General William C. Westmoreland, commander of U.S. troops in Vietnam from 1964 to 1968, with President Lyndon Johnson, c. 1968. Westmoreland often used the phrase "light at the end of the tunnel" to indicate that soon the U.S. would gain the upper hand in the war.
"As we emerge from a decade of conflict abroad and economic crisis at home," President Obama said in his speech from Afghanistan on May 1, 2012, "it is time to renew America."
What sounded eerily like a campaign speech was an effort to condense the complexity and crisis of the United States' decade-long occupation of a country that counts itself among the poorest in the world into a several minute pep talk that seemed entirely disconnected from reality.
Occupied over and over again, Afghanistan is a country that has been torn apart by years of war.
And now, Obama seemed unintentionally to suggest, Americans can join that uninviting club of countries whose citizens have been impoverished by war.
A majority of Americans believe that that United States should leave Afghanistan. Whatever the motive was to launch the first attacks against the country, a decade of politics and war have changed the scene “7,000 miles from home” and also the homefront itself.
President Obama declared that somehow out of this war we would find:
“An America where our children live free from fear, and have the skills to claim their dreams. A united America of grit and resilience, where sunlight glistens off soaring new towers in downtown Manhattan, and we build our future as one people, as one nation.”
The hyperbole of the prose is so disconnected from the reality of the politics of U.S.-Afghanistan relations that it boggles the mind.
As the president delivered his speech, large-scale protests were only just drawing down after a “May Day” general strike that saw crowds demonstrating all over the U.S. and throughout the world.
“My fellow Americans,” the president said, “we have traveled through more than a decade under the dark cloud of war. Yet here, in the pre-dawn darkness of Afghanistan, we can see the light of a new day on the horizon.”
It was not exactly the Vietnam War-era phrase “light at the end of the tunnel.” But his wording closely echoed that oft-repeated phrase, which, in the shadow of that other war, came to symbolize the endlessness of another long war which just might be won, the leaders said throughout another decade, if only…if…
or not at all.
What sounded eerily like a campaign speech was an effort to condense the complexity and crisis of the United States' decade-long occupation of a country that counts itself among the poorest in the world into a several minute pep talk that seemed entirely disconnected from reality.
Occupied over and over again, Afghanistan is a country that has been torn apart by years of war.
And now, Obama seemed unintentionally to suggest, Americans can join that uninviting club of countries whose citizens have been impoverished by war.
A majority of Americans believe that that United States should leave Afghanistan. Whatever the motive was to launch the first attacks against the country, a decade of politics and war have changed the scene “7,000 miles from home” and also the homefront itself.
President Obama declared that somehow out of this war we would find:
“An America where our children live free from fear, and have the skills to claim their dreams. A united America of grit and resilience, where sunlight glistens off soaring new towers in downtown Manhattan, and we build our future as one people, as one nation.”
The hyperbole of the prose is so disconnected from the reality of the politics of U.S.-Afghanistan relations that it boggles the mind.
As the president delivered his speech, large-scale protests were only just drawing down after a “May Day” general strike that saw crowds demonstrating all over the U.S. and throughout the world.
“My fellow Americans,” the president said, “we have traveled through more than a decade under the dark cloud of war. Yet here, in the pre-dawn darkness of Afghanistan, we can see the light of a new day on the horizon.”
It was not exactly the Vietnam War-era phrase “light at the end of the tunnel.” But his wording closely echoed that oft-repeated phrase, which, in the shadow of that other war, came to symbolize the endlessness of another long war which just might be won, the leaders said throughout another decade, if only…if…
or not at all.