Word: mightfully
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Ronald Reagan would have done it differently. He would have told a story. It might not have been a true story, but it would have had resonance. He might have found, or created, a grieving spouse - a young investment banker whose wife had died in the World Trade Center - who enlisted immediately after the attacks ... and then gave his life, heroically, defending a school for girls in Kandahar. Reagan would have inspired tears, outrage, passion, a rush to recruiting centers across the nation...
...question the President was expecting. He said he rejected that argument "because if you follow the logic ... then you would never leave. Right? Essentially you'd be signing on to have Afghanistan as a protectorate of the United States indefinitely." And the time limit, he suggested, might give him leverage over Hamid Karzai, the recalcitrant Afghan leader: "In my discussion with President Karzai yesterday," Obama said, "I was able to articulate to him exactly what he's going to need to do over the next two years to be prepared for this transition." (See a video about the soldier...
...might reasonably ask, did the strategy review really have to take so long and be so public? Obama had no choice about the public part of the program; he is privately furious about the leaks, especially those from the military. "We will deal with that situation in time," an Obama adviser told me. The criticism of the President for dithering is also unfair. This second Afghan strategy review in less than a year was made necessary by an assortment of dramatic new developments on the ground. Each had to be analyzed individually and then correlated with the others. There...
...brought upon himself by focusing so much attention on health care reform - but its proper place is in another speech. Given the feeling of abandonment that many of the soldiers I've spoken with during the past few years have, a more appropriate message to the American people might have been: I know you're hurting, but we're at war. We're trying to stabilize the most dangerous part of the world. We're trying to prevent the collapse of a nuclear state, Pakistan. We're trying to capture and kill the people who massacred our friends and neighbors...
...might have asked the public to pay a tax to support the war, as Congressman David Obey has suggested. Or he might have listed some charities that people could contribute to - Greg Mortenson's brilliant effort to build schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan comes to mind - or he might have asked Americans to send clothing, or seeds, to the second poorest country in the world. This is a message, a resolute and passionate evocation of national purpose, that the Taliban need to hear as well...