Big Dogs Weblog

You Say ChickenHawk, I Say Obama

by Blake on Sep 23, 2009 at 10:32 Political

Well, it is coming apart for our Resident- he picked the wrong war- he thought (and still, to this day cannot say the words) that the surge in Iraq couldn’t work, probably because George Bush advocated for it.Now that the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan is going south, he wants out. 

Actually, he was never in it, as other Democrats now are beginning to admit. This was just a campaign ploy to try and show that he had some testosterone somewhere in him, when in actuality the opposite is true. Democrats do not like to fight- they have never met a war they couldn’t lose, or a confrontation they could master. 

President Obama is exploring alternatives to a major troop increase in Afghanistan, including a plan advocated by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. to scale back American forces and focus more on rooting out Al Qaeda there and in Pakistan, officials said Tuesday.

The options under review are part of what administration officials described as a wholesale reconsideration of a strategy the president announced with fanfare just six months ago. Two new intelligence reports are being conducted to evaluate Afghanistan and Pakistan, officials said.

The sweeping reassessment has been prompted by deteriorating conditions on the ground, the messy and still unsettled outcome of the Afghan elections and a dire report by Mr. Obama’s new commander, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal. Aides said the president wanted to examine whether the strategy he unveiled in March was still the best approach and whether it could work with the extra combat forces General McChrystal wants.

nytimes.com

War is a messy thing in the best of circumstances, and Afghanistan is not that at all. Afghanistan is, as the Russians found out, a very complicated situation. Russia was attempting to conquer the country- we are just trying to unify the country under one leader with a quasi- democratic form of government. Still, the resemblance to attempting to herd cats is still a valid analogy for this tribal country, where there has never been any central leadership to speak of.

So we can agree that the task is hard, but the Resident is more concerned with politics and perception than with real results, and his advocacy for this war was always rooted in relativism- the “perception” of being for this conflict was always more important than the reality of succeeding in this endeavor, despite the blood of our soldiers being spilled for this effort.

Although Mr. Obama has said that a stable Afghanistan is central to the security of the United States, some advisers said he was also wary of becoming trapped in an overseas quagmire. Some Pentagon officials say they worry that he is having what they called “buyer’s remorse” after ordering an extra 21,000 troops there within weeks of taking office before even settling on a strategy.

Mr. Obama met in the Situation Room with his top advisers on Sept. 13 to begin chewing over the problem, said officials involved in the debate. Among those on hand were Mr. Biden; Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates; Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton;James L. Jones, the national security adviser; and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

They reached no consensus, so three or four more such meetings are being scheduled. “There are a lot of competing views,” said one official who, like others in this article, requested anonymity to discuss internal administration deliberations.

Among the alternatives being presented to Mr. Obama is Mr. Biden’s suggestion to revamp the strategy altogether. Instead of increasing troops, officials said, Mr. Biden proposed scaling back the overall American military presence. Rather than trying to protect the Afghan population from the Taliban, American forces would concentrate on strikes against Qaeda cells, primarily in Pakistan, using special forces, Predator missile attacks and other surgical tactics.

nytimes.com

Oh yeah, there’s a good idea Joe-  Why, for the life of me someone doesn’t just sew Biden’s lips shut I will never know- he should be duct taped to within an inch of his life and put in Cheney’s “undisclosed” location.  Even Hillary can’t accept this scenario– it runs counter to reality, and as much as I might dislike her personally, she has a better grasp on reality than either the Resident or “Say it aint so” Joe.

Mrs. Clinton, who opposed Mr. Biden in March, appeared to refer to this debate in an interview on Monday night on PBS. “Some people say, ‘Well, Al Qaeda’s no longer in Afghanistan,’ ” she said. “If Afghanistan were taken over by the Taliban, I can’t tell you how fast Al Qaeda would be back in Afghanistan.”

nytimes.com

But sources in the administration and elsewhere finally admit that the support for the ” Good War”- the war in Afghanistan, was only a ploy to try and demonstrate Nobama’s manhood- and that it can now begin to be “disengaged” from, in a delicate and discreet way.

Escalation is a bad idea. The Democrats backed themselves into defending the idea of Afghanistan being The Good War because they felt they needed to prove their macho bonafides they called for withdrawal from Iraq. Nobody asked too many questions sat the time, including me. But none of us should forget that it was a political strategy, not a serious foreign policy. 

There have been many campaign promises “adjusted” since the election. There is no reason that the administration should feel any more bound to what they said about this than all the other committments [sic] it has blithely turned aside in the interest of “pragmatism.”

the liberal blog Hullabaloo

Yep- that’s a liberal for you- everything is relative, there is no black and white, just shades of gray, and as we have seen from the missile withdrawal from Eastern Europe, treaties are apparently just pieces of paper, and our word, our honor, means nothing to these cowards. And that is what they are, top to bottom, front to back.

And the words of this Resident, that sounded so “lofty” and principled, and, well- serious- well, you can wad them up and try for a free throw to the trash, because that is, apparently, all they are worth.

“Al Qaeda and its allies — the terrorists who planned and supported the 9/11 attacks — are in Pakistan and Afghanistan.  Multiple intelligence estimates have warned that al Qaeda is actively planning attacks on the United States homeland from its safe haven in Pakistan.  And if the Afghan government falls to the Taliban — or allows al Qaeda to go unchallenged — that country will again be a base for terrorists who want to kill as many of our people as they possibly can.”—— Barak Obama

Yes- that was, and is true- but this Resident is interested in easy results, and doesn’t want to chance being bogged down in a long war- we have a Resident with ADD, and he really can’t concentrate on something for an extended period. This is probably the reason for the teleprompters.

Representative Ike Skelton, Democrat of Missouri and chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, sent Mr. Obama a six-page letter arguing the case for more troops for General McChrystal. “There is no strategy short of a properly resourced counterinsurgency campaign that is likely to provide lasting security,” he wrote.

Mr. Obama now has to reconcile past statements and policy with his current situation.

“The problem for President Obama is he has made the case in the past that we took our eye off the ball and we should have stayed in Afghanistan,” said former Defense Secretary William S. Cohen. But now that he is in charge of the war, Mr. Cohen said, Mr. Obama is discovering “he doesn’t have much in the way of options” and time is of the essence.

nytimes.com

The biggest problem for the Resident is that he just does not trust or believe the Generals in charge of this war- which is contrary to common sense, because I can think of no one in this administration that has less experience than our “Commander in Chief” (in name only)– thus, he should, if he was smart, be listening hard to the officers in the field. But he doesn’t. And that is a problem very deeply rooted in the Democratic Leftist psyche.

If someone in the WH doesn’t tell the Resident to shut up and listen, this war will drag on for years, or he will jerk us out of Afghanistan, and he will be the single reason we lost the war here. Al Qaida will have their safe haven back, and the the only way we could respond in the future would be with nukes, because by that time, Al Qaida will have toppled Pakistan as well.

Because Pakistan will have seen how we treated Poland and the Czech Republic, and they will know that Nobama is no friend to have or trust. They will be on their own.

And so will we.

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Tags: afghanistan, coward in chief, hypocrisy, lies, war