Choosing our own future

Osama Bin Laden is dead. Good riddance. Don't believe Joe Scarborough or other moronic pundits who claim that President Obama went against his supporters on the left by taking out the head of Al-Qaeda. None of us are shedding a tear for Bin Laden. He got what he deserved.

Bin Laden was evil -- but he wasn't stupid. A realistic assessment of his actions suggest that he accomplished some of what he set out to do. The goal was to entice the US into a protracted ground war in Afghanistan in order to bankrupt America and to radicalize the Muslim world against the West. And the result? The US military is approaching a decade in Afghanistan, plus eight years in Iraq, and together those campaigns have cost two or three trillion dollars. Meanwhile, there has been some radicalization of small groups of Muslims.

We're still here, of course, and we can ensure that Bin Laden's goals are not fully accomplished if we wrap things up in Iraq and Afghanistan, and if we use our military a bit more sparingly in the future. This is not a call for demilitarization or isolationism, but only for wisdom and foresight. America cannot go on spending as much as all other countries combined on the military, and America cannot go on deploying its forces all over the world.

Let us regroup at home and lead by example so that the US once again occupies the moral high ground. If America had invaded Afghanistan after 9/11 with a smart plan and an exit strategy and if the country hadn't taken its eye off the ball by getting wrapped up in Iraq, then thousands of lives and trillions of dollars might have been saved. We might have had to wait for a small team of soldiers to take out Bin Laden 10 years after the fact, but that is what happened any way.