Last week at West Point, President Obama cited his reasons for sending more troops to Afghanistan. Obama spoke eloquently. He insisted our cause is just. It is necessary, it is crucial. Killing Afghanis is the way to peace. The oxymorons rolled off his tongue. Apparently, it does not matter that wars are bankrupting us. Or sending our young to die. Or leaving them psychologically impaired. Or degrading the environment. Or, bitterest of ironies, breeding a new generation of terrorists. It doesn't seem to matter that most Americans want the war to stop, that most Afghanis want us out. It doesn't even matter that only a hundred Al Qaeda members remain in Afghanistan. The rest have taken refuge in Pakistan. Our new war president says the war must continue.

If there were a Nobel Prize for Theology, large parts of President Barack Obama's Oslo speech could be cut and pasted into an acceptance speech for it. The Peace Prize speech dealt with war and he made a clear case from the start for the use of force when necessary. While he began with political arguments for this position, his rationale took on an increasingly religious tone as the speech echoed faith leaders and theologians going back to the origins of Christianity.

The decision by President Obama to send additional troops to Afghanistan saddens me. I believe it is a mistake, it is the wrong direction for U.S. foreign policy, and it is disappointing to many of us in the faith community and our friends who spearhead the on-the-ground development efforts in Afghanistan and around the world. We needed a new approach to the very difficult and complicated situation in Afghanistan, and this isn't it. We were promised fundamental change in the direction of U.S. policy around the world, and this isn't it.

Catholic groups with a stake in matters of war and peace were alternately hopeful and dejected by President Barack Obama's plan to add 30,000 troops to the war effort in Afghanistan. "I think he's making a tragic and horrible mistake," David Robinson, head of Pax Christi USA, said of Obama during a Dec. 2 telephone interview with Catholic News Service from Pax Christi headquarters in Erie, Pa. "The irony of him announcing this fateful escalation the week before (Obama accepts) the Nobel Peace Prize, this is Greek tragedy."

Gen. Eric Shinseki was famously shunned by the Bush administration for daring to state the true costs of occupying Iraq. As President Obama's secretary of veterans affairs, he is, thankfully, no less candid about the grinding problems veterans face at home. They lead the nation in depression, suicide, substance abuse and homelessness, according to data that Mr. Shineski is delivering in salvos in his current role. About one-third of all adult homeless men are veterans, and an average night finds an estimated 131,000 of them from five decades bedding down on streets and in charity sanctuaries. About 3 in 100 of them are back from Iraq and Afghanistan. The problem of homelessness for Vietnam veterans is, shamefully, well known. But the men and women in this growing cohort took just 18 months to find rock bottom, compared with the five years-plus of the previous generation's veterans.

When Matthew Hoh joined the Foreign Service early this year, he was exactly the kind of smart civil-military hybrid the administration was looking for to help expand its development efforts in Afghanistan. A former Marine Corps captain with combat experience in Iraq, Hoh had also served in uniform at the Pentagon, and as a civilian in Iraq and at the State Department. By July, he was the senior U.S. civilian in Zabul province, a Taliban hotbed. But last month, in a move that has sent ripples all the way to the White House, Hoh, 36, became the first U.S. official known to resign in protest over the Afghan war, which he had come to believe simply fueled the insurgency.

A Sunday meeting and a Monday protest -- that was the agenda planned in advance of Wednesday's eighth anniversary of the start of the Afghan war. There had been other protests in Washington over the course of the conflict, dozens of them, but this time organizers believed they could revive the beleaguered antiwar movement, once such a force in U.S. policy. The next 48 hours would put their optimism on trial.

Although spurned by the United States, the International Criminal Court approaches its first review conference next year with several high-profile war-crimes prosecutions under its belt. More recently, the court grabbed headlines by issuing a warrant for the arrest of Sudan's president, Omar al-Bashir, over alleged war crimes committed in the country's Darfur region. But the seven-year-old ICC faces stiff challenges in coming years, advocates say. Supporters of the court who gathered in New York this week -- including its chief prosecutor, Luis Moreno Ocampo -- say second thoughts by some countries that signed on to the court, and criticisms that the ICC only goes after rights violators in weak countries, are just part of the challenge.

In a lengthy article, the Vatican newspaper said the U.S. and British governments had detailed information about the Nazi plan to exterminate European Jews during World War II, but failed to act for many months and even suppressed reports about the extent of the Holocaust. The newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, contrasted Allied inaction with the quiet efforts undertaken by Pope Pius XII to save as many Jews as possible through clandestine assistance.

On the face of it, a commitment by all United Nations member states to reach an understanding on how the world body should intervene to stop genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing would not seem like a major stretch. But the debate scheduled in the General Assembly for Thursday over the concept, known as "the responsibility to protect," is producing rancor before it even begins. So much, in fact, that instead of figuring out how to enforce the doctrine, the General Assembly could end up debating the policy's validity all over again, even though about 150 world leaders already endorsed it in 2005.