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Peace Candidate Talks Tough
by James Glaser July 22, 2008 Barack Obama is in the Middle East on some sort of international campaign swing, and he is telling the world that he will pursue America's War on Terror "with vigor." I don't know what war "with vigor" really means, but it sounds pretty scary to me. In the last few weeks, Obama has been talking about sending more troops to Afghanistan after he is elected. Somehow it doesn't seem right for the candidate who preaches change and talks about stopping the war in Iraq to be talking about escalating the war in Afghanistan. Soon I expect Barack Obama to start using words like, surge, winning, and victory, all of which are not the words anti-war people want to hear. If you think back over seven years ago when we first attacked Afghanistan, the reason given was to kill or capture Osama bin Laden. Well, we haven't been able to do that, and because bin Laden has left Afghanistan, I don't know if winning or victory is even possible there. What can we win and just over whom are we going to be victorious? Remember, when we attacked Afghanistan, it was arguably one of the most pitiful nations on earth. It hasn't gotten better either. If Barack Obama really wants to change things in Washington, then taking our country out of the perpetual war we have been in since WW II ended would be a nice one to start with. If you think about the countries we defeated in the "big one," they all learned that war does not pay. Germany, Japan, and Italy have been non-violent on the world stage for the last 60 plus years, and when it comes right down to it, so has most of the world. Third World countries are constantly fighting amongst themselves, and the United States has attacked a multitude of small backward countries. Yes, we have won some of those wars ( Haiti, Granada, Panama), but even when we claim victory, we end up sending money to those countries for decades. Today, one country cannot attack and take over another country. In today's wars, there is nothing to win. You can kill a lot of people, you can have a lot of your people killed, but when the fighting is over, things go back pretty much to the way they were before the fighting started. Wars today are really just a faster way to achieve regime change. When the presidential "peace" candidate starts talking about how he is going to continue the wars started by the political party he is trying to replace, things look really bad for this country's chance to know peace. |
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