And the War Continues....

30,000 more.... I hope all breathing, conscious viewers of Obama's speech the other night made the connection that some of those cadets in the audience may possibly lose their life or become severely wounded in the escalating war over Afghanistan. And not just our fellow Americans, but more of our allies and many more innocents in this effort to exterminate the extremists. We all wish that the current circumstances over there were different. We'd pull our soldiers out of there tomorrow, and immediately stop the killing. In that utopian world, humans would learn to value life, value each other, our similarities, and differences - putting an end to our civilization's history of hate, humiliation, cruelty, violence, and horror. For all our "progress", how far have we actually risen above our beastly ancestry?

What's the best scenario? We snuff them out, eliminate their leadership, permanently debilitate their infrastructure and networks, the Afghan government stabilizes and develops the capacity to handle their own domestic problem people, we (US & allies) team with them to establish a tradition of growing grassroots ambassadors that incubate institutions of education, health, and economic opportunity equally across gender, religion, race, ethnicity.... And then, once we have accomplished all those costly improbabilities, will we find ourselves repeating the seemingly endless battle in Yemen, Somalia, Iran, or the numerous other countries where their cousins live?

Hypothetically thinking, what if the tables were turned, and we were the ones that had foreign armies waging war on our soil, destroying our towns, fields, some of our women and children in the process of rooting out our radicals.....Would we not fight back? Would we ever stop fighting?

For every philosophy of non-violence, there is a philosophy of war.

After all the reading and thinking and talking to dozens of veterans, soldiers currently serving, lawyers, professors, doctors, farmers, mothers, fathers, and all sorts of strange or common Americans across this country; I've tried to make sense of this war; to draw an informed, better understanding; maybe a few loose conclusions to improve personal actions.....

At least pertaining to our President's speech the other night, and the difficult decision to send (and shift) thousands more, I support him. I think that Obama is the type of person, and more importantly, the type of leader, that tried to find every possible way to save lives by getting out, but the facts of this disaster didn't add up to doing such.

As for Dick Cheney..... His comments prior to the speech do nothing but further solidify his reputation as a primary detriment and source of destructive hypocrisy to our country. You can't call yourself a true Republican after shooting your friend in the face. Just another accident to add to all the other mistakes. He ought to be fitted with more than a muzzle. I reserve further comments.