The Making of a Quagmire

[unhappycamper]

The Making of a Quagmire
Byron Williams
Posted: October 11, 2009 01:54 PM

Eight years ago, I wrote an essay titled "Confessions of a Quasi-Pacifist." I wrote the piece during a time when I, like many Americans, were trying to understand my feelings immediately following the 9/11 tragedy.

I concluded at the time, I was not the absolute pacifist I originally thought. There was indeed a threshold of evil that I was willing to cross with the use of force knowing, as the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr cautioned, that made me susceptible to evil as well.

Ignoring Niebuhr's caution, I supported the effort to invade Afghanistan. If a sovereign nation knowingly provided a safe haven for those who caused the 9/11 tragedies, the U.S. had no other recourse.

But it wasn't merely supporting the invasion of Afghanistan. It was also providing tacit approval for the Patriot Act and fueling momentum to invade Iraq, which begat Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay.

Eight years removed things look different. America is now faced with the possibility of an inimitable paradox. President Obama has just won the Nobel Peace Prize while he simultaneously plans to unequivocally make Afghanistan his war.


Rest of article at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/byron-williams/the-making-of-a-quagmire_b_316779.html

[HillbillyBob]

1. Some of us took a lot of flack and name calling for predicting just

what is happening now. As well as saying that destroying 2 sovereign nations would be a disaster, wrong and win us no friends, get a bunch of innocent men, women and children dead or maimed. When it really was a crime matter rather than a war matter.

It sucks to be right, I even predicted just this mess when the talk of (*) running for office.

And I was ridiculed then. It sucks to be a Cassandra.