Posted by
ApolloSpeaks on Friday, October 30, 2009 10:03:47 AM
Boy Obama's favorite punching bag to relieve his frustrations and fears.
For Obama the Afghan War that was "a war of necessity that we have to win" has now turned into a terrible morass inherited from the Bush adminstration that he now sees as unwinnable. It's not so much, as Krauthammer says, that Obama is playing the blame game with Bush because his strategy in Afghanistan has failed (
see ); it's because he now realizes
that no strategy can succeed in defeating the Taliban and building a modern democratic state without modernizing the Afghans a mostly hostile, illiterate backward people unwilling to join the 21st century*.
*When we invaded Afghanistan in 2001 our troops were greeted as liberators by the oppressed Afghan people. Now they are seen as occupiers who have overstayed their welcome.
Obama's recent whining about Bush reveals a change of mind about the necessity of the Afghan War in fighting terrorism. Indeed, after ten months of failing to capture or kill bin Ladin, and charm the Afghan people into venerating him (his Moslem outreach initiative hasn't worked here), Obama is stuck with a war that he wants to disown; a war he no longer has the will and resolve to fight and that's impossible for him to immediately quit. If he declares victory and leaves Afghanistan-because al Qaida, as Jim Jones says, "is a fragment of its former self" and we're hit again in a deadly domestic terror attack, Obama is finished. If he continues the war with a surge of troops and the Taliban remains unbeaten with mounting US deaths and casualties Obama then becomes another LBJ with a new Vietnam and an anti-war revolt on the Left*.
*If Obama doesn't end the Afghan War by 2012 George Soros and the far Left will most likely support a Democratic challenger who will.
Krauthammer uses the Iraq model for Afghanistan while forgetting two things: Iran's policy change in 2007 to rein in al Sadr and scale down the Shiite insurgency*; and the Anbar Awakening which decimated al Qaida in Iraq with US help. There is nothing comparable happening in Afghanistan. The Taliban-supported by Iran and possibily Russia-are implacably bent unto death on our defeat and retreat from their country. A heavier footprint and surge of troops cannot by itself replicate in Afghanistan our success in Iraq. Afghanistan is a quagmire, a nation-buliding nightmare, and Obama knows it. He curses Bush for leaving him an unwinnable war that is likely to ruin his presidency and domestic agenda. Obama is fortune's hapless fool headed for failure and a legacy of ashes. After smiling and lying his way to the presidency raising messianic expectations of transformaing America and the world the law of karmic retribution is at work undoing all the false promises and unrealistic dreams.
*Once the fear of a US invasion passed a stable and functioning Iraq was seen by Tehran as the best option for expediting the withdrawal of US ground forces from the region. As Ahmadenijad said in August of that year: "Once US forces leave the region we and our friends (the Syrians, Hezbollah, etc.) will fill the vacuum."
The mess FDR left Truman never got the better of his adult soul.
Postscript: Harry Truman: The Adult Wartime President
Victor Davis Hanson recently wrote a short insightful piece for the Wall Street Journal comparing Barack Obama to that other Democratic president who inherited a war from his predecessor, Harry Truman (see). Hanson reminds us that Truman was left with a mess horrifically worse than the Afghan War-which included giving away Eastern Europe to Stalin. Though Truman did his share of complaining never once was he heard blaming FDR for his problems. If Truman were alive today he'd have nothing but contempt for Obama's constant whining and weakness in dealing with enemies. America has the right president at the right time in history when the ideal adulthood is practically dead in our culture and perpetual adolescence is the norm (see and see ).