Afghanistan: Our Guiltless Acquiescence in a Mistaken War Feeds the Political Cowards Who Lead Us

© 2010 Peter Free

17 June 2010

Drip-drip of American tragedy in Afghanistan

The war in Afghanistan was the wrong approach to dealing with terrorism, yet it lingers on because our political leaders and their high-ranking military subordinates are too cowardly to end it.  Our complacent consumer-centric culture tolerates the drip-drip of tragedy from Afghanistan by paying it virtually no attention.

Being from the Vietnam generation, I am haunted by the silence that 2010 America pays to the most significant moral issues of today.  It as if we, as a society, have lost our soul.

Whose responsibility is this?

Bob Herbert, of the New York Times, wrote recently about the Afghanistan war, "Our government leaders keep mouthing platitudes about objectives that are not achievable, which is a form of deception that should be unacceptable in a free society." 

(Bob's editorial is outstanding.  Please read it.)

The problem goes deeper than that.  It goes to our support, as citizens, of the cowardly people who lead us.  It goes to our geopolitical ignorance as a public and to our laziness as individuals in allowing our leaders to deceive us with obvious misstatements of truth and childishly short-sighted plans.  Probably most significantly, it goes to our willingness to let irrational passions and hatreds, rather than far-seeing rational analysis, govern our nation's course.

If we can't link hands, hearts, and functioning brains over our children who serve in the military, just what is going to bring this nation back to greatness?