Do you notice  that since his inauguration, US President Barack Obama has barely mentioned Iraq, but has said a lot about Afghanistan, as well as Pakistan? For the first time since the September 11 attacks in 2001, we see a US President concentrating his efforts, and that of his administration on the area where terrorists are most active. It is also where Osama Bin Laden has been supposedly living all these years. Logic has finally come to the White House.

Continuing any war is something that we do not want to hear, but if we must put our energies into a war, and committ troops, I would rather it be in an area that we can justify. Iraq was never justifiable. Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld tried desperately to tell us that the United States invaded Iraq because Saddam Hussein was a threat. Firstly, he wasn’t a threat. Secondly, the weapons he supposedly had were a myth, and most importantly, the terrorists who destroyed 3,000 lives in the September 11 attacks were first of all from Saudi Arabia, and their leader, Osama Bin Laden, lives in the hills between Pakistan and Afghanistan. I don’t see a link to Iraq there at all. If nothing else, President Obama is making a direct link between who he is targetting and the exact geographical area where Bin Laden lives. As I said, we don’t want either the Iraq war or the war in Afghanistan to go on any further, but I am happy to have our troops in Afghanistan rather than Iraq. A Taliban controlled Afghanistan would be far worse than anything Saddam Hussein could have cooked up. They have proven that.

Also, for the first time in many years, the Afghan and Pakistani leadership is being put well and truly under the pump. Afghan President Hamid Karzai struts around in his Afghan national dress and waxes lyrical about anything and everything, but he has done little to unite his people, let alone put in place real strategies of finding Bin Laden, who is effectively living on his doorstep. Pakistan has had years of a military coup leader who has been treated with kid gloves by the US. Now it finds itself with an ineffectual leader, Asif Ali Zadari, who is doing even less than Karzai. What I want to see is President Obama putting the squeeze even more on these two gentlemen and make them work for their own security. If they are secure countries, then the world will be a more stable place as well.

I think we are still all in shock knowing that we have an articulate, intelligent President at the helm in the United States. Yes, he is being picked apart about his economic stimulus packages, but like I have said before, no one knows how to fix things. They all think they do. He can defend Afghanistan far more than Bush could ever defend Iraq. If anything, he is putting the focus back onto Afghanistan, which was the original miltary action soon after September 11th 2001.

Maybe if Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld had concentrated their efforts in Afghanistan and Pakistan more since 2001 and made the leaders there more accountable, we may have seen Osama Bin Laden hang from the noose, and not Saddam Hussein. A lot of time has been wasted, and it’s now time to think more cleverly, act more strategically and achieve some type of workable result without thousands of innocent men and women dying for the sake of oil and strategic position in the Middle East.

I do find it amazingly amusing, but also downright insulting, when I hear opponents of President Obama criticising every little thing he does. I am quite well aware that politicians need to be made accountable and they deserve to be pulled up when they are not performing. But please remember that this current situation, whether it be financial, military, or domestic, is so much more than any other sitting US President has ever had to deal with, probably with the exception of Franklin Roosevelt. The armchair critics weren’t there when George W Bush took his country to war on a whim, vetoed a children’s health bill, whilst promoting his ‘No Child Left Behind’ policy, and destroyed the chance to  further research the benefits of embyonic stem cells.

To the right wing, all that was a recipe for a superb Presidency.

Enjoy your day