Obama's New War Plan: Sasha Smith

I think this must have been one of the hardest messages for Obama to do. I know he probably had to make a really hard decision. I'm not also sure that I can say I wouldn't have made the same decision. As much as I am anti-war, we can't ignore the fact that Obama did not start the war and we had been entrenched in this awful situation years before he became President.

I'm not sure that it would really be responsible for us to have started a war and then pulled out and leave the people that we destroyed helpless. Obama most likely would not have started an unnecessary war but unfortunately he is going to be the one who is remembered having to end it.

I am not in the White House to know the in's and out's on how Obama came to that decision. We probably will never know the truth and will be speculating until all the troops come home. The hardest part of the decision for me is the $30 billion dollars in the first year alone. Today, I was facilitating race dialogues at Morehouse College, an historically black college in Atlanta, for Abraham Lincoln's Bicentennial Leadership Town Hall's (which are being held all across the nation.) We talked about Lincoln's "unfinished work." This was referring to race and equal rights for all as two major challenges for Lincoln that we still struggle with today. Obama is part of this "unfinished work." And he alone will not be able to finish it. We will have to help our President and our nation to overcome the hate an that started this unnecessary war in the first place. Lincoln is researched, and written about in the same amount of times as  Jesus, and Shakespeare. If a man so great was able to make mistakes and still be revered as one of Americans best President's than I believe Obama has the right to learn from his decision and maybe some day we will be revering him in the same way as Lincoln. If I learned anything today from being in a room with high powered leadership in the city of Atlanta it was that we should not judge someone by a few decisions they have made but by how they have learned and grown to be a better man from those decisions.

(To learn more about Lincoln's Bicentennial Celebration events visit www.lincolnbicentennial.gov.)

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