Lincoln to Obama

Irony of all time, Lincoln enables black to lead country with new vision

By Robert Weller

Only a fool would say happy days are here again, yet no one can blame us for pinning our hopes on another skinny, muscular man from Illinois in a time of troubles.

Perhaps the Nobel Committee saw something in President Obama that his own people don't, didn't or don't yet. Perhaps he doesn't even know himself.

I tasted the legacy of Abraham LincolnAbraham Lincoln for the first time in years when I happened on Gregory PeckGregory Peck's narration of Aaron Copland's Portrait of Lincoln in my iTunes collection.

No sound bite here, at least none anything like what we hear lately.

"The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise -- with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country," said Lincoln in a speech to Congress on Dec. 1, 1862.

"Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. ... We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of Earth."

Lincoln, who gave his life in the bargain, promised that if we eliminated slavery "the world will forever applaud."

Our nation got used to that applause as we helped the world out of many jams, though it cannot be denied it often may have helped enrich us. Surely we were a democratic empire blessed a bounty of resources few could match.

Now we wander seemingly from one direction and strategy to another. Before he died in 1945, President Franklin Delano RooseveltFranklin Delano Roosevelt told our Allies we would not restore their colonies after defeating the Axis. We ignored a mutual defense pact with France and their troops were crushed at Dien Bien Phu in early May of 1954. Barely a decade later we were sending thousands of troops to South Vietnam.

Now we are trying to conquer Afghanistan, an area even Alexander the GreatAlexander the Great couldn't subdue until he married Roxane, the daughter of a regional nobleman of Sogdiana near Samarkand.

Islam was the single unifying force in this remote region after its arrival in the 7th century. Even modern armies like the British and Russian couldn't control the area.

One reason the Taliban has been so hard to defeat by our Army, by far the most advanced in the world, is that we helped arm them.

The Carter Administration had decided that one way to help increase pressure on Moscow, ultimately forcing its collapse, would be to draw it into a war in Afghanistan. From 1979-1989 it was their Vietnam.

The Taliban, whose rigid interpretation of Islam offends many nations, and even many Muslims, won control after several years of fighting.

They lost it almost overnight after allowing Osama Bin Laden's terrorists to launch the Sept. 11 attacks.

Other than forcing them out of Kabul, and failing to catch the Al Qaeda leader, most attention was focused on ousting Saddam HusseinSaddam Hussein from Iraq. The primary reason was the fear he had Weapons of Mass Destruction.

Now, eight years later, the Taliban has increased its strength by as much as 40 percent by some estimates.

One wonders how Lincoln would have dealt with this situation? Given his aggressiveness he certainly would not have given up control of the countryside.

Obama reportedly has spent time studying how Lincoln reacted to his generals. "The rail splitter" frequently fired them, and never bought into their argument that the war could not be won.

This situation appears to be exactly the opposite. An all-volunteer army exists to fight.

Hints from the Taliban's Mullah Omar that he favors negotiations will face close scrutiny by this administration.

Obama said earlier, "Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek."











Lincoln to Obama

Prize award small in comparison to presidential election