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George, Thanks for posting David Swanson's exacting critique of the Nobel acceptance speech. His words are right on, pinning down Mr. Obama's fall. The increase of troops to Afghanistan was a historic decision and will be seen, in my opinion, as a tragic misstep, and unfortunate expense of a great deal of human hope for change. It will be many decades before we can recover from Mr. Obama's choice or lack thereof. What is lost in Mr. Obama's rhetoric and framed so beautifully by Mr. Swanson is that peace is our choice. It may not be Afghanistan's choice because of the socio-economic climate there, but as the greatest power on the earth, it is certainly ours. To argue that limited war is a step toward peace is now a very, very, old argument and it unfortunately has little support in history. Peace is our choice and to achieve it we must wage it as aggressively as we wage war. Of course, that would require an economic realignment of our entire society. If President Obama had stepped forward and claimed that his increase in Afghanistan was a mandatory "job program " in the United States it might have seemed a more accurate and better description of why he had made the choice he made. To cloak his choice in the veiled threat of "there is evil in world" brings to mind Harry Potter, Transformers, Lord of the Rings and a host of super hero movies that infect our cultural world view. There is evil in the movies, that's for sure . It seems that Mr. Obama is just trying to give the folks who bought popcorn their money's worth, just as his predecessor did. The formula is not complicated and it plays out very well eventually on a society that would like to believe the world is a Super Bowl we are out to win. It seems more logical that it is a place to live we are likely to eliminate. Peace,
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