Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. From Genghis Khan to Gorbachev, foreign occupiers have failed to “finish the job” in Afghanistan.
Tonight, President Obama is expected to announce that unlike, say, Attila the Hun, he has a strategy for victory in the “Graveyard of Empires”:
I’ve also indicated that after eight years -- some of those years in which we did not have, I think, either the resources or the strategy to get the job done -- it is my intention to finish the job. And I feel very confident that when the American people hear a clear rationale for what we’re doing there and how we intend to achieve our goals that they will be supportive.
Obama reportedly will send an additional 34,000 troops in order to bring them all home. Hmm. Sounds like the Vietnam War strategy to “destroy the village in order to save it.”
Washington Post columnist Colbert I. King recently wrote:
And that gets us to a fear that is growing among some of the president's most ardent supporters: that Barack Obama, the fresh, think-outside-the-box leader brimming with energy and new ideas, has entered the White House and gone native.
Suspicion is spreading that Obama has lost some of the character that made him special; that he has taken on the ways of this town, thinking in conventional terms dictated by a brain trust and self-serving, entrenched Washington interests that make this city go ‘round.
That development, if true, would be as disastrous to the Obama presidency as a military miscalculation.
Count me among the 52 percent of Americans who oppose the Afghanistan war. The only viable “exit ramp” is to bring the troops home. Now.
