Photo: Doug Mills/The New York Times

Where’s the “Mission Accomplished” banner, Mr. President?

The President addressed the cadets at West Point tonight taking a play out of his predecessor’s playbook: surround yourself with troops, and appeal (six times) to 9/11:

To address these important issues, it’s important to recall why America and our allies were compelled to fight a war in Afghanistan in the first place. We did not ask for this fight. On September 11, 2001, 19 men hijacked four airplanes and used them to murder nearly 3,000 people. They struck at our military and economic nerve centers. They took the lives of innocent men, women, and children without regard to their faith or race or station. Were it not for the heroic actions of passengers onboard one of those flights, they could have also struck at one of the great symbols of our democracy in Washington, and killed many more.

He states himself that al Qaeda is no longer in Afghanistan:

As we know, these men belonged to al Qaeda — a group of extremists who have distorted and defiled Islam, one of the world’s great religions, to justify the slaughter of innocents. Al Qaeda’s base of operations was in Afghanistan, where they were harbored by the Taliban — a ruthless, repressive and radical movement that seized control of that country after it was ravaged by years of Soviet occupation and civil war, and after the attention of America and our friends had turned elsewhere.

It’s also nice to be reminded just how horrible those Taliban are: “ruthless, repressive and radical.” Nice alteration, Mr. President. Excellent work on painting the enemy as less than human.

So the occupation that has lasted for the past eight years will continue for at least another 19 months. We’re barely two years shy of the total occupation that the Soviets managed (and that we condemned while we funded and armed the opposition) during the 80′s. But this shouldn’t be viewed as a new Vietnam:

First, there are those who suggest that Afghanistan is another Vietnam. They argue that it cannot be stabilized, and we’re better off cutting our losses and rapidly withdrawing. I believe this argument depends on a false reading of history. Unlike Vietnam, we are joined by a broad coalition of 43 nations that recognizes the legitimacy of our action. Unlike Vietnam, we are not facing a broad-based popular insurgency. And most importantly, unlike Vietnam, the American people were viciously attacked from Afghanistan, and remain a target for those same extremists who are plotting along its border. To abandon this area now — and to rely only on efforts against al Qaeda from a distance — would significantly hamper our ability to keep the pressure on al Qaeda, and create an unacceptable risk of additional attacks on our homeland and our allies.

The United States officially had soldiers in Vietnam from 1965-1975.  This is not like that at all.

Mr. President, on September 23, 2001 I stood in a pulpit and spoke to a people who were afraid and angry. I read Romans 12:20-21:

“If your enemy is hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads.” Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

What I said then is true today: We cannot defeat terror by being more terrifying. It was true for President Bush. It’s still true for President Obama. This increase of soldiers in Afghanistan is a horrifically bad idea.

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I posted recently on the combination of Twitter and 24/7 news adding to the feeling of desperation in the world.  A wise commenter posted that it isn’t that the world is getting worse, we’re just hearing about it all the time.  I couldn’t agree more.  And I have an example to prove the point.

Ask the random moderately educated person what is the worst school massacre in America is, and they will tell you one of a couple of things. Depending on their age, they are most likely to say Columbine or Virginia Tech.  A few might pull out the Texas Sniper.  Others will think of some incident they might have been involved in, however remotely.  They would all be wrong.

The reality is that the worst school killings isn’t ingrained on the public psyche because it happened in a time prior to world wide news coverage.  It happened on May 18th, 1927 in the little town of Bath, MI.  And there is a good chance you’ve never heard of it, unless you’ve heard me ramble about it.

Andrew Kehoe was upset about new taxes.  So to get even, he blew up the school in Bath.  He killed 44 people in two explosions during the school day.  He planned the attack for months, getting hired on as the schools janitor and spent 8 months wiring up the school with explosives.  An entire wing of the school failed to explode, or the death toll would have been much higher.  Kehoe also killed himself in the final explosion.  In addition to the deaths, Kehoe destroyed the majority of the school building and town leadership.  The last explosion, done via a car bomb just like in Iraq so even those things aren’t new, killed much of the leadership of the town.

Now this made the news.  It dominated headlines around the country for weeks.  But news was slow, pictures rare and unless you picked up the paper, you didn’t read about it.  News was a very passive thing then.  Today, we’d have live footage from helicopters, kids around the country would twitter about it while fifty people who just “felt bad” because of it opened up fan pages on Facebook.  A group in Iowa would set up a website saying that George Bush knew about it and helped plant the bombs.  Another here in Alabama would theorize on their website that it was really a cruise missile fired from the USS Ronald Reagan.

And it’s that difference that makes today’s world seem to be going to Hell in that proverbial hand basket.  It’s the same one we’ve been in for years, and fundamentally it’s a better and more comfortable basket than ever before but the complaint of a single occupant carries far more weight today than ever before.  I mean why make your friends depressed, when you can depress the whole world, right?

The post The World is Going to Hell in a Hand-basket! appeared first on Geek Palaver.