That delicious irony filled statement coming from ardent Obama supporter and Religious Leftist Jim Wallis:
Two weeks ago, we delivered to the White House an open letter to the president calling on him to lead with a different kind of "surge" -- a surge of strategic and focused international development, diplomacy, and targeted humanitarian assistance (and, yes, the necessary security to support it), rather than again relying on more military escalation. Seventeen thousand people have signed on to that letter. We heard little of that new approach in this announcement of sending more troops to fight terrorism. To undermine, isolate, and roll back the influence, capacity, and power of groups like al Qaeda is a necessary goal, but we still fail to fully comprehend how the presence and consequences of foreign military power serve to strengthen the extremism we seek to weaken. The plan that the president announced last evening is still the wrong kind of surge, and the emphasis of this policy is still in the wrong place. The history of the troubled country of Afghanistan, the lack of a reliable governance partner, the absolute failure of every other occupation of that nation, and the consistent mistake of leading with military solutions all predict sad outcomes for this old approach. Our nation's growing skepticism about this war is well-founded.Ultimately, only a whole new approach to Afghanistan will have any chance of success. And many of us will continue to call for that, in the hope that the Obama administration will eventually listen. In the meantime, we will pray for our servicemen and women who will continue to sacrifice for a tragic strategy, for more innocent civilians in Afghanistan who will die from more military escalation, for a president whose deepest instincts we still trust, and for the soul of our own nation. May God save us from our well-intentioned mistakes.
Hey Jim... may God save us from your supposedly well-intentioned mistakes.
