In his speech on Afghanistan last Wednesday evening, President Obama said:
“Peace cannot come to a land that has known so much war without a political settlement.”
Actually, a political settlement cannot come just because one side wants it. A political settlement needs both sides’ consent (or at least grudging acceptance). If one side would rather fight than negotiate, then they get to decide. I get more than a little tired of people who say the solution to a problem is to negotiate with the other side, without understanding that the other side has to be willing to negotiate, too. If the other side thinks that they can achieve their goals better by fighting, they are going to do that. And if we say that we are leaving (or are significantly reducing our presence), where is the incentive for the other side to negotiate, as opposed to waiting until we leave – unless, of course, they think we will be so desperate to negotiate, that they can get what they want that way.
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David Ignatius said this in The Washington Post:
“This Vietnam history is a caution against premature optimism about diplomatic solutions to deeply embeded conflicts, such as the one in Afghanistan. But the fact remains, as is so often stated, that there is no military solution to such conflicts.”
Actually, that is not true. In fact, Vietnam is an example where there was a military solution. The military solution was simple: The North Vietnamese attacked South Vietnam in 1975, and they won. Winning is a military solution.
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In his speech, President Obama also said:
“We must chart a more centered course. Like generations before, we must embrace America's singular role in the course of human events. But we must be as pragmatic as we are passionate; as strategic as we are resolute. When threatened, we must respond with force -- but when that force can be targeted, we need not deploy large armies overseas.”
I’m sorry, President Obama. Who are you saying wants to “deploy large armies overseas” “when … force can be targeted”? Instead of saying you are against things that nobody is in favor of, tell us how you would do things differently than what real people either have done or are proposing to do. Anybody can sound reasonable when they are comparing themselves with silly positions that aren’t held by other people. What President Obama needs to do is to explain how his positions are different than positions that other people really do hold.
(Perhaps President Obama is trying to make a subtle reference to Iraq here. Well, that doesn’t work. To accomplish what President George W. Bush was trying to do in Iraq (and what lots of Democrats voted for when they got a chance to approve our going into Iraq before we went there) required a large army. In fact, it probably required a larger army that we initially sent. You may disagree with what we were doing. But you can’t say that what we were doing did not require a large army.)
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And finally, near the end of his speech Wednesday evening, President Obama said:
“Over the last decade, we have spent a trillion dollars on war, at a time of rising debt and hard economic times. Now, we must invest in America's greatest resource -- our people. We must unleash innovation that creates new jobs and industries ….”
If President Obama really wants to “unleash innovation”, then he needs to get out of the way. Government is not going to unleash innovation by what it does. It will unleash innovation by what it doesn’t do. By the new laws it doesn’t pass. By the new regulations it doesn’t impose. Our schools can’t even fire incompetent teachers (or at least very many of them). Why do we think government can do anything positive to unleash innovation? Except that President Obama and many of his supporters really do think that. Which is depressing.
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