Never before has a speech by President Barack Obama felt as false as his Tuesday address announcing America’s new strategy for Afghanistan. It seemed like a campaign speech combined with Bush rhetoric — and left both dreamers and realists feeling distraught.One can hardly blame the West Point leadership. The academy commanders did their best to ensure that Commander-in-Chief Barack Obama’s speech would be well-received.
Just minutes before the president took the stage inside Eisenhower Hall, the gathered cadets were asked to respond “enthusiastically” to the speech. But it didn’t help: The soldiers’ reception was cool.
One didn’t have to be a cadet on Tuesday to feel a bit of nausea upon hearing Obama’s speech. It was the least truthful address that he has ever held. He spoke of responsibility, but almost every sentence smelled of party tactics. He demanded sacrifice, but he was unable to say what it was for exactly.
An additional 30,000 US soldiers are to march into Afghanistan — and then they will march right back out again. America is going to war — and from there it will continue ahead to peace. It was the speech of a Nobel War Prize laureate.
[More]
Related:
Obama is getting tiresome. The tone and cadence of his speeches is entirely predictable and boring. And there is little, if any, real content. Obama is spiralling into the ground.
Obama’s magic is turning out to be just that, all smoke and mirrors. Little if any substance. His election win ranks right up there with AGW as one of the biggest frauds in history.
Adding 30,000 more troops for 18 months is a colossal waste of money and lives. There is no military solution. That is a civil war that must be settled by the Afghanis themselves! Our views as to how or by whom that country should be governed are irrelevant. Get all foreign troops out and find a better way to help Afghanistan get back on its feet.
It’s not a “civil war“, it’s tribalism wrapped up in Islamofascism.
It’s not about a “country“. It’s about tribes that should just die out. But they are propped up by outside forces and funding .. E.g. Saudi oil. We wouldn’t care if the war just stayed local but it doesn’t , it’s global … the trial of 18 in Toronto makes it our concern too. Also the murder of innocents by terrorists in Mumbai a year ago seem to have been assisted from the West, maybe even out of Canada.
The odd thing is that it seems to be easier for a despot to hijack a whole chunk of geography in the Middle east and hold onto it for decades than it is for a bad management to hijack a company like Enron and survive for very long.
3 months later he makes his decision, those West Point cadets know damn well that as future military commanders they won’t have months to ponder a decision, and they’ll be stripped of command or dead if they make wrong ones.
re above link and Ralph Peter’s assessment of the commitment of 30,000 troops with apparently France declining — for now. There’s more than apt advice there which needs profiling sooner rather than later.
It will soon be an anniversay of a day of infamy. What would O have done if he had been POTUS back then.
It would have been viewed as simply another ‘man-made disaster’ requiring months of meetings before arriving at an a decision sometime around April. Then if the Japenses weren’t beaten by Dec 1943 all the troops would be called home.
Reminds one of Bush pulling many of his troops out of Afghanistan the first time around to look for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
Because he didnt finish the Afghanistan conflict, Obama and other nations are left to clean up his mess, if that is even possible.
Hell, he couldnt even find Benny Binladen and his senior staff which were hiding out in the Afghanistan hills. God knows where they are now, planning their next attack against the western world.
“Because he didn’t finish the Afghanistan conflict”
It isn’t the Afghanistan conflict, we aren’t fighting countries. We aren’t fighting bin Laden either. One minute the enemy is called al-Qaeda, the next minute the Taliban. Hillary Clinton has lately taken to calling it a “syndicate of terror” . Which is it?
Until we get our minds around that, and name the enemy, this is going to go on for a long long time.
Harper’s right to pull out in 2011. The West is too politically correct to name the enemy.
Too politically correct to name the ennemi and even more so to try to kill as many as possible !
Wars aren’t won without breaking things and killing people and are terrible things as not only the real ennemi is killed: It’s messy and collateral damage of innocents is always a part of it even when one tries to be careful ….. as one should.
Half trying just ends up killing the same innocents, but half trying means that it’s all a waste as nothing gets resolved i.e nothing is won even if technically one doesn’t lose like in a traditional war.
Having slept on it, maybe I was wrong to say this isn’t about countries. It might be better to say it is about “pretend countries’ whose boundary lines were drawn in the sand around a bunch of warring tribes. Now their populations have exploded and their system of government based on tribalism won’t work. The very name of some of these countries implies they are not secular: the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Pakistan is smack dab in the middle of this mess. Pakistan chose not to throw in its lot with Gandhi and Nehru in 1947 because India wanted to create a secular country. India today has a Muslim population about the same size as Pakistan that lives alongside of Hindus and Sikhs etc. India more or less works but Pakistan is teetering on the edge of an implosion. India was invaded by death cult terrorists ( presumably from Pakistan) blowing up 170 innocent women and children a year ago, which event PMSH recently recognized on his recent visit to Mumbai.
Thus the enemy is Islamofascism harbored in pretend countries that have been hijacked by despots and which will implode because their large populations can no longer be sustained by governance based on tribalism. If the pretend country of Afghanistan falls, then the so-called Af/Pak problem grows and becomes a big threat to India. India already has 450,000 troops up in Kashmir staring at Pakistan. Pakistan and India have nukes. This ain’t pretty.
Nomdeblog: ” This ain’t pretty ” I agree and a ” just war ” is something ugly to try to stop something uglier when there is no other viable choice than war.