Long past time for U.S. to get out

Published 3:45 pm Thursday, July 1, 2010

Since President Obama embarked on his historic presidency, there has been a noticeable drop in public discourse regarding our duo foreign occupation disasters of Iraq and Afghanistan.

To a certain extant this temporary hiatus is perhaps inevitable given the presidential transition. However, the Obama honeymoon is over and the facts regarding these on going occupations and slaughters can no longer be ignored.

There are two pivotal issues regarding both Iraq and Afghanistan. The costs of these wars, coupled with our ever burgeoning pentagon budget, will cripple our best efforts to repair our economy and national infrastructure. Consider that the 2010 Pentagon budget will exceed $600 billion dollars, and this does not take into account the spiraling costs of Iraq-Afghanistan.

These acts of clear aggression have been a catastrophic human rights disaster for the people of Iraq and Afghanistan. We are responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis and Afghans. Coupled with the ever rising death toll is the ominous and impending environmental destruction brought about by our incessant use of depleted uranium munitions since these attacks began. We are the architects for these costly human tragedies and there is no end in sight.

Indeed, President Obama — pursuing a strategy that may well destroy his presidency — wants to expand the Afghanistan war and insure that military advisers are entrenched in Iraq perhaps forever.

Americans need to heed the words of the brilliant Mideast correspondent Robert Fisk and demand that the U.S. military remove itself from the Middle East. The United States will not be able to recover and prosper until we address and resolve the issues of what may well be our great foreign policy tragedies.

Jim Sawyer

Edmonds