Tragic mistake

The mounting news over the past weeks has come to a head, and President Obama is expected to announce this evening: America will send a few more tens of thousands of military personnel to Afghanistan. Over these weeks, I have felt myself becoming sadder and sadder, more and more disappointed in our President, who I had hoped would have the sense and the courage to disengage militarily. Bob Herbert, in his op-ed column, "A Tragic Mistake," in today's New York Times, expresses my opinion better than I could:

It would have been much more difficult for Mr. Obama to look this troubled nation in the eye and explain why it is in our best interest to begin winding down the permanent state of warfare left to us by the Bush and Cheney regime. It would have taken real courage for the commander in chief to stop feeding our young troops into the relentless meat grinder of Afghanistan....
    More soldiers committed suicide this year than in any year for which we have complete records. But the military is now able to meet its recruitment goals because the young men and women who are signing up can’t find jobs in civilian life. The United States is broken—school systems are deteriorating, the economy is in shambles, homelessness and poverty rates are expanding—yet we’re nation-building in Afghanistan, sending economically distressed young people over there by the tens of thousands at an annual cost of a million dollars each.
    I keep hearing that Americans are concerned about gargantuan budget deficits. Well, the idea that you can control mounting deficits while engaged in two wars that you refuse to raise taxes to pay for is a patent absurdity. Small children might believe something along those lines. Rational adults should not.
    ...The tougher choice for the president would have been to tell the public that the U.S. is a nation faced with terrible troubles here at home and that it is time to begin winding down a war that veered wildly off track years ago. But that would have taken great political courage. It would have left Mr. Obama vulnerable to the charge of being weak, of cutting and running, of betraying the troops who have already served. The Republicans would have a field day with that scenario.
    ...We still haven’t learned to recognize real strength, which is why it so often seems that the easier choice for a president is to keep the troops marching off to war.

Mr. Herbert states flatly that this "will prove to be a tragic mistake." I am afraid that he is right.

See others' opinions

On The Caucus, The New York Times's blog of politics and government, find today, under "Full Circle for the Commander in Chief," other readers' responses to the questions:

What would you like to hear from the president tonight? Will his supporters be open to persuasion? How can he best convince you that he is proceeding on the right path in Afghanistan?

    You're invited to share your thoughts there, too, if you can manage to do so before comments are closed.

I myself was able to register a comment on the Caucus blog. I didn't read all of the comments (there were hundreds), nor did I literally count the pros and cons, but I got a sense that there were five or more comments against sending more troops than comments in support of doing so.
    I think that all of the high-level military and political planning (summarized by President Obama on Tuesday evening) dwells in Fantasyland. When it comes to those ancient tribal cultures, we are utterly foolish to think we can establish in them any lasting structures to our liking (without far, far more dedicated resources than we remotely begin to have or could remotely hope to find support for).
    Don't say it, for I know: I shouldn't take all of this so seriously.

Thou shalt not...

Saith the God of George W. Bush:

DON'T STEAL
The government
doesn't want
any competition

(Actually, that was on a bumper sticker I saw on the way to work this morning.)

Could this happen? Yes, theoretically...

The following letter, written by Gary Livacari—and appearing on TomPaine.com on December 1, 2006—posits a remarkable and "impossible" (but nevertheless intriguing) set of circumstances:

Re: Iraq’s Reality Bandwagon

In all sincerity, the only way out of this mess is if, in the face of continuing calls for Bush and Cheney's impeachment, they are convinced to resign for the good of the nation by the republican hierarchy. This would make Pelosi president and she would be under immense pressure from the left wing of her party to withdraw the troops immediately.

Obviously, this calls for a limerick. Give me a few minutes. I'll compose one while I'm installing a bathroom exhaust fan.

Ah! Better yet, you compose one. I'll insert it into this post later, along with the one (or more) I come up with.

12/7/2006. Inspired by Southern Writer (serving, I guess, as a sort of muse), I just wrote:

Hey now, wouldn't it be preziosi
If both Bush and his Bela Lugosi
    Resigned their post
    Or gave up the ghost
And the presidency fell to Pelosi?

And, now that I've gotten off the dime, Serena Joy has written:

It is a limerick, for true,
Bush and Cheny, Moristotle does rue.
    If they gave up the ghost,
    I'd propose a toast
To a whole new motley crew.

And I say:

Thanks, Serena, for the valiant entry,
To my own verse apt and complementary.
    May Bush and his pawn
    Forever be gone
And nevermore claim they're landed gentry.

In the woods

My wife and our poodle and I took a long walk in the nearby woods yesterday. We walked through glorious fall foliage, up and down some fairly rugged, rocky hills, along a wild-enough creek to provide many sounds of falling water and continual picturesque vistas. Though at no moment did I experience one of those "surpassing feelings,"¹ the walk restored in me a sense of calm and balance. And I needed that.

Ironically, the way this country is "in the woods" politically now is anything but calm and balanced.

In his New York Times op-ed piece Friday ("Insulting Our Troops, and Our Intelligence"),Thomas L. Friedman wrote:

George Bush, Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld think you’re stupid. Yes, they do.

They think they can take a mangled quip² about President Bush and Iraq by John Kerry – a man who is not even running for office but who, unlike Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, never ran away from combat service – and get you to vote against all Democrats in this election.

Every time you hear Mr. Bush or Mr. Cheney lash out against Mr. Kerry, I hope you will say to yourself, “They must think I’m stupid.” Because they surely do.

They think that they can get you to overlook all of the Bush team’s real and deadly insults to the U.S. military over the past six years by hyping and exaggerating Mr. Kerry’s mangled gibe at the president.

...if the Bush team can behave with the level of deadly incompetence it has exhibited in Iraq – and then get away with it by holding on to the House and the Senate – it means our country has become a banana republic.

And in today's New York Times ("Throw the Truthiness Bums Out"), Frank Rich writes:

While lying politicians and hyperbolic negative TV campaign ads are American staples, the artificial realities created this year are on a scale worthy of Disney, if not Stalin. In the campaign’s final stretch, Congress and President Bush passed with great fanfare a new law to erect a 700-mile border fence to keep out rampaging Mexican immigrants, but guaranteed no money to actually build it. Rush Limbaugh tried to persuade his devoted audience that Michael J. Fox had exaggerated his Parkinson’s symptoms in an ad for candidates who support stem-cell research purely as an act.

In a class by itself is the president’s down-to-the-wire effort to brand his party as the defender of “traditional” marriage even as the same-sex scandals of conservative leaders on and off Capitol Hill make “La Cage aux Folles” look like “The Sound of Music.” Just in recent days, the Rev. Ted Haggard, a favored Bush spiritual adviser and visitor to the Oval Office (if not the Lincoln Bedroom), resigned as leader of the National Association of Evangelicals after accusations that he patronized a male prostitute, and the Talking Points Memo blog broke the story of the Republican Party taking money from a gay-porn distributor whose stars include active-duty soldiers. (A film version of Mrs. Cheney’s "Sisters," alas, still awaits. [Sisters is an out-of-print lesbian sex novel by the wife of "vice president" Dick Cheenie.])

As I said, American politics is the cheapest entertainment going, but it's not pretty or funny or fun³.
_________________

1. My post about a "God experience" in my back yard.
2. But why would the hapless Kerry joke [a verb] about this in the first place? Pathetic. When he read my post about Bush jokes not being funny, he obviously didn't get it.
3. My first post about Kerry's "joke."