Nuts
When Barack Obama was running for president, he put forward the idea that the war in Iraq had been no more than a distraction from the just war in Afghanistan. I, on the other hand, who was running for nothing, put forward the idea that he had gotten this just the wrong way round. Afghanistan is a tribal wasteland that can’t be tamed without unthinkable effort, whereas securing Iraq as an America-friendly democracy situated on the borders of Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia might actually be an important victory in the fight against Islamo-fascism. But of course, as we know, Obama is uncomfortable with the word “victory,” because as a student of history, he’s reminded of when Emperor Hirohito surrendered to General Westmoreland aboard the USS Ronald Reagan. Or, you know… something historical like that.
So now, after instituting policies that increased the number of American casualties in Afghanistan five-fold, Obama begins a withdrawal that can only reverse any gains those policies achieved. The Taliban aren’t idiots. They will bide their time and return to slaughter anyone who stood against them the moment we’re no longer there to defend them. The Afghan security forces on whom Obama is counting will ultimately join whatever side seems most likely to win. I really don’t see how this can turn out any other way.
This is not to say I think we should stay. I didn’t think we should have surged in the first place. I thought we should have drawn down our forces in Afghanistan and focused them instead on securing the victory in Iraq, thus insuring the presence of an ally in the region and encouraging a democratic trend to the Arab spring… instead of what’s probably going to happen now. I don’t think it’s “isolationist,” to pick your fights.
But Obama can’t do what’s right overseas anymore than he can do what’s right here because his thinking is based on incorrect premises, and those premises are kept in place by the political power of his left-wing base. Bush mishandled the war in Iraq for far too long, it’s true, but he had — or was developing — the right idea. The War on Terror is not a state-based war but an ideological one. It will be won, if it is won, by establishing and maintaining oases of better ideology in the midst of the enemy. I have no doubt our military could do that in Afghanistan given enough money and men and time, but I think the price is too high and we shouldn’t pay it… not when we’ve already done the job in Iraq. As with the economy, so with the war, Obama hasn’t really a clue.
All right, it’s just one man’s opinion. But while I’m at it, here’s another: Whether I’m right or wrong, whether he’s ultimately right or wrong, Obama’s speech was a drab business, a purely political statement meant to cast blame on Bush and nab war credit for himself while at the same time positioning himself as a peace-nik in time for the election. While there are men still out there getting shot and killed, I say: Nuts.
According to just released figures from the Congressional
Budget Office (CBO), the federal government racked up a
deficit of $929 billion from October 2010 to June 2011. The
federal government is on pace to run up 1.4 trillion dollars
in debt this year.
VIVA LA TEA PARTY! AKA THE REAL MIDDLE CLASS!
Two days in a row. First the troop drawdown speech , then opening the petro reserve. I guess election time is here. We can all see through this ruse. I have a suggestion for Obama. Do the country a favor and be a one term wonder, and then go build houses with Jimmy Carter. That way you can redeem yourself in some small way.
He wouldn’t know which end of the hammer to hold!
The carpenter analogy works best when you think of Obama as the guy who asks the other guy to hold the nail.
Obama is abysmally ignorant about economics, history, war strategy, the climate and environment….and etc. His only focus, ever, has been on himself as Himself. As a Master-Manipulator of you and your emotions. Period.
His agenda has always been to control others and turn them into ‘his’. All his accomplishments have been attained not by actual skills, genuine work and visible achievements but by verbal manipulation of others. This includes everything from his time at college, to his voting ‘present’ during his Senate stint, to his being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, to his being voted in as President. Not one of these ‘goals’ has been based on any actual action on his part…other than emotional manipulation.
All Obama does, is this emotional manipulation – ie., campaigning. He does not get involved with policy or program development; he leaves all of that up to others. His agenda is more basic than policy and programs; it is control. As such, Obama’s manipulative actions are geared to this control.
He lies constantly; his speeches are virtual words; they are unrelated to any factual reality. So, he’ll give one speech to one audience and the next day, tell a different audience a totally different story. Obama doesn’t talk to refer to objective reality; his words are meant to manipulate you into being His. The fact that the data in his speeches are untrue is irrelevant; the agenda is to make you..His.
So- the withdrawal from Afghanistan has nothing to do with the War on Terror..and remember, Obama has declared that terrorism doesn’t exist. He’s switched words; it’s now called ‘man-caused disasters’..which removes the specific jihadist ideological agenda behind it. See how easy it is to control reality?! You just re-name reality…and it no longer exists!
The withdrawal has one purpose: Votes.
And, Obama is releasing oil from the US reserves – which are meant to be used only in an emergency. Hmm..the emergency is that Obama’s polling rates are going down. That’s the reason why.
And, remember his ‘stimulus’..which was, he told us, supposed to be for shovel-ready projects? Heh; it was to placate the unions, his campaign buddies, and the money went to keep state unionized civil service in their jobs.
His administration is doing the unthinkable – actually suing a private company, Boeing, because it wants to set up shop in a right-to-work state rather than in a unionized state. That’s to please Obama’s union buddies.
And Obama’s contempt for ‘the people’ is boundless. He ignores Congress – insisting that they pass his bills without reading or debating them.
Congress refused his Dream Act. So- Obama is ignoring this refusal and is getting its rules through by Executive Fiat; that is, he is going OUTSIDE THE LAW. Congress, by the Constitution, is the only body allowed to make laws. It rejected the Dream; Obama is ignoring this rejection..and going ahead anyway.
Why- for the hispanic votes.
And so on..Everything that Obama does has one agenda: Himself.
That includes disempowering the American people, making them dependents of the state; that includes ignoring their legislative body, Congress; that includes ignoring the laws they pass; that includes disabling the economy by increasing the debt and deficit…
He is destroying America. Get rid of him.
You may underestimate his boiling hatred for America.
His mother, Obama Sr., Frank Marshall Davis, Bill Ayers, Reverend Wright, Rashid Khalidi, Louis Farrakhan, Charles Ogletree, Valerie Jarrett, Michelle Obama, George Soros, Andy Stern, Richard Trumpka, the entire faculty of Columbia, his socialist community organizer cohorts, Saul Alinsky, 95% of his political appointees (i.e, Jones, Holder, et al). Every person who has ever influenced Obama has been united by their hatred of America. He couldn’t possibly NOT hate this country.
Basketball may be the single element of American culture that he doesn’t despise.
And, keep in mind, that Obama was ALWAYS first and foremost “Black”/”Personal of Colour” to everyone including his mother. He was never himself. And such a relief, (to Ayers et al., who saw they could use him in their own plans) he cleans up well, and is good looking in a Western sort of way.
Yes, he hates the USA, and its power and its beauty. And he is eaten with malice.
Do NOT hate on the long-legged mack daddy!
LOL
Gawd. He’s not only DULL, annoying, self-worshipping, fugly, lazy, rude, tactless, juvenile, petulant, emotionally/mentally challenged but, he also sucks at golf. HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
/digress off
Predictable is an understatement.I wonder how many people recited his speech along with him.Lol
I’m glad he thinks he is a hero.He can have CAIR,the Clintons,Rev Wright and the DOJ over for dinner to celebrate.
Now he can get back to his important job,raising campaign funds,destroying the budget, buying votes from his new batch of illegals and building an Islamic nation.
Well, what does that tell you about the intelligence of the of the American voter who put the “Great One” into the most powerful position on earth? How many hours do you think He stood in front of a mirror when He was a young man developing his gestures and mannerisms? Just sickening!
When Obama is reelected the hurt is going to really deep for people like you. You will be hurt that we didn’t like your ideas. Time for some new ideas perhaps? I always said it would be a very rough eight-years for you types. I’d stock up on blood pressure medicine (paid for with your Medicare Part D — that nasty guvmint program), you’re gonna need it.
So basically you’re proclaiming loudly that you don’t live in the real world, eh?
Praetorian: This definition applies to both you and your master.
Main Entry: corrupt
Part of Speech: adjective
Definition: dishonest
Synonyms: base, bent, bribable, crooked, debauched, double-dealing, exploiting, extortionate, faithless, fast and loose, fixed, foul, fraudulent, gone to the dogs, inconstant, iniquitous, knavish, mercenary, nefarious, on the take, open, padded, perfidious, praetorian , profiteering, racket up, reprobate, rotten, shady, snide, suborned, tainted, treacherous, two-faced, underhanded, unethical, unfaithful, unprincipled, unscrupulous, untrustworthy, venal, wide open
Thomas_I : You forgot one thing: Demonic!
Time for some new ideas? They’re old ideas and have failed, repeatedly for a century and a half. The USSR, North Korea, China, Cuba. Socialism is not the answer and if you think it’s because we “don’t tax the rich enough” well, for one thing if you confiscated all of the “rich’s” money, you could run the country for a day and a half. Or, how about this: “The problem with socialism is that sooner or later, you run out of other people’s money”. Or is it that we “need to go green”? BTW did you notice the electric car maker in Yurp that just filed for bankruptcy. Electric car makers always do..and have done so for 100 years now. And where does the energy come from to power electric cars? And have you heard of the conservation of energy law? Have you heard of printing money to increase the money supply? That causes inflation and this is what our government is doing right now. What planet are you from? Or are you from utopia? You know that mythical magical place wher unicorns fart rainbows and giant butterflies carry people to/from their appointments to their yoga classes?
What are these new ideas and how are they working out for you? Hero worship and shallow slogans should not be the basis for anyone’s political alignment. Mix in some thinking one of these days.
Can there be more than a dozen people out there with an IQ higher than that of a toaster who doesn’t believe that the timing of this withdrawal is for anything other than political purposes?
A withdrawal concluding in late August/2012 means that will be barely ten weeks between that mark and ourvember elections The administration is gambling that the Afghani government will be able to remain viable long enough to get them (the Obama administration) past election day and avoid the political consequences of the inevitable Afghanistan meltdown. Over the next fourteen months scattered Al-Quaeda units will start “coming home” and be in their blocks on the starting line when the U.S. pulls out.
Indeed, t’would be a day of very dark irony if civil war broke out mere days after our last chopper took off from there.
AAARRRRGHHHH! That was the sound of me yacking my egg-drop martini all over my key board upon reading Klavan’s most recent stomach churning screed. Let’s be honest here, how is Afghanistan not Bush’s fault? Hmmm? HE NEVER WENT INTO AFGHANISTAN TO SMOKE OUT OSAMA! It took a REAL leader in the form of our current President to find and finally subdue that man. Bush invaded Afghanistan to spread American imperialism, nothing more. He had 8 years to get Osama, but didn’t, because he didn’t want to get Osama. Bush needed a boogey man to justify spending billions on his buddies over at Haliburton and Duncan Hines. President Obama got him in 2 years all while pre-ocupied by a lousy economy created by….oh, here it comes…GEORGE BUSH. And Dick Cheney. We now need to withdraw our brave military men and womyn and start spending money on jobs here at home, on good paying teacher’s jobs, and municipal worker jobs, like parking meter attendants and those guys who pick up my trash that Reynaldo, my house man, takes to the curb every Monday.
Lol… You had me going until Reynaldo. Excellent!
Really, seek help soon. Reality beckons.
Thank you for that paid political announcement from the Democratic National Committee. Why don’t you click your heels and keep saying “It’s Bush’s Fault, It’s Bush’s Fault,” just like Dorothy in the Wizard of OZ. I think you have a lot in common with her. You both live in a fantasy world and you both don’t have a clue on how to deal with reality. But it WAS a nice far-left commercial you gave. You actually managed to hit all of the far-left talking points in one paragragh. MoveOn must be paying you well.
Lovely Earth has been ‘outed’ on Pajamas Media as pure parody. LE posts frequently and the posts are always mock-up cookie cutter parodies of a stereotype far-out leftist. But LE was challenged as parody…and admitted it.
Ignore or enjoy but don’t take LE as genuine! Pure parody.
Doesn’t it say something pathetic and/or scary about the Left that it has gotten itself to the point that those outside of it often can’t tell the difference between actual Leftist rhetoric and parody of same?
Read “The Secret Knowledge,” new from David Mamet, and love it!
“I thought we should have drawn down our forces in Afghanistan and focused them instead on securing the victory in Iraq, thus insuring the presence of an ally in the region.. ”
IMO, the long term prospects that Iraq will be an ally are less than zero. The earth will change rotation and the sun will rise in the west before that happens.
And I guess that LevelyEarth is all for leaving the women of Afghanistan to their fate via the Taliban. Why do you hate women so much Lovely?
Bush went into Afghanistan “to win”, Barry can’t stand the thought. Instead he would rather create another crisis, a crisis whose policy may enable those pesky Muzzies to plant the big one in Mooshelle’s garden. He’ll have only hisself to blame when this one goes fubar.
I don’t see how Afghanistan can be won. Its peoples are to set in a tribal, paranoid, backwards mind set to even be capable of building a stable government and society.
And yet when I think of us leaving I think of my friend. He calls himself Do (it took me 3 months of stopping myself from saying it like Homer Simpson). He came over from Vietnam with the first wave of boat people. His dad was a sort of head guy in their town and he stood against the NVA when they first came around. The commies killed two of his soldiers and so the old man spent a few years hunting down and killing every commie he could get his hands on.
When the bad guys took over the country they came for my friends dad. They took him away and everyone figured they were just going to kill him. They took my friends families house and business away, drove them into the street, wouldn’t allow him to attend school and constantly threatened them with violence. The first chance he got he took his sister and some friends and escaped.
He worked his ass off here for years until he had enough to start his own nail business, and even then still kept working other jobs. He sent money home every month to help his mom and siblings. He got married, had kids, bought a boat… went fishing maybe a little to much for the wifes liking. He watches games on the weekend with his friends from the old country. They drink beer and tell stories about the old times.
25 years on he gets a call from his mom. “Do, you have to come home now, right now! Your father just showed up at the door!”
Turns out the commies didn’t kill the old man after all. They took him to a re-education camp and never bothered to tell his family. For a quarter of a century they kept him as a slave. They worked him from dawn till dusk, fed him black, moldy bread and buggy rice. He drank from an untreated stream that was as likely to give you dysentery as quench your thirst. And there were the endless propaganda lessons and other efforts to ‘get his mind right’.
And the beatings.
They finally figured he was to old to cause any more trouble so they let him go home after 25 years. My friend got to see his father twice before the old man died. The police kept an eye on him the whole time. The neighbors helped… the police that is, not my friends family.
There are a lot of Vietnamese and Hmong here in Sacramento. Every time I see one I recall how three different American presidents promised, swore to them that we would not leave them. If they would just stand and fight with us we would be there for them, until the end.
Well in the end we got tired of it all and left. Then we got so tired of it that we wouldn’t even render the material support we had promised. No more fuel, no more ammo, no more air support or spare parts or anything they could use to defend themselves. There were three offenses by the north against the south after we pull our troops out. The first two were repelled. It was the third, the one after we totally cut them off that finally killed South Vietnam.
Every time I see a Vietnamese or Hmong I feel a little guilty. I grew up poor (at least poor for an America) and growing up that way I learned the most important lesson. Your word is the only thing of real value you have. Without it you might as well be adrift at sea or lost in the desert. We broke our word and my friends father lived a life worse than a plantation slave for the last quarter of the 20th century because of it.
Like I said, I don’t see how we can ‘win’ in Afghanistan. But I do know this, there are a hell of a lot of people who are going to be murdered because they were fools enough to believe our word was good.
wow
Trust me, if you read any of my posts you will see that I am by no means a supporter of Obama and I do think he will lose badly in 2012. But you are making the assumption that by pulling these paltry 33,000 troops out, this will LOSE the war in Afghanistan. This war was lost back in 2002, when we decided to stop fighting al Qaeda and start nation-building in Afghanistan. It was a stupid idea then and it’s a stupid idea now. I urge people to read “Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq” by Michael Scheuer. Scheuer was the head of the “bin Laden” unit in Afghanistan before the war and he knows a little something about Afghanistan and its people. In his book, Sheuer basically says that we should have gone into Afghanistan, killed as many al Qaeda and Taliban as we could have (maybe even killing bin Laden back then if we had used massive military force rather than just the smaller forces we sent in), and then left. Yes, we should have left after our goals we achieved.
It was and still is a stupid idea that we are going to transform Afghanistan into Iowa simply by shoveling money into it and trying to “train” illiterate tribesmen into modern soldiers. So we should have gone in, done a whole lot of hurt to the al Qaeda and the Afghans, and then left. Now we are seeing the results of a failed policy. And always remember, too, that in Vietnam the military brass always saw “A light at the end of the tunnel,” that if we only had a few thousand more troops, we could “crush” the enemy. The people at the Pentagon ALWAYS think they can win if they just throw more troops at anything. Leave, now. The Taliban will simply wait us out and then, when we do leave, the “country” will collapse just like South Vietnam did after we left them. Johnson may have been wrong in managing the war in Vietnam, but that does NOT make us right in what we are doing now, which is basically what Johnson did back in Vietnam.
Afghanistan is a failed state. Any country that has a constant armed insurrection within its borders and no functional central government is a failed state. Afghanistan has been, and always will be, a tribal land mired down in Islamic fundamentalism. And it’s not going to get any better. Ever. We either maintain a relatively small presence there on a large base (say, roughly 20,000 people) and send everybody else home, or we just leave. Maintaining a large base would enable us to mount occasional attacks against al Qaeda and it would intimidate the Taliban from attacking us again. Sort of like the arrangement we now have with Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. Those should be our only choices. Obama’s choice will split the difference and subject us to endless fighting until about 2020, and it may not even end then. Doesn’t anybody see the insanity in that?
Unfortunately, going in with massive force, while strategically and tactically sound, would have resulted in enormous casualties among the “innocent civilians” that jihadist/terrorist forces hide within. And the one unbreakable rule of war in the West today is: MUSTN’T HURT ANY NONCOMBATANTS! PROTECT THE INNOCENT! AND THEY’RE ALL INNOCENT BY DEFINITION! We can only kill the actual fighters, and better yet, just their leadership; everyone else is utterly innocent, or at worst a helpless dupe. See the last forty years of Israeli attempts at self-defense to see the mess this ultimately makes.
I swear, if we’d tried to fight the Axis with today’s tactics, “The Man in the High Castle” would have been the best-case scenario…
So; He intends to bring 30,000 troops back to the U.S.A. to add to the unemployed? Where does he expect them to get a job?
And if there are that many less troops in Afghanistan, who’s left to maintain watch of the compounds of the troops resting and replenishing?
This is Obama’s idea of ‘jihad’ for his enemies, the military, who did not vote for him.
I can think of no more fitting legacy to Obama than a summary impeachment.
“but I think the price is too high and we shouldn’t pay it… not when we’ve already done the job in Iraq.”
I see your point. But I’m sure glad Harry Truman didn’t see it this way when Germany surrendered in May 1945. And we had already destroyed most of the Japanese navy and naval air power, retaken the Philippines, etc. And remember that the “price” to be payed for continuing the war against Japan at that point (before the A-bomb was ready) was estimated in millions of Americans. And the population of the US then was less than half of what it is now. And we had already lost 500,000 men in the war up until that point.
What’s still needed in Afghanistan is surely far less than that.
Afghanistan was in a strategic holding pattern so the whole 10 year argument is hollow. 5 years to win an insurgency was pretty damn good if you ask me.
The facts are from the beginning the President changed important aspects of the 5 year strategy, no 400,000 ANSF, no force structure of 500,000 through 2012. A July draw down date, transition instead of repositioning of force posture, 10,000 out in 2011 not 5,000 really no one would have come out in 2011 if not for that crappy demand for July.
Withdrawing the surge force in the middle of the 2012 fighting season. Instead of leaving at the end of 2013 under the 5 year plan the President added another year 2014. Pretty strange for a dude that wants to leave a war adding another year. He kept changing the objective and at times did not know what the objective was. He took months to make a decision on the surge, wasting valuable time in 2009.
Once again just as we have put pressure on to bring the Talib to a political solution, he has undermined it. Our strategy was direct we put the terms of condition prior to the surge to the Talib, so when during the end game we broach talks the terms of conditions are the same. That is how you negotiate from a position of strength and the enemy know you are in a position of strength.
So Afghanistan should not be seen as COIN failing, all the constraints the President put on it made it a near impossible task.
That is where a lot of debate came from early on why continue with a strategy and send soldiers to their deaths when so many constraints had been placed on the strategy. Plan B or let just leaving as early as mid 2009. Because the writing was on the wall how this was going to end.
That is what people have to ask over the deaths for the last two years why did he send troops to war with a strategy he knew would fail. People say an early withdrawal he is saving lives, what about the deaths of the last two years.
The over reliance on special forces and use in non traditional roles under a so-called CT strategy will in the end, lead to another Somalia.
See the President is never wrong so I still in my humble opinion that these constraints were placed on the Afghan strategy as he wanted to prove the surge in Iraq was a fluke. He never accepted that it worked and he is never wrong so it must have been a fluke.
Two totally different countries, Iraqi security forces were further along, Afghanistan is a rural insurgency like the Bore War, in Iraq we could lock areas down to restrict movement. Iraq was a far more developed country that made COIN easier.
You make no mistake we could have won the Afghan war in 5 years and yes using COIN. And that is why President Bush and VP Cheney left the 5 year strategy behind. Afghanistan was to important a mission to fail, failure was not an option.
Now we are told Afghanistan is not important and failure is an option. Failure is victory.
He was always out of his depth, and his inexperience shows.
What is now predictable is that the anti-Obama and anti-Bush screeds are damned close to each other. There is no attempt to search for complicated and gnarly “truths” but rather simply to heap every available, plausible or implausible accusation in the other direction and hope that something sticks.
Yeah, so Obama gives a so-so, wishy washy, somewhat middle of the road speech with a bit of something for everyone. Obviously, then, he is a politician (gasp) who hates America (except for basketball and maybe babies.)
And by the way, the point that one could take 100% of the wealth of the rich and not pay off the debt is a straw man. The point is rather whether or not you can take 5% more and enough wealth will still be created so that the deficit shrinks. Some recently troubling rhetoric verges on blackmail from the rich: “We simply WON’T invest until Obama is out of there, because we want him out of there.” One hopes that the POTENTIAL for a boom is building up out there somewhere and that when it comes, investors and entrepreneurs will pounce or create it in the first place.
The economy has not recovered, which is the scary part. The “hopeful” piece is that with Obama out of there the problem would be “solved.” I am not that optimistic, but my hope is that with or without him we will be able to bounce back. If we do, the bounce/boom will come from an unexpected direction and people will kick themselves that they did not get in early; in the meantime some will lose their shirts blowing their wads on the bad guesses. So it goes.
And who could ever be optimistic about much of anything in Afghanistan and Pakistan? Given the history, I would have higher hopes for Iran.
“I don’t think it’s “isolationist,” to pick your fights.”
True enough. But it’s kind of strange to hear this in regard to Afghanistan circa 2011. Didn’t we already pick our fight in Afghanistan some time ago?
Picking your fights carefully is wise. But “unpicking” fights you’ve alrady picked once they’ve started and you have second thoughts is not the same thing at all. There’s another word for that and it’s not a very nice one.
maybe the Big O really doesn’t know what he’s doing.or maybe we don’t know what he’s really trying to do? from this lowly vantage point so far from the halls of power, it looks like he’s screwing things up