The New Harford Democratic Club is having a congressional forum for the 2nd District, maybe 1st District too. Krist Boardman, who is running as a Democratic candidate against Dutch Ruppersberger on a platform of Money for Jobs, Not for War will participate in the forum on Wed., Sept. 1 at 7 PM at the Aberdeen Holiday Inn off I-95. Krist is looking for volunteers to hold his banner with his platform message. You can learn more about his campaign by going to his The
The Pledge of Resistance-Baltimore hosts an End the War! End the Occupation! rally on Thurs., Sept. 2 from 5 to 6:30 PM in
August 30, 2010
We Owe the Troops an Exit
By BOB HERBERT
We learned on Saturday that our so-called partner in this forlorn war, Hamid Karzai, fired a top prosecutor who had insisted on, gasp, fighting the corruption that runs like a crippling disease through his country.
Time magazine tells us that stressed-out, depressed and despondent soldiers are seeking help for their mental difficulties at a rate that is overwhelming the capacity of available professionals. What we are doing to these troops who have been serving tour after tour in
Time described the mental-health issue as “the U.S. Army’s third front,” with the reporter, Mark Thompson, writing: “While its combat troops fight two wars, its mental-health professionals are waging a battle to save soldiers’ sanity when they come back, one that will cost billions long after combat ends in Baghdad and Kabul.”
In addition to the terrible physical toll, the ultimate economic costs of these two wars, as the Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz and his colleague Linda Bilmes have pointed out, will run to more than $3 trillion.
I get a headache when I hear supporters of this endless warfare complaining about the federal budget deficits. They’re like arsonists complaining about the smell of smoke in the neighborhood.
There is no silver lining to this nearly decade-old war in
“Clearly, the final chapters of this particular endeavor are very much yet to be written,” said Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, during a BBC interview over the weekend. He sounded as if those chapters would not be written any time soon.
In a reference to President Obama’s assertion that
A lot of Americans who had listened to the president thought it was, in fact, a date when the American forces would begin an exodus. The general seems to have heard something quite different.
In truth, it’s not at all clear how President Obama really feels about the awesome responsibilities involved in waging war, and that’s a problem. The Times’s Peter Baker wrote a compelling and in many ways troubling article recently about the steep learning curve that Mr. Obama, with no previous military background, has had to negotiate as a wartime commander in chief.
Quoting an unnamed adviser to the president, Mr. Baker wrote that Mr. Obama sees the wars in
Wars are not problems that need managing, which suggests that they will always be with us. They are catastrophes that need to be brought to an end as quickly as possible. Wars consume lives by the thousands (in
One of the reasons we’re in this state of nonstop warfare is the fact that so few Americans have had any personal stake in the wars in
Not only is this tragic, it is profoundly disrespectful. These are real men and women, courageous and mostly uncomplaining human beings, that we are sending into the war zones, and we owe them our most careful attention. Above all, we owe them an end to two wars that have gone on much too long.
Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company
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"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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