Day By Day

Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Change you can believe in

If this had happened when Bush was President the media would have made this guy a national hero, these days not so much.
When Matthew Hoh joined the Foreign Service early this year, he was exactly the kind of smart civil-military hybrid the administration was looking for to help expand its development efforts in Afghanistan.
A former Marine Corps captain with combat experience in Iraq, Hoh had also served in uniform at the Pentagon, and as a civilian in Iraq and at the State Department. By July, he was the senior U.S. civilian in Zabul province, a Taliban hotbed.
But last month, in a move that has sent ripples all the way to the White House, Hoh, 36, became the first U.S. official known to resign in protest over the Afghan war, which he had come to believe simply fueled the insurgency.
"I have lost understanding of and confidence in the strategic purposes of the United States' presence in Afghanistan," he wrote Sept. 10 in a four-page letter to the department's head of personnel. "I have doubts and reservations about our current strategy and planned future strategy, but my resignation is based not upon how we are pursuing this war, but why and to what end."
It appears that serving his country under teH 0ne's stellar leadership has caused a crisis of confidence. How many more resignations await while Obama hits the links for another 18 holes? Things are starting to unwind; will we watch a replay of the last days of Nixon as the White house and staff become increasingly paranoid as they isolate themselves through incompetence and inaction?  

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