Open Letter to President Obama

This was sent to me in an email from a family member. I am not putting my opinion on it - I am simply posting this letter to spark a conversation.




Dear President Obama,

Do you really want to be the new "war president"? If you go to West Point tomorrow night (Tuesday, 8pm) and announce that you are increasing, rather than withdrawing, the troops in Afghanistan, you are the new war president. Pure and simple. And with that you will do the worst possible thing you could do - destroy the hopes and dreams so many millions have placed in you. With just one speech tomorrow night you will turn a multitude of young people who were the backbone of your campaign into disillusioned cynics. You will teach them what they've always heard is true - that all politicians are alike. I simply can't believe you're about to do what they say you are going to do. Please say it isn't so.

It is not your job to do what the generals tell you to do. We are a civilian-run government. WE tell the Joint Chiefs what to do, not the other way around. That's the way General Washington insisted it must be. That's what President Truman told General MacArthur when MacArthur wanted to invade China. "You're fired!," said Truman, and that was that. And you should have fired Gen. McChrystal when he went to the press to preempt you, telling the press what YOU had to do. Let me be blunt: We love our kids in the armed services, but we f*#&in' hate these generals, from Westmoreland in Vietnam to, yes, even Colin Powell for lying to the UN with his made-up drawings of WMD (he has since sought redemption).

So now you feel backed into a corner. 30 years ago this past Thursday (Thanksgiving) the Soviet generals had a cool idea - "Let's invade Afghanistan!" Well, that turned out to be the final nail in the USSR coffin.

There's a reason they don't call Afghanistan the "Garden State" (though they probably should, seeing how the corrupt President Karzai, whom we back, has his brother in the heroin trade raising poppies). Afghanistan's nickname is the "Graveyard of Empires." If you don't believe it, give the British a call. I'd have you call Genghis Khan but I lost his number. I do have Gorbachev's number though. It's + 41 22 789 1662. I'm sure he could give you an earful about the historic blunder you're about to commit.

With our economic collapse still in full swing and our precious young men and women being sacrificed on the altar of arrogance and greed, the breakdown of this great civilization we call America will head, full throttle, into oblivion if you become the "war president." Empires never think the end is near, until the end is here. Empires think that more evil will force the heathens to toe the line - and yet it never works. The heathens usually tear them to shreds.

Choose carefully, President Obama. You of all people know that it doesn't have to be this way. You still have a few hours to listen to your heart, and your own clear thinking. You know that nothing good can come from sending more troops halfway around the world to a place neither you nor they understand, to achieve an objective that neither you nor they understand, in a country that does not want us there. You can feel it in your bones.

I know you know that there are LESS than a hundred al-Qaeda left in Afghanistan! A hundred thousand troops trying to crush a hundred guys living in caves? Are you serious? Have you drunk Bush's Kool-Aid? I refuse to believe it.

Your potential decision to expand the war (while saying that you're doing it so you can "end the war") will do more to set your legacy in stone than any of the great things you've said and done in your first year. One more throwing a bone from you to the Republicans and the coalition of the hopeful and the hopeless may be gone - and this nation will be back in the hands of the haters quicker than you can shout "tea bag!"

Choose carefully, Mr. President. Your corporate backers are going to abandon you as soon as it is clear you are a one-term president and that the nation will be safely back in the hands of the usual idiots who do their bidding. That could be Wednesday morning.

We the people still love you. We the people still have a sliver of hope. But we the people can't take it anymore. We can't take your caving in, over and over, when we elected you by a big, wide margin of millions to get in there and get the job done. What part of "landslide victory" don't you understand?

Don't be deceived into thinking that sending a few more troops into Afghanistan will make a difference, or earn you the respect of the haters. They will not stop until this country is torn asunder and every last dollar is extracted from the poor and soon-to-be poor. You could send a million troops over there and the crazy Right still wouldn't be happy. You would still be the victim of their incessant venom on hate radio and television because no matter what you do, you can't change the one thing about yourself that sends them over the edge.

The haters were not the ones who elected you, and they can't be won over by abandoning the rest of us.

President Obama, it's time to come home. Ask your neighbors in Chicago and the parents of the young men and women doing the fighting and dying if they want more billions and more troops sent to Afghanistan. Do you think they will say, "No, we don't need health care, we don't need jobs, we don't need homes. You go on ahead, Mr. President, and send our wealth and our sons and daughters overseas, 'cause we don't need them, either."

What would Martin Luther King, Jr. do? What would your grandmother do? Not send more poor people to kill other poor people who pose no threat to them, that's what they'd do. Not spend billions and trillions to wage war while American children are sleeping on the streets and standing in bread lines.

All of us that voted and prayed for you and cried the night of your victory have endured an Orwellian hell of eight years of crimes committed in our name: torture, rendition, suspension of the bill of rights, invading nations who had not attacked us, blowing up neighborhoods that Saddam "might" be in (but never was), slaughtering wedding parties in Afghanistan. We watched as hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians were slaughtered and tens of thousands of our brave young men and women were killed, maimed, or endured mental anguish - the full terror of which we scarcely know.

When we elected you we didn't expect miracles. We didn't even expect much change. But we expected some. We thought you would stop the madness. Stop the killing. Stop the insane idea that men with guns can reorganize a nation that doesn't even function as a nation and never, ever has.

Stop, stop, stop! For the sake of the lives of young Americans and Afghan civilians, stop. For the sake of your presidency, hope, and the future of our nation, stop. For God's sake, stop.

Tonight we still have hope.

Tomorrow, we shall see. The ball is in your court. You DON'T have to do this. You can be a profile in courage. You can be your mother's son.

We're counting on you.

Yours,
Michael Moore
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MichaelMoore.com


P.S. There's still time to have your voice heard. Call the White House at 202-456-1111 or email the President.

Michael Moore is a big, fat idiot.

The Other One wrote:

Michael Moore is a big, fat idiot.

That may be true but this letter is also.

Do you honestly think we are protecting our freedom by sending our brothers, sisters, sons and daughters to a region of the world that will never be contained or controlled? I'm not talking about Afghanistan either, I'm regarding the entire Middle East. What progress we can or ever will be able to make over there will be done through politics. As disgustingly bleak as diplomacy has been and will be it is less greusome than the pointless blood we shed. We are not protecting our interests. We are not winning a war. We are burning lives and resources that could be spent to put us back on top of the world in education, production, quality of healthcare, protection of borders and countless other productive ventures.

We have already lost more troops than people killed in the WTC bombings. How much more of my brothers' blood will it take before the contribution to destroy terrorism outweighs the acts of it? I am a United States Marine. I know terrorism. Our country has (sometimes sheepishly, sometimes boldly) admitted acts of terrorism in the name to protect our freedom. The line is played out.

We need to stop playing games with our citizens lives, stop pumping money into guaranteed financial losses and work on our borders, our citizens competence in a market that is outpacing us with an education that eclipses us.

The "Good 'ol USA" is going to wither and die if we stay the course. As a whole we will just bitch about it, eat our fast food and watch the stars dance as the ship sinks.

I pretty much agree with you, BBB. Problem is that lots of people don't understand or respect any form of problem-solving other than threat, authority, and brute force. Black & White thinkers like EP can't wrap their inflexible minds around the notion that some problems quite literally CAN'T be solved via brute force- even when clear evidence has been right in front of them for decades (the War on Drugs, for example).

The invincibility of our military is a deeply ingrained notion here in Amerika... and we seem to believe that they can, therefore, solve any problem. Kinda like trying to swat a fly with a sledgehammer- you'll break lots of shit in the process, and the fly will probably get away.

I won't claim to be any better in this regard- I only see the Afghanistan operation as a mistake via hindsight... and I think the same is true of most people who are having doubts these days. We Americans were gung-ho and out for blood back in 2001/2002, and few people questioned the plan of going over there and kicking some Taliban ass. I didn't. But nowadays, reality has long since set in... turns out that nation-building is damn costly in terms of lives and dollars (who'da thunk??)- and it might not even be possible to attain the sort of outcome that Bush & Co. envisioned. So yeah, with the benefit of hindsight I believe we'd have been MUCH better served with a focused, well-funded, international police action... and the Eurofags likely would've jumped on board with that.

But that's neither here nor there considering the situation we find ourselves in. I don't particularly LIKE Obama's plan... but I've yet to hear a better alternative. Obviously he wants to tie up the loose ends as well as possible and get the hell out. Don't know what else we COULD do at this point other than continue to flush lives and money down the drain indefinitely (the Republican alternative?). And we all know that the likes of EP will bitch & moan no matter WHAT the plan is.

I'd like to think that we'll learn a lesson from all this, but history tells me otherwise.

One thing that I find amusing about all this is that the Iraq and Afghanistan pull-outs are timed to immediately precede the 2010 and 2012 elections, respectively. Obama is betting ALL the Dems' cards on a decent outcome for both Crapistans- at least in the short-term. I don't see this going well.

Bighead wrote:

Don't know what else we COULD do at this point other than continue to flush lives and money down the drain indefinitely.

Glass... End the problem...

Keep dreaming dumbass.

Won't be us...

If anyone nukes Muslims it'll be Israel or India depending on the locale. A big political mess if India does, the beginning of WWIII if Israel does.

nitromaxx98 wrote:

Won't be us...

Silly notions like empathy aside... what really disturbs me is that you and millions just like you really can't understand that such action wouldn't even be in our OWN best interests.

Ratzilla wrote:

If anyone nukes Muslims it'll be Israel or India depending on the locale. A big political mess if India does, the beginning of WWIII if Israel does.

True dat... could be WWIII either way. It might be inevitable. If that's the case, then you fuckers are on your own... I'm headded to Australia.

I'll be rooting for ya'll, though.

Bighead wrote:

Silly notions like empathy aside... what really disturbs me is that you and millions just like you really can't understand that such action wouldn't even be in our OWN best interests.

No shit, Sherlock...

Bighead, you know the Aussies would take our side in WWIII. But maybe, just maybe, the nukes would only fly in the Northern part of the globe.

A best case scenario would be that the Middle East and parts of Asia would have a nuclear slugfest destroying the bulk of the Israelis, Arabs, and Hindus, and leave us with only the witch burners that we are accustomed to living amongst.

Yeah, I saw lots of Aussies at Bagram. They'll be on our side and they're pretty close to China. When WWIII starts, I'll either get a better job or move to Thailand, depending on my finances.

What's the weather like in Camp Leatherneck?

It changed from dusty to muddy a couple days ago.