Harpo Jaeger dot com

The signs are inescapable

I’d say that the fact that Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan was a Muslim is a lot less important than the fact that he was an Army psychiatrist. His entire job is preventing people from feeling that they have to do exactly what he did.

Coincedence? No. When people with the training to assess and treat psychological syndromes like PTSD succumb to them, something is seriously wrong. Military suicides are already going way up. Afghanistan isn’t the good fight anymore. Service members are speaking out following their experiences there. There was a time when we could have done good there. That time is over.

Bush didn’t care about the troops enough to bring them home. Instead, he deployed more. And that doesn’t just mean that a bunch of them suddenly just materialized. Tours got longer. Time between them got shorter.

Obama, don’t make the same mistake. The deceptively low (considering the length of the engagement [and especially when compared to Iraq]) casualty figures are only or side of the story. This war is driving the country deeper into depression. It’s driving a wedge between us and our allies (cite BBC), not to mention the Muslim world. And it’s putting an unsustainable strain on our military.

You have the power to end it now. Do it before it’s too late.