Crossposted from Hillbilly Report
When the "War on Terror" began their were objectives to that war to be achieved. We were to go over there, topple the Taliban government and try to bring Democracy, and capture Obama bin Laden and bring him to justice along with all his cohorts we could find for the cold-blooded murders of thousands of Americans on Sept. 11, 2001.
Now, I will admit at the beginning I too thought that this was a worthy, and moral goal for our country to seek. We after all were attacked by bin Laden, who was aided by a Taliban government that harbored them and gave them safe haven to plan and execute the attacks. We could have gone to Afganistan and done the job with a splendidly trained and determined military.
However, along the way this whole thing got twisted and morphed into something quite different. A war on the Taliban government, and the al-Queda group led by Osama bin-Laden was morphed into this "War on Terror" which many of us saw the whole time as a propoganda hammer to pound it into the skulls of the American public that any person that tried to speak out againt the new war they sought in Iraq was a coward, communist, or flat-out traitor.
We then sent our brave young men and women into the wrong country without the proper equipment and without adequate training to face what would happen after the initial invasion that they pulled off magnificiently because the former administration seriously miscalculated and fumbled in a big way on a war they should not have sought. They effectively stretched our troops and resources across two countries but mostly ignored the first, you know the one that the folks who really attacked us were in??
Now I want to stop right here and say something that every American no matter what their political stripe if any may be should think long and hard about. Through almost a decade and now into the second administration, who have been the real victims of all of this?? Hundreds of thousands of our brave young American neighbors who have volunteered to serve in our armed forces either out of patriotism or a sheer desire to better their station in life.
How many tours of duty have these same young people been required to serve over and over again. How many of them were ripped from pregnant spouses for their third tour of duty?? How many times have the same families sacrificed their loved ones going into harms way time and time again for a policy that was failed from it's very conception by failed leaders that seemed to care not about these young people or their families as long as they achieved whatever objective it was that if you notice they have never even achieved!!!
How many of these young now have lain their lives in the dust of the desert sand as a sacrifice for their country and never come home, whose families will forever be stuck with the final image of them getting into whatever it was they left in? These troops have poured their sweat, tears and blood into the middle-east and have never had a clear objective, and exit point or anything else to go by but orders that have been flawed more times than not.
When is their time to be told that they have done their job, done their duty that millions of Americans have never done, and now can come home?? When will they get at least a clear objective to aim for??
The former Administration is gone. This is our baby now, and I honestly do not like the direction this thing keeps taking. Suggestions are being made to send thousands more troops to Afganistan, and I honestly do not see any kind of strategy or list of goals to be achieved:
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said that walking away isn't a viable option to deal with a war that is about to enter its ninth year.
"I don't think we have the option to leave. That's quite clear," Gibbs said.
The debate over whether to send as many as 40,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan is a major element of a strategy overhaul that senior administration policy advisers will consider this week as they gather for top-level meetings on the evolving direction of the war.
Obama has invited a bipartisan group of congressional leaders to the White House on Tuesday to confer about the war. He said the administration would brief leaders from both parties and key committee chairmen and would seek their opinions.
http://news.yahoo.com/...
Now you can call me partisan but you can also call me consistent. I have only spoken on some of the human toll in these wars and not the financial. While that is bad, the human toll concerns me more because as a Democrat I believe in fighting against social injustice wherever I see it and right now I believe the men and women of our armed forces who are being forced to toil tour after tour for a never-ending game of ring-around-the-rosy while their mission never gets accomplished are being dealt a serious injustice.
Does our party really want to adopt a failed policy of doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result?? I think most of us know what that is the definition of.
If the Obama Administration is serious about continuing a failed policy then we must simply stand up for our troops and demand sanity with clear, defined goals and an exit strategy in the not too distant future. If we have not achieved whatever the hell it is we were supposed to do there by then we never will. Americans may have to simply live with the fact that our leaders then missed the window of opportunity way back when with their incompetent actions and nothing we can do will ever make up for their failure. Our society as a whole should learn a valuable lesson and never let themselves be propogandized and whipped into such a frenzy again.
But for the life of me I cannot figure out why we would want to carry on a failed policy that is another party's legacy.