"Gentlemen! You Can't Fight In Here...

...this is the War Room!" Thus spake President Merkin Muffley in "Doctor Strangelove" forty-five years ago. Kudos for those of you who recognized the quote immediately, and shame on you who may have ascribed it to any of our more recent heads of state. Or not.
I have the distinct feeling that Barack Obama believed with every fiber in his earnest soul that he would bring about world peace, starting with his own country. But then there's that security briefing that every new president gets as part of the "transition." Suddenly the rubber of all those hopeful timetables about troop withdrawals and change in our foreign policy meets the harsh road of reality. Thirty thousand more troops will win the war in Afghanistan, and eighteen months later, they'll be packing up and heading home.
Michael Moore had some harsh words for our president in an "Open Letter" posted the day before the troop increase was announced. Never a fan of subtlety, Mike states that raising the number of troops in Afghanistan makes Obama the next "War President." He never makes the connection to Albert Einstein's assertion that "You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war," but that's the idea.
And somewhere, in a world that makes much more sense, this sentiment would ring true and we really could beat our swords into ploughshares and put all that money back into education and a health care program that would be the envy of every other country on the planet. That's not the world we live in currently. Taking a look at "the big board," and realizing that we have some strange commitment as the world's only remaining super power to keep the rest of civilization from tearing itself and us to tiny bits.
Would I prefer that there were some peaceful means to end all this strife? You bet I do. I am certain that our president wishes he could hit the reset button on the past eight years himself, but he's stuck playing out the string. It is ironic to me that Mister Moore chooses in his letter to cite Harry Truman's courage when he fired General MacArthur rather than letting him invade China. How different would our lives be now if that had happened? Would we still owe them all this money? And if George Patton would have pushed on into Russia at the end of World
War Two, there might not have been a Soviet Union to invade Afghanistan in the first place. But back to Harry Truman for a moment: Wasn't he the guy who ordered the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? I wonder what Mike thinks about that decision. I'm guessing that in a distant time and celestial plane, Harry and Barack will probably have a nice shared perspective about what it means to be "leader of the free world."