A Message to President Obama after 100 Days: Do Not Let War Bring You Down (336 hits)
By Robert N. Taylor President Barack Obama has much of which to be proud after 100 days in office. But I write today not to praise him but to warn him of trouble ahead. That trouble goes by the name “War.”As a man with plenty of gray hair in his head, I remember the administration of President Lyndon Johnson during the 1960s. I saw a president successfully aid Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement by getting virtually all the major civil rights laws we live by today passed through the U.S. Congress. However, I also saw a president who was destroyed and forced to back away from seeking a second term in office because he was caught in the contradiction of trying to do social good on the domestic level while simultaneously trying to win an unjust war in Vietnam - a war he inherited from another president.
Barack Obama faces the same contradiction.
Former President George Bush misled the nation into supporting an invasion of the Iraq. The war was started in violation of International Law and it was persecuted in an immoral and incompetent fashion. The Obama administration promises to remove the major component of U.S. combat troops by 2011 (if things go well) while leaving another 50,000 in the country for some undetermined period - possibly for 10 to 12 years. This is wrong. It is wrong because it sounds suspiciously like continuing the war - just at a lower level. America should not be in Iraq at all. Continuing the war of Bush and the neo-conservatives in any fashion is to do no more than perpetuate a wrong. A wrong, which at roughly $12 billion a month, drains this nation of precious resources at a time of economic crisis. Mr. Obama, there is nothing you can do to convert the wrong of George Bush into a right - except end that war now and get out of Iraq. As a general rule, you solve a problem by identifying the causes of the problem and attacking the causes with their opposites. The cause of the current Iraq problem was the immoral invasion. Thus, the solution is to end the invasion and bring the troops - all of them - home.
Finally, be warned that the same neo-conservatives who worked behind the scenes to bring us the Iraq war are now working just as hard to get this nation involved in a military confrontation with Iraq’s neighbor Iran. This is all part of the neo-conservative white man’s dream to control the world, especially the oil-rich world. Mr. Obama, do not allow them to pull you into their master plan. The current wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan have the potential of draining this nation and crippling your administration. You have decided to send tens of thousands of more troops to Afghanistan. Why? What is this nation’s goal in Afghanistan? The vague generalities coming from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would require us to fight in Afghanistan for another 15 to 20 years and we will neither catch Osama bin Laden nor produce a stable government in the country. Unjust wars can only lead to disaster. President Obama do not repeat the mistake of President Lyndon Johnson.
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