President Obama’s speech from West Point tonight was one of his best. He made a strong, logical argument, and even infused it with a little emotion – something he injects into most of his speeches too sparingly.Never-the-less, I am not persuaded that we will accomplish in the next eighteen months what we have failed to accomplish in the past eight years, using less than half as many troops as we’ve had in Iraq.
What will Afghanistan be like in a year after we pull out? The appropriate analogy is that is will be changed just as much as the glass of water is changed once one removes a finger from it.
It was very hard to look at all the strong young faces in the West Point audience – literally the best America has to offer – without wondering which of them will leave life or limb in the Afghan mountains, trying in vain to prop up a corrupt government while fighting a ghost army.
The Bush administration left Obama with few choices – none of them easy – but I fear he is not choosing wisely. We need to get out of there now and rebuild this country. Every day we spend in Afghanistan we’re nothing more than the most effective recruiting agent for the Taliban and Al Qaeda.
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Run GW's Surge 1 speech simultainiously with tonights Surge 2 speech & tell me the differance. Same speech differant country, differant talking head. In the winter of 2010 BO will give a speech stating that "with the new information we have received 911 was launched from Pakistan."
Close your eyes & you can hear Dick Chaney in both speeches. Hitler gave great speeches also.
Thank Christ there is no draft. God bless our boys. I agree we need to get the "F" out. sooner the better.
The first 15 minutes was pretty good, then all I could think was "YOU WON - QUIT CAMPAIGNING ALREADY!"
Is it just me or does anyone else think there is a corelation to getting out of there in 2011 and the Presidential elections the next year?
There were some young faces in that audience. God love them all for standing up and protecting us all.
I agree sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan is a mistake but maybe for different reasons than yours.
I vividly remember Bush on national TV, not long after 9/11, proclaiming we would capture Bin Laden "Dead or Alive." The country was solidly behind him. Soon afterward he sent our brave troops to do just that and when we had Bin Laden cornered, he pulled our troops away in order to allow the Pakistanis to `finish the job.'
In 2003 Bush pulled the bulk of our forces out of Afghanistan to fight against Iraq (a country that had nothing to do with 9/11)which many of us believe was the biggest foreign policy blunder since Viet Nam and possibly much worse.
At present, Obama does not have the money, time or popular support a president should have to fight such an ellusive enemy as Al Quaeda...it was all squandered fighting the needless war in Iraq.
Chances are bleak that additional troops will be able to crush the insurgency and the extremists, given the history and geography of Afghanistan.
Nation building efforts by the U.S., if we go by our track record, will be half-hearted, and will eventually make the warlords richer and more powerful.
When the military starts pulliing out after 18 months, will the Afghan gov't. under Karzai be able to govern the country with the Afghan National Army and police?
This is not a strategy for military victory but for re-election in 2012.
Unlike the the Halloween prank of leaving a bag of burning dogshit on somebody's doorstep, the Bush people left the burning bag (in the form of Afghanistan) inside the house as they left.
That said, it's Obama's to deal with now. There are no cut and dried right answers or solutions here. I think we turned the middle east into a military tar baby when we went into Afghanistan and Iraq. Getting out now feels like the right solution to me. We're in a area of the world we don't understand, fighting? an enemy we can't seem to find and whose only goal is to hang on until we leave. Sounds familiar to me. There are many differences but this has bad news written all over it.
The only difference here is that Obama seems to have made a closed ended committment which I agree with. It's not necessarily a good message to send to the Taliban but it's just the right message to send to the Afghani's and the Pakistanis. "It's your country. Get your shit together because we are out of here in 18 months".
We'll see. I think we should have a draft. We'd be less likely to get into to this stuff if more people had a stake in these decisions.
We'll see.
Two comments - with split screen I watched both CNN and Fox news coverage of the speech. CNN showed about three times as many shots of people all across the country listening to the Pres. It was enough to make you cry.
Secondly, as a former Toastmaster will SOMEBODY please tell the President to STOP dropping his hands on the podium as the microphones pick up the thumping.
Lastly, did anybody count the number of times the President used the word "I"?
It is a pity that politics won out over a sound policy. Is there anyone who really believes the situation will have improved over the next 18 months? Neither the Taliban nor the terrorists will be humming kumbahya around the old campfire with the Marines in 18 months. So we will face the same issue in the summer of 2011. If we pull out, we have cut and run; if we stay then we just prolong the inevitable. At the end of the day it is Afghanistan not the 51st state. Afghanis will do with their country exactly what they want, it isn't a matter of "if they do it", it is "when will they do it."
Am I crazy or did it look as if the President's eyes were filled with tears of sorrow? We are caught between Irag (sorry) and a harder place and ain't any of us that really wants to be there. There is no way out but out, and unfortunately some brave young Americans, some really bad guys, and a lot of innocent Afganis are going to be sacrificed. So if one option is to leave as fast as we can, what is the alternative? Stay as long as it takes...maybe forever? I think he made the only call he could make given the absolutely miserable hand he was dealt.
Of course I meant Iraq (not Irag)...typing too fast for my own good.
He probably had tears in his eyes because his audience was falling asleep instead of jumping up and down chearing.
Cheering, not chearing...
Birdman, you are spot on. How about some accountability? Until there is a feedback loop where people who leave us holding the bag gets whacked instead of setting up a political situation where others can use it to their advantage, America will be a dog chasing its tail.
Which brings us to the Afghanistan and Iraq problem. We need to look at it like a surgeon looks at a patient with a problem. Treat the problem timely and move on. GW Bush and Dick Cheney were Musharraf's fools. They bought the old internet Kenyan scam of forwarding money hoping to hit it big. But they played with our money and fortune. Why are we there? What are we trying to accomplish? Is the strategy correct? Is it working? What is the downside of staying or leaving?
I thought Tom Friedman summed it up pretty well yesterday: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/02/opinion/02friedman.html?_r=1
BO should be studying the Presidency Lyndon Johnson. No way he gets a second term. The new great speech giver who said,"we will extend our hand ,if you unclinch your fist" has: ordered the killing of three pirates,who were surrounded by the US Navy , the continued occupation of Iraq & now esculated the war in Afganistan. BO is as big a liar as anyone else in government. The real terrorists are running this country.
Gaga: when you consider failed leadership, have you forgotten who tied our Gordian knot in the Middle East? I too favor bringing our troops home. But I have to give our current President slack for at least 2 reasons: he is a lot smarter than I am and, from where he sits, he can see a lot deeper into the water. It ain't over till it's over. The way to win chess is play more moves in advance of your opponent so that he does not understand what you are doing. Let us hope he is a grandmaster.
I see above that some of you are disgusted with Obama, now that you see that he is a liar.
During the campaign, he was quite clear about the AfPak war: it was the "good war," the "essential war," a war that we "cannot afford to lose." He even proposed an "overland invasion" of Pakistan.
Many of my friends and family readily admit that they voted for Mr. Obama precisely because they thought he was lying about all of that. Are you in that category?
He is, of course, a liar, having demonstrated it virtually every day. I struggle to find instances wherein he has told the truth. (I know that there are some, just not very many.)
The promise to be the most transparent presidency in history is a good example of his lies. At least the fact that he is a liar is transparent.
And to any who may have voted for him assuming that he was lying straight faced about the AfPak war: nice citizenship.
It's rich that his supporters are now shocked, shocked that this man would shade the truth.
Reading between the lines:
Our culture has evolved into one where opinions carry more weight than primary sources. We have a tendency to treat our trust as a football, given to others to run with.
Whenever there is confusion, a priest class arises. Talking heads are the prophets of our day. Reading entries on this blog is like tearing a page off right wing talking points. Your sense of trust is what made Bernie Madoff grow into a monster and why people join Islamic fundamental cells. Conspiracies are enticing but the world might be better explained in terms of a more mundane scenarios: human failings, political and economic realities and lost opportunities. Hard to believe, but it isn't about you! There is a difference between faith and understanding.
To "YouMayBeRight" -- Are you suggesting that BO is the only politician who tells lies? isn't it the minimum ante for joining the club? If that's all you've got against him i'll probably just go ahead and vote for him in '12.
Lying is an overt, conscious act. I actually don't think that Bush lied about WMD in Iraq although it was stunningly, disastrously incorrect. But I don't think he lied. Cheney's another story.
Obama may have been incorrect about some things or misjudged outcomes but consciously lying is a preposterous and unsupportable (at least for now) claim.
David Brooks, conservative columnist in Friday's NY Times praises our current President's analytical management style. Then again, Brooks is not an angry white man.
In today's Times is a cartoon of Dick Cheney, who is an angry white man.
But I suppose if you were weaned on a pickle, you wouldn't read the Times.
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