Levees Not War

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed.” —Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1953

Having taken a long walk after a filling Thanksgiving dinner, we’ve been thinking and working on a longer piece about the president’s decision to escalate the war in Afghanistan. In short: Good process, wrong conclusion. Stay tuned for details.

In the meantime, we wanted to run some good thoughts from New York Times columnist Bob Herbert, who, as usual, nails it:

. . . the president has arrived at a decision that never was much in doubt, and that will prove to be a tragic mistake. It was also, for the president, the easier option.

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, to face up to the terrible toll the war is taking — on the troops themselves and in very insidious ways on the nation as a whole.

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