Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D.

To the Editor:

Re “Accepting Peace Prize, Obama Offers ‘Hard Truth’” (news article, Dec. 11):

The Nobel Peace Prize only underscores the irony and sadness of President Obama’s Afghanistan policy. On that memorable night a year ago, in Grant Park in Chicago, before an impressed and stunned nation and world, Mr. Obama promised that change would come to America.

We looked forward to change where we could become more disengaged from, and impartial about, the world’s conflicts, since we are not the world’s policeman. Where anti-American extremism and terrorism could begin their gradual decline and eventual disappearance because the swamp would be drained of motivation for them.

But to our disappointment we find the recycled and failed policies of Lyndon B. Johnson, George W. Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld.

All we can do now is hold out hope that change will come to Mr. Obama himself, that he will reinvent us as a nation newly disengaged from conflict, where hatred against America can become virtually extinct, where we can at last make our peace with the world.

James Adler
Cambridge, Mass., Dec. 11, 2009

Note from KBJ: Did Barack Obama promise to change everything? I seem to recall him distinguishing between the war in Iraq and the war in Afghanistan, calling the former a "war of choice" and the latter a "war of necessity." Did the letter writer think he was kidding? Perhaps what this shows is what an empty vessel Barack Obama was (and is). People such as the letter writer filled that vessel with whatever they wanted (or hoped for). Hope and change indeed!