The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

The Afghanistan War Was A Total Success

Posted on | June 24, 2012 | 6 Comments

by Smitty

Insty points to HotAir on the Afghanistan Surge being mishandled. This argument operates under a misapprehension that any of Obama’s Afghanistan policy was ever serious in the first place.
Obama campaigned in 2008 on the notion that the unpopular Iraq war was a distraction:

Democrat Obama declared that the failed policy in Iraq — which he argued was never the central front in the war on terror — has distracted attention from the growing terrorist threat in Afghanistan and proves the need to withdraw from Iraq. “If another attack on our homeland comes, it will likely come from the same region where 9/11 was planned,” he said in a speech in Washington. “And yet today, we have five times more troops in Iraq than Afghanistan.”

Safely sworn into office, Obama offered the Afghanistan question the Full Hamlet:

There is every sign that President Obama is now taking too much advice and that it is make up your mind time on Afghanistan. Nato’s new secretary general, the former Danish prime minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, has openly voiced his worries about the rising scepticism being voiced by politicians on both sides of the Atlantic about the viability and value of the Afghan mission.
The immediate cause for Obama’s indecision is whether to agree to McChrystal’s request for extra troops, somewhere in the region of 40,000 according to most reports, for Afghanistan.

What observers fail to realize is that the only point to Obama’s Afghanistan policy was to say something, anything that sounded halfway credible in 2008. When the Iron Triangle came to collect on the campaign promises, Obama’s 2009 response could be summarized as: “Wut?” By then, it was too late. The Afghanistan War gambit had already hit its peak success on 04 November 2008. That our military had been flanked from uphill on the org chart would take years (including one from my life) for everyone to discover.

Let us be perfectly clear: while it’s still not a bad thing that the United States elected a black man in 2008, it is a colossal shame that the first President elected, who happened to be black, lacked both the erudition of a Thomas Sowell and the courage of an Alan West. Come November, we must send Obama back to Chicago, where surely his résumé and command of hooey will land him a job as a starting pitcher for the Cubs, with no appreciable degradation from Barack’s success as president.

Category: Aghanistan, Barack Obama

Comments

6 Responses to “The Afghanistan War Was A Total Success”

  1. DaveO
    June 24th, 2012 @ 12:21 pm

    Obama reiterated a talking point that resonated with the America that never served the Nation in any capacity: Afghanistan is the Good War, Iraq is a costly diversion.

    Putting the blame where it belongs: Bush-43 tied himself and the Nation to the Powell Doctrine. No number of First World countries can fix a country in which ‘bombing them back to the stone age’ raises their quality of life. Obama and the Dems had no exit strategy, don’t know how to develop an exit strategy, and if Obama wins in November, we’ll see troops stay in Afghanistan because Obama won’t want to bring them home.

    Tactically, a disengagement is even more violent, exceptionally more bloody, than an invasion. If Obama executes a disengagement, he will undermine the anti-war movement and Code Pink to the point where only the mentally ill can give them credence.

    An active war drains DoD of resources. With sequestration, EO, and such things as EPA regulations draining the coffers, Obama effectively prevents any upgrade (even to the nukes), as well as refit and resupply.

    Defense contractors will, as they did under Clinton, sell their wares to any bidder that guarantees a revenue stream, even if selling the items is illegal.

    It’s a great strategy: semi-legitimate blaming of Bush; and the military-industrial complex eats itself; and the Saudis and Egyptians continue to fund and man the Taliban and AQ to get bled out in A-stan.

  2. M. Thompson
    June 24th, 2012 @ 12:27 pm

    Pitching coach.  At least give the Cubbies something; they did bring Greg Maddux into Major League play.

  3. crosspatch
    June 24th, 2012 @ 12:54 pm

    This fits a pattern I see with Obama.   So a “surge” is called for in Afghanistan but the bulk of the troops are put where they will be least effective.   Sort of like deciding on a Social Security payroll tax cut when we needed a tax cut but making exactly the one tax cut that we DON’T need when Social Security is going cash negative.   This administration seems to do things in such a way as to do maximum possible damage or have least possible effectiveness.

  4. Bob Belvedere
    June 24th, 2012 @ 6:42 pm

    This administration seems to do things in such a way as to do maximum possible damage or have least possible effectiveness.

    I believe the term for this is ‘fundamentally transform’.

  5. Quartermaster
    June 24th, 2012 @ 7:02 pm

    Do we have to send him to a place as close as Chicago? Why not Johnston Atoll instead? I could live with Wake if it weren’t still useful. At any rate, Chicago is much too close.

  6. Pathfinder's wife
    June 24th, 2012 @ 11:34 pm

    Take comfort in the fact that he’ll likely go out on speaking tours most of the time — foreign countries are about the only place left that would probably adore him appropriately.

    At this point I’m not sure if winning/not-winning is even in the playbook for the A-stan goat roundup; I’m just glad my kid’s getting out of there soon and the other two don’t appear to be slated to go.  Not hurting my feelings any.