Great news from the President last night: we’re absolutely, positively, sure-as-shit getting the hell out of Afghanistan. And, as Phil Collins once sang, “we’ve gotta get in to get out.” So, time for 30,000 more of our friends, neighbors, sons, and daughters to get in. Not all of them will be getting out, unfortunately, but if you wanna make an omelet, you gotta break a few eggs, right? Lots of these expendable eggs will be coming from my neck of the woods – Fort Drum, which is about an hour north of me in the now infamous NY 23rd District (not sure if Doug Hoffman knows that or not). Ft. Drum is the home of the 10th Mountain Division (which had the honor of being the “most deployed” army division of the 1990s, and has endured multiple deployments and suffered large numbers of casualties in “Operation Enduring Freedom”), whose mission it is to train to fight in terrain like Afghanistan (not that Watertown, NY is exactly Afghanistan, but it’s pretty rural, gets damn cold in the winter, and has lots of trees and mountains (not exactly the Rockies, of course, but having humped a camping backpack up and down them myself, I’d just as soon not have to carry 120 lbs of military equipment around in them – especially if people were shooting at me). But at least we a have a firm deadline of July 2011 for withdrawal. Well, not a deadline, really. More like a “goal.” And, of course, it’s “tied to events on the ground.” And there’s no actual defined number of troops that will begin withdrawing in 2011. But we’ll pull out in time – “honest, honey.”
After all, as the President pointed out, the number of troops in Afghanistan has paled in comparison to the number in Iraq. So, we need to even all that out. Oh, I suppose we could do that by pulling our guys and gals out of Iraq instead of sending more of them off to die in Afghanistan, but that wouldn’t have been very manly, and Republicans would’ve taunted the President mercilessly. Not now, though – just ask Karl Rove, who said he’d be:
“among the first to stand up and applaud” the President for a troop increase.
…I am glad the president will finally provide General McChrystal with the troops he needs
Hey, if geniuses like Karl Rove and Michael Steele think this is a good thing, it must be. Mustn’t it?
Oh, sure, surrender monkeys like Russ Feingold and Dennis Kucinich aren’t happy, but those guys are always going on about stupid shit like peace and universal health care and whatnot.
As many Obama true believers have pointed out, this decision was “very hard,” and you certainly can’t argue with that. Our last great War President told us being the preznit was “hard work,” after all, and it was one of the few things he ever said that had the ring of truth to it.
For me, though, President Obama’s new master plan for Afghanistan evokes the words of the last generation’s great American War President, Lyndon Johnson, who, in 1966 (when there were “only” 200,000 US troops in Vietnam) said:
Some people ask if we are caught in a blind escalation of force that is pulling us headlong toward a wider war that no one wants. The answer—again—is a simple no…. There is not, and there will not be, a mindless escalation.
Amen, and “…God Bless you, God Bless our troops, and may God Bless the United States of America.”