Flickr photo by T ruthout.org
The nation awaits an announcement from President Barack Obama tonight that will confirm that Obama has, in fact, pledged to send 35,000 more troops to Afghanistan to escalate war.
We await confirmation that some soldiers for Christmas will be getting the gift of deployment to an American theater of war in Afghanistan.
Just weeks ago, Obama was able to, with the support of the U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry, reject four military options that were on the table and send them back to the drawing board so that when they were resent to his desk they would have exit strategies in them.
None of this action, which seemed to indicate at least a personal conflict with the war, involved a plan for immediate withdrawal. None of this involved bringing an end to the quagmire we now face in Afghanistan and will surely expand if we send any more troops to Afghanistan.
And, now, this nation sits at a conjuncture waiting for Obama's primetime speech at West Point, which will be sliced, diced, dissected, disemboweled, and re-cut for mass consumption by the people of America by media pundits afterward.
Those who saw Keith Olbermann's Special Comment on Countdown Monday night or Rep. Dennis Kucinich's appearance on On the Record w/ Greta van Susteren on Friday night know American minds need to be captured in the interest of this idea that this war should be continued or else this nation's sleazy adventure in Afghanistan will become very untenable.
I cannot know or sympathize with the position for opposing Obama's current actions on the Afghanistan War, which are surely evident among Republicans who as a party find they can never support anything the president does. But, I do have the capacity to see the folly of the liberals and Democrats who have the ability to steer Obama into a more humane direction than escalation.
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