Anticipating Obama’s speech at West Point, David Brooks writes:
What’s emerging appears to be something less than a comprehensive COIN strategy but more than a mere counter-terrorism strategy — shooting at terrorists with drones. It is a hybrid approach, and as we watch the president’s speech Tuesday night, we’ll all get to judge whether he has cut and pasted the different options into a coherent whole. It’s not the troop levels that matter. What matters is how this war will be fought.
Some very smart people say that the administration’s direction is already fatally flawed. There is no such thing as effective COIN-lite, they argue. All the pieces of a comprehensive strategy have to be done patiently and together because success depends on the way they magnify one another.
Others are concerned that there will be too much “exit strategy talk.” Tom Ricks observes:
Perhaps most importantly, is his heart in it, and can he bring along a good portion of the American people, especially part of his base? Or is he gonna say we’re giving it 12 months and then we’re outta here? … If he uses the phrase “exit strategy,” or dwells on the subject, then you’ll know you’re probably looking at a one-term president. In other words, file under “Jimmy Carter,” not “Abe Lincoln.”
All this, of course, is what comes from months of public agonizing and a sense that domestic politics, and domestic political advisers, had overtaken the process of developing a winning war strategy. In a feverish effort to keep the unplacatable Left placated, Obama runs the risk of making his own job — leading us to victory — more difficult.
This is obviously not a role he relishes nor a process he has excelled at. There are choices to be made: McChrystal or not, exit-strategy limited or not. It is excruciating to watch the White House try to please this and that constituency as if this were an ag bill. But as Donald Rumsfeld once said of the Army, we fight wars with the president we have. This president has a chance to — for once — put aside pedestrian domestic concerns and demonstrate he understands both the nature of our enemy and the requirements of fighting a self-described critical war. If he does that, the politics will sort themselves out. If not, he’ll have far greater problems than keeping Nancy Pelosi happy.
Achoo. Gesundheit. Call the ADL. Seriously, are you for real? And is Maverick going to spend his whole campaign on this kind of nonsense?
I guess some truths are just too politically correct to utter.
Of course they’ll dance in the streets. They’re praying for a weakling like Obama to deal with, and as muslims they have a duty to try and bring him back into the fold. (Whether Obama was a practicing muslim as a boy or not, the islamic world believes he is an apostate.)
Al Qaeda learned its lesson when it endorsed John Kerry in 2004 and people where rightly disgusted. This time around most of them should be crafty enough to keep their mouths shut until the election is over.
By the way, Abe, obama is not dark. The vanilla I put in my coffee is darker–probably stronger, too.
I think, by the “optics” of an Obama victory, Representative King meant that our enemies will see it as an American capitulation, as a manifestation of the Stockholm syndrome.
Obama, in his person, his parentage, childhood, his impulses and political leanings is an anti-establishment figure. He is willing to talk to anyone, he thinks American must change, fundamentally, his religious mentor and moral guide considers this country corrupt and sinful.
Obama’s appeal may well be understood by Islamists as a loss of nerve, a tacit surrender, especially because he is a man of color, and a color for which they have contempt.
Islamists would much prefer Obama but not because of the color of his skin, his ethnicity, or his family name — but because they will be able to push him around in almost everything that they want. A president who is willing to come to the debate table with red-handed murderers is as a supreme disadvantage, and “exchange” quickly devolves into “extortion.”
Obama suffers from the same broken idea of America’s image as Clinton the First did. He seeks to “restore America’s image abroad,” but misinterprets this as merely being “liked” abroad. Fundamentalist Islamists who have control of large swarths of countries/regions like Lebanon, Pakistan, Gaza, Afghanistan, and so on, will certainly “like” America more simply because we will give into what they want… they have dispensible men and no sactity of human life, they’d be willing to call Obama’s bluff at every turn.
But, Obama and other’s will be happy as long as they like us. America will be the campus whore who sleeps with everybody and never asks for anything, she’ll be well liked by everybody who takes advantage of her… yet utterly empty of soul.