After his speech this week President Obama's been taking some hits from Vermont Dems. Not just the left fringe of the party, ably represented here, but even the mainstream Democrats: Senator Leahy: "For me it boils down to whether or not there is a convincing answer to this question: What can realistically be achieved, and is it worth putting our soldiers’ lives on the line, at a million dollars a troop, as our economy continues to struggle here at home? Sizeable deployments of soldiers from Vermont and other states are only the latest compelling reasons for reaching deep to find the right answer this time. "At this point I am not convinced that the hole dug earlier by a thousand bad decisions can be paved over at all." Senator Sanders: "I think the president made a mistake. I`m disappointed at what he did, and I`ll tell you one of the reasons...This is a worldwide problem. Where is Europe? Where is Russia? Where is China? Where is the rest of the world? With these 30,000 troops, we`re going to have 70 percent of the foreign troops in Afghanistan," Sanders told Ed Schultz on MSNBC. Representative Welch: "Nevertheless, increasing our military footprint in Afghanistan will not achieve the goals the President outlined. Our goal, and our obligation, is to protect the American people from another al-Qaida attack. Al-Qaida is a dispersed group pursuing a radical and violent agenda. It is not a nation state. Our strategy should focus on containing and degrading al-Qaida worldwide, not expanding our military footprint in Afghanistan, a country rife with corruption and a history of tribal loyalties rather than stable government institutions. He gets a bit more support, although it is far from enthusiastic, from Madeleine Kunin: Are there really good wars and bad wars? We thought so during World War II, and in retrospect, we were right. But in Vietnam, and Iraq we were wrong. Will our renewed effort in Afghanistan and Pakistan keep us safe, can we leave a more stable situation in our wake, and can we really pull out in 18 months if we’ve made little progress? Will we ever reach a time when we can beat swords into plowshares? So many questions. I have no final answer except to say, for now, I will give our President the benefit of the doubt in the hope that this careful man, who does not like war any more than we do, will have made the right decision. And here are some comments from friends: BTW--I took my Barack Obama poster off the wall today. There is only so much that I can forgive. Did candidate Obama promise 2 have more troops in Afghanistan than the Soviets did during their occupation? Well, he's topped them now. Sad. Obama, at a jobs summit: "our resources are limited." Not so limited, however, to stop us from waging a pointless war in Vietghanistan. I thought we had to invade Afghanistan when we did. I really think we had to under the circumstances. Still, at this point it's hard to see the justification for staying. Rik Hertzberg points out in last week's New Yorker that most of the justifications, like needing to go to stamp out al Qaeda, just no longer apply: they are operating without much difficulty in plenty of other places, including Pakistan, which is much, much scarier than Afghanistan. |
