Obama Sending 30,000 More Troops To Afghanistan

With apologies to "awilheim", I think his/her contribution from yesterday is far more thoughtful. (Then again, what wouldn't be?) Awilheim's comment read as follows:

"This is not a rebuttal per se to comments in favor of the president's decision, but I'd like to point out two logical fallacies that seem be popping up in arguments contra 'again' et al:

1) Because Obama announced his intention to escalate the conflict in Afghanistan way back in the campaign, this build-up was completely predictable and therefore warrants no protest from the anti-war crowd.

—No, his decision does not come as a surprise. But if you consider it a wrongheaded policy move, the fact that the President announced his intentions well in advance does not make it any less objectionable. Many progressives who disagreed with his Afghan war stance calculated that it was still in their best interest to support him in the campaign (on the basis of his domestic agenda, renewed commitment to diplomacy, etc.), hoping that he might come around to their thinking on the war. Was it a long shot? Perhaps, but there's nothing wrong about being disappointed by the inevitable.

2) Because Obama has studied this issue much more than any of us, his conclusions on the matter are necessarily superior to our own.

—This strikes me as a very dangerous attitude to adopt with respect to one's own government. Merely understanding the complexities of a military situation does not mean that you are approaching it with the dispassionate, unencumbered judgment that one would hope to see in the commander-in-chief of the armed forces. The previous administration included numerous examples of officials driven by political considerations and ideological predisposition to ignore uncomfortable facts and opposing views. Simply being a policy expert does not mean that your assessments are in the best interest of the country (e.g. - health care industry lobbyists). So it's hardly beyond the pale to assert that Obama might have made a poor decision.

(By the same token, I do not fancy myself an expert on the Afghan war. But having read what I've read and knowing what I do about combat, my read is that this build-up is sending us down a slippery slope to no particular avail. I would love to be mistaken, but as a civically engaged individual, I will promote that viewpoint if/until I feel I am proven wrong.)"

-posted by awilheim yesterday at 3:42 p.m.

He is doing approximately what he said he would do during the campaign, so no, it is not a big surprise doing a straight comparison with campaign rhetoric.

However, the situation is much different now than it was last Sept-October. The "bottom" 90% are seriously hurting, many states and cities are hurtling toward insolvency, hundreds of thousands of jobs disappear every month, and there's no plan to do anything remotely significant enough to turn things around, not only short term but long term too.

To show his budget hawk bona fides, Obama is dancing around ordering cuts in discretionary fed programs (not defense) -- which won't amount to much money, just pain, since that is not where the money is. Meanwhile, he commits us to spending at least $30 billion additional, $100 billion a year or so, on this "most important" war.

Does anyone think we'll be out of Afghanistan before we've spent another trillion dollars and 3,000 citizens' lives there, not to mention an additional many thousands who will be so injured their lives will be wrecked and they'll be in essence wards of the state for as long as they live?

Anybody in the administration doing a real, financial and human, cost-benefit analysis on this escalation? Where's the new way of doing the people's business?