Day of Decision

December 1, 2009 is the day President Barack Hussein Obama announces his plans for our forces in Afghanistan, using the venue of the US Military Academy at West Point as a prop for political brownie points. June 6, 1944 was another date of consequence to the future of the world with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt listening to General Dwight David Eisenhower and providing every available resource to make the crusade started on that D-Day successful. It is a shame that we now have a leader who rightly termed Afghanistan a war of necessity (which in my mind means a war that must be won) who will not even give General Stanley McChrystal, the full number of additional forces that were requested months ago that McChrystal, the Eisenhower of today leading troops there, said were the minimum not needed to prevail but simply to stave off defeat. Both the US entry into the Second World War and the current Afghan campaign were triggered by a "day of infamy" (to borrow from FDR) with December 7, 1941 setting off the first and September 11, 2001 triggering the latter, but back when America's leaders still had backbone, we knew any war our nation embarked on, we had an obligation to win. This Obama with benchmarks and timetables for troop withdrawal makes a mockery of the loss of 3000 in two towers in Manhattan, in a field in Pennsylvania, at the Pentagon itself, and the thousand who have died since in the effort to avenge the outrage in the lair where Osama himself planned, Afghanistan. Pray the pretender in office is replaced by a leader who will not settle for defeat but will pay any price for victory before the US losses not only all credibility as as world power but even as a reliable nation.