aw. RE: The Nobel Prize for War 2009 goes to ...

[Mark Kohut]

I may be self-comfortingly delusional and projecting obama's world, so to speak....but I have this hope that he wanted to 'surge' now for greater security for us and them, so to speak.............

So, if they do not step up, and I think he knows that is not likely to happen, then it will, counterintuitively, be easier to leave.

I heard Michael Walzer speak a while ago, 2+ years ago now, in NY , a philosopher most famous for playing all the changes on what is a 'just' vs. an "unjust" war........

His leading principle was innocent deaths, civilians or soldiers on the wrong side (who should not have even been fighting if war was 'unjust')
Anyway, he believed that the Iraq War was not a just one to engage in. Nothing new there. 

BUT, he argued publicly that ONCE WE WERE THERE, it was now unjust TO simply leave lickety-split......THAT would result in unnecessay deaths for soldiers and Iraqi civilians THEN.....

I hope a semi-hidden belief, such a calculus, is part of Obama's moral compass re Afghanistan. As I say, I sorta hope. The thing with feathers 
not on angels........


--- On Thu, 12/3/09, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: aw. RE: The Nobel Prize for War 2009 goes to ...
> To: "P-list" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Date: Thursday, December 3, 2009, 2:02 PM
> http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2009/12/the-bin-laden-strategy.php
> 
> In his thorough history of 9/11 The Looming Tower, Lawrence
> Wright
> makes a pretty persuasive case that Osama bin Laden’s
> goal in planning
> out terrorist attacks throughout the 1990s was to suck the
> U.S. into a
> Soviet-style war in Afghanistan. Bin Laden had no delusions
> about
> turning the U.S. into a Muslim country. Instead, he wanted
> to pull
> America into an expensive, dispiriting, unwinnable
> war—the sort of war
> nearly every power that has invaded Afghanistan has had to
> extract
> itself from, tail between legs. Wright writes that bin
> Laden was
> initially dispirited at the ease with which U.S. forces
> removed the
> Taliban from power.
> 
> The good news is that the United States is a lot richer and
> more
> powerful than the Soviet Union was, and the Taliban’s
> backers are a
> lot poorer and weaker than the mujahedeen’s backers were.
> So at the
> end of the day, actually bleeding us into submission
> isn’t going to
> work. Even in our weakened post-Bush, post-Iraq,
> post-recession state
> we can afford to be sloppy with our allocation of
> resources. But that
> doesn’t make it a good idea. As Matt Duss pointed out
> yesterday,
> that’s why one of the strengths of the administration’s
> approach to
> Afghanistan is its determination to avoid a purely
> open-ended
> engagement. The precise nature of that commitment is,
> however, pretty
> vague and they’re under pressure from the right to move
> in the most
> open-ended direction possible. It’s important to resist
> that impulse
> and keep America’s interests in Afghanistan in
> perspective relative to
> our many other interests at home and around the world.
>