I'd like to spin on Meteor Blades' Afghanistan poll which, imo, was depressing in its options -- Will we be in Afghanistan for 10 years? More or less?
Holy hell, are we nuts for even asking?
My ex is a case manager at the VA and has recently taken on a daunting task of working in the newly created division of case management for Iraq vets (and presumably Afghan vets as well, didn't ask her). She is a courageous woman with a heart as big as any I have known and the tales she tells are mind numbingly sad.
Because we've for the most part succeeded in reducing outright deaths with body armor and state of the art field triage, the conditions of surviving injured vets are more terrible than ever before. Never mind PTSD (well, mind that too), a large number of the injuries, perhaps an overwhelming number of them involve head injuries from the frequent violent concussive blasts that soldiers have encountered from IED's.
And the worst part of the equation? Head trauma injuries can take decades to fully manifest. Think of the costs: broken families, broken lives, broken hearts of the sons and daughters, mothers and fathers. For a lifetime for many.
WE DON"T NEED TO BE IN AFGHANISTAN and we sure as hell never should have been in Iraq. Please, send a personal message to change.gov for us to get out, and get us out NOW. Our resources need to be instantly diverted to improving airport security (for real this time), border security (costal receiving), infrastructure security, a mission to the moon conversion to alternative energy -- all of which can be part of the economic recovery stimulus.
If we quit asserting ourselves in the affairs of other countries for our own selfish interests, (stopping the red tide in the 60's, now stopping the oil security tide in the 2000's), there's little chance that we'll be plagued by wmd toting middle easterners who are hopping mad-jealous of our collapsed economy.
One of the things that greatly impressed many of us about Barack Obama when we first knew of him was his apparent understanding of the history of the middle east and of his strong public criticism towards the pursuit of armed conflict with Iraq. But if Obama holds true to his word of aggressively pursuing our "war on terror" in Afghanistan, he might well be forgetting a different history; that of LBJ who lost his "Great Society" momentum to another war that we were ill equipped to win. And if you want a more direct historical foretelling of potential doom, there's the more recent history of the USSR's debacle in... Afghanistan.