Obama’s War: No TIME It is Not!

I know the success of magazine articles are often crafted around catchy phrases and provocative thoughts; however, the phrase appearing on the December 14, 2009 issue of Time magazine, though it may be catchy is a thoughtless revision of history: “It’s His (Obama) War Now.”

Time, (Joe Klein), you are in the wrong “arena” when you write this war is owned by President Obama. It is not. If a president must be named in this response to the September 11 2001 attack on United States citizens, it must be President Bush. This conflict is a Bush administration conflict; some would even say, more specifically, that it is probably a Cheney conflict since the word on the street is that Cheney is the one who actually made the “real decisions” in the White House. Still others would be justified in saying it is a response to the Taliban/ Al-Qaeda mess. Bush, Cheney, Al-Qaeda, Taliban— this is a cancerous tumor that seems to be growing. However, it is not owned by our current president. Barack Hussein Obama was sworn into the Presidency of the United States on January 20, 2009; the Afghanistan conflict began long, long before that date.

Let’s be clear: The Afghanistan conflict is a cancer President Obama is attempting to cure, and, sadly enough, the (young) American soldiers will be the ones on the frontline. We need to applaud President Obama and the troops for attempting to clean up this mess. Those are the articles that need to be written and, indeed, the prayers that need to be prayed—for the troops. We need a cover story from TIME that reads: “Americans: Praying for their SOLDIERS.”

Who cares if President Obama doesn’t deliver a speech employing the storytelling techniques of a Ronald Regan. That was the Reagan way; we don’t need a puppet president; we need a president with his own method of talking to and with the American people.

Tagging the war on Obama coat-tail might sell issues of Time, but it is a representation of how history becomes a revisionist lie. The purpose of journalism is not to revise history; the objective is to report history. If we start saying that the war is Obama’s, that is what we are doing. The truth of the matter is this: President Obama is simply attempting to clean up a mess. Let’s get the facts right at the beginning so we won’t have to rewrite them!