Today there is a great post up on The Conservatives by our own Brian Faughnan displaying the absolute lack of compassion and downright cruelty of Barack Obama and his Administration.

The process will get more difficult for those who lost loved ones: Mohammed will attack and denigrate the victims. He will express pride in what he has done. Jihadists around the world will pay him tribute. The foreign and domestic press will dissect every step of the process. And in Manhattan, security will mount, and the alert level will rise, and New Yorkers will undoubtedly read that our intelligence agencies are facing more and more credible threats against the City. This will go on for years.

Even if Mohammed is eventually convicted and executed - by no means a slam dunk - could that result possibly be worth the pain?

What sort of man could fail to take into account the pain he is likely to cause for the 9/11 families, and for the people of New York?

Brian goes on to list a few bits of evidence as to what sort of man could do such a thing. Earlier today I came across another article that provided further evidence. While being greeted by our military members on Osan Air Base in South Korea the President quipped:

You guys make a pretty good photo op

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While Obama was taking a bow on his Asian Apology Tour, Quinnipiac released a new poll in which the President’s ratings also took a bow, h/t Ed Morrisey at Hot Air.

Obama’s job approval rating fell to 48 percent in the Nov. 9-16 survey of registered voters nationwide by the Hamden, Connecticut-based university, with 42 percent polled saying they disapproved of the job he is doing.

The Quinnipiac Poll also showed a drop in approval of the Presidents handling of the war in Afghanistan. Voters now “disapprove 49 - 38 percent of the President’s handling of the war there”. In October that number read 42 - 40 percent approval.

Now, don’t misread this as support for the war effort losing steam.

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President Obama and national security team discuss Afghanistan

As we’ve discussed before, President Obama is on the horns of a dilemma. He campaigned on the idea that the “real” war on transnational terrorism is being fought in Afghanistan and has since demonstrated that, true to his roots in the far left, he can’t bring himself to pursue any policy which might strengthen US influence abroad. In the process he has carried out a series of metaphorical terrorist attacks of his own, using surrogates to attack General Stan McChrystal. discredit the general notion of winning, and, of course, blame President Bush.

Today more of Obama’s Afghan strategy becomes apparent.

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-TobyToons

It’s hard to see in the signature line, but there is a special thanks to commenter mrkwong for the initial idea on this cartoon (here - comment #62).

Obama spent the day golfing instead of making his long awaited decision about sending more troops to Afghanistan.

For weeks, President Obama has been indecisively dithering about whether to send more troops to Afghanistan to fight what he correctly calls a “war of necessity.” General Stanley A. McChrystal’s report, in which he requests more troops, was issued at the end of August.

The Commander in Chief, taking political heat for not having enough women in his inner circle, found golf a more important political expediency than finally making the Afghan decision. There was so much heat that an article in the New York Times began, “Does the White House feel like a frat house?” Obama apparantly needed headlines proclaiming that he golfs with a woman, more than he needed to make the life and death decision as to whether he will send more troops in support of his “war of necessity.”

Obama’s Afghan indecision has gone on for so long, some wonder if Obama has delayed his long overdo decision until after this year’s gubernatorial elections in New Jersey and Virginia in order to help struggling Democrat candidates Jon Corzine and Craig Deeds. Others have simply concluded that Obama is ignoring Afghanistan and breaking his vow to fight his “war of necessity.”

The major decision the Obama Administration continues to procrastinate is whether to continue the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan. Victory in Afghanistan was, as you will recall, one of Obama’s main campaign themes - one he used to convince people that he wasn’t the dyed-in-the-tie-dyes peacenik his left-wing record, background and positions on other issues suggested. Under President Bush, America’s war aims in Afghanistan were fairly straightforward:

(1) Drive the Taliban from power.

(2) Destroy Al Qaeda’s training and operations bases in the country, while killing or capturing as many of their personnel as possible.

(3) Replace the Taliban with a government that was less repressive, viewed as legitimate by the Afghan people, and would not cooperate with Al Qaeda - a step that inherently involved preventing the revival of the Taliban itself, given its Islamist ideology and thorough integration with Al Qaeda.

Step One was accomplished swiftly in the fall of 2001, and Step Two proceeded apace at the same time; Al Qaeda’s leadership was never wholly destroyed (its very top men appear to have fled to the Waziristan region of Pakistan), nor completely routed from the country, but its bases were destroyed and its ability to project power from Afghanistan to outside countries was essentially crippled.

Step Three was always the diciest as a long-term proposition; as I wrote in early 2003:

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American Elephants hopes that the administration is delaying making a decision on Afghanistan until Tony Blair becomes the first President of the EU.  The idea being, it’d give the White House moral reinforcement:

Now we all know Tony Blair has his head on straight about both the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and resolutely so. Is Obama then waiting for Blair’s leadership to give him the political cover to send more troops to Afghanistan?

Well… it’d be both a good idea and a personally satisfying scenario*, so I think that nobody should count on it happening. After the President’s unforced error yesterday in Copenhagen it’s no longer safe to assume that this administration’s strategic planning abilities are up to even minimum standards. It’s much more likely that the White House simply doesn’t know what to do next. Which does mean that they might seize upon enlisting Blair’s support - but if they do, it’ll probably be out of desperation. Which means that people still won’t be able to assume that any forethought went into the decision.

Just the way it goes.

Moe Lane

PS: “President” of the European Union for an unelected position may not be technically incorrect, but it’s a little eyebrow-raising.  Why didn’t they just call the position “Premier?”

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Tonight, President Barack Obama goes to Copenhagen to lobby for Chicago to get the Olympics. And incidentally, if he succeeds, Chicago real estate developers, like many of his donors, will get zillions in development contracts from the city. The Chicago Tribune’s John Kass noted that  Obama is “asking the IOC to make Mayor Richard Daley the king of Chicago for life.”

It turns out that today, his pick to lead our troops (and all of NATO) in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, will be in London giving a speech about how to win in Afghanistan. I guess McChrystal is allowed to tell our allies how we can win, just not Congress or the White House.

Perhaps Obama could stop by London and listen to the speech or chat with his general? But perhaps not. According to Kass, Obama told the head of NATO that he doesn’t have the time to chat about NATO and Afghanistan:

“I’ve got so much to do here,” Obama told NATO Secretary-General Anders Rasmussen in the Oval Office on Tuesday. “So, I will sleep on the plane. I’ll land. I’ll speak. Then fly right back.”

Note that Rasmussen is Danish. And Obama will be in Denmark. Perhaps tea at Rasmussen’s before returning to all his work back in Washington?

This has set eyebrows to full raise all across America.

The military general credited for capturing Saddam Hussein and killing the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq says he has only spoken to President Obama once since taking command of Afghanistan.

“I’ve talked to the president, since I’ve been here, once on a VTC [video teleconferece],” General Stanley McChrystal told CBS reporter David Martin in a television interview that aired Sunday.

“You’ve talked to him once in 70 days?” Mr. Martin followed up.

“That is correct,” the general replied.

It is rather appalling, based on what we already know, that the President of the United States would only talk to his commanding general once in the seventy days the general has been engaged.

This is a sign of priorities. The President has spoken over 100 times on health care. It has consumed him in a way critics say Iraq consumed President Bush.

There is a significant difference though. President Bush won in Iraq with his fixation. Barack Obama is losing on the health care front and now looks set to lose Afghanistan too.

Perhaps Obama needs to recalibrate his focus and attention. Patton was right that America won’t tolerate a loser. And thus far Obama is losing on most every front.

But then, I want Obama to fail except in Afghanistan.

On February 17, 2009 (just about a month after swearing an oath to defend his Country against all enemies foreign and domestic) it was reported that Barack Obama was committing an additional 17,000 troops to the Afghanistan “conflict” in order “[t]o meet urgent security needs.”

On March 27, 2009 Barack Obama “announced a comprehensive, new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan that is the culmination of a careful 60-day, interagency strategic review,” suggesting that:

We are in Afghanistan to confront a common enemy that threatens the United States, our friends and allies, and the people of Afghanistan and Pakistan who have suffered the most at the hands of violent extremists. So I want the American people to understand that we have a clear and focused goal: to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future…To achieve our goals, we need a stronger, smarter and comprehensive strategy.”

Two days later, on March 29, 2009 it was reported that Barack Obama was committing “4,000 troops to Afghanistan along with hundreds of civilian specialists in an effort to confront what he considers “the central challenge facing [that] country.” Now the master of indecisiveness is promising “to announce new strategies for both countries Friday” (September 25, 2009).

To the detriment of us all, while Obama waffles and flips and flops (like the fish out of water we all knew he WOULD be in trying to fake it as a legitimate Commander in Chief) between all these strategies he can’t seem to make up his mind about, 317 MORE Soldiers have died fighting in defense of Operation Enduring Freedom which is more than 30% of the total lives lost during the entire 8 years of the conflict.

This is a record no man should ever be proud of. Barack Obama’s incompetence is directly and solely to blame for the flag-draped coffins of grief that have been delivered upon hundreds of American families and shame to the office he should never have been allowed to hold.

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If you are old enough to remember the George W. Bush Administration and the 2004 and 2008 presidential campaigns, you will recall that a favorite theme of critics of Bush’s war management was that Bush hadn’t listened to Army brass asking for more troops in Iraq and/or Afghanistan. In particular, the Democrats practically made a secular saint of General Eric Shinseki, who supposedly was fired for delivering this message. (The truth is rather different, but the media has been printing the legend for so long it’s hardly worth the candle at this late date to argue the point). Gen. Shinseki even ended up being given a Cabinet post in the Obama Administration for little other reason than as a symbol that Obama would break from his predecessor by following his subordinates’ recommendations.

Well, as we so often have reason to say of Obama’s campaign rhetoric, that was then and this is now. And we are learning that listening to requests from his commanders for more troops is not Obama’s strong suit as Commander-in-Chief.

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Barack Obama inherited a ‘war on terror’ (along with an aspiring ‘nuclear’ Iran) that he told us during the campaign was high on his list of priorities and concerns. He assured us he would spend a lot of energy focusing on these things were he elected President. He hasn’t, other than to throw a few thousand more troops into harms way with no real strategy to back it up hoping that would shut up us security hawks and buy a little time to figure a way to get himself OUT of this mess.

Senator Obama’s voting record doesn’t square with President Obama’s rhetoric on terror, or Afghanistan…it doesn’t even square with his alleged new tough talk on Iran. Remember, the Senator offered face to face talks with Iran and the President wants to impose new sanctions…all the while STILL planning that face time with Iran’s Chief Executive Tyrant and resident lunatic he’s prattled on about for so long now.

Where I come from, the man is either a bald-faced liar or a two-faced hypocrite. Whichever it is, Barack Obama is not the least bit concerned with saving any of his faces:

“Until I’m satisfied that we’ve got the right strategy, I’m not going to be sending some young man or woman over there — beyond what we already have,” Obama said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” If an expanded counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan contributes to the goal of defeating al-Qaeda, “then we’ll move forward,” he said. “But, if it doesn’t, then I’m not interested in just being in Afghanistan for the sake of being in Afghanistan or saving face or . . . sending a message that America is here for the duration.”

Well, we DON’T have the right strategy, he HAS sent in more troops, he’s being told that wasn’t enough, and we stand ready to have defeat snatched from the jaws of victory…AGAIN…because of the whims and fancies of a man and his minions who were never qualified to make National Security and life and death decisions for us…

It’s deja vu all over again…

On Wednesday evening, President Barack Obama delivered an address to a joint-session of Congress in the hopes of strengthening public and legislative support for his health care reforms, but shrewd Republican Capitol Hill researchers note that the President’s carefully-crafted speech was missing one important element – namely, the troops.

While the president consciously rallied fleeting progressive support and attempted to dispel myths surrounding the legislation, he wholly neglected to mention military personnel, becoming the first wartime Commander-in-Chief to do so since former President Gerald Ford in 1974.

With public approval of the war effort in Afghanistan dipping, the case could be made—and with little difficulty—that the decision not to mention the troops serving in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere was a conscious, deliberate one.

Obama’s progressive base is rebelling, raucously in some instances, on everything from the public option to LGBT marriage equality. As it stands now, the President’s political house has been beaten and battered, and a commitment to the Afghanistan War just may be the big, bad wolf to come blow it all down. And this is not a risk the White House is willing to take.

The collapse of public resolve for the ongoing but unmentioned efforts in Afghanistan is symptomatic of the Administration’s timidity with fully committing to the war. Americans look to their President in times of war for leadership and guidance. Our President’s silence can mean only one thing, and it surely is not victory.

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Add George Will to those calling for a new strategy for Obama’s war in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

In a column entitled “Time to Get Out of Afghanistan,” Will expands upon comments he made on ABC’s “This Week” and argues we should reduce our forces in Afghanistan and “do only what can be done from offshore, using intelligence, drones, cruise missiles, airstrikes and small, potent Special Forces units, concentrating on the porous 1,500-mile border with Pakistan, a nation that actually matters.”

The Will strategy comes a day after General Stanley McChrystal, the top US commander in Afghanistan, submitted a report that also calls for a new strategy in Afghanistan. According to the New York Times, McChrystal’s report lays the groundwork for more troops and “would invest the United States more extensively in Afghanistan.”

President Obama announced a new strategy for his war in Afghanistan and Pakistan at the end of March - less than six months ago. Can Obama sell another new, more intensive, Afghan strategy, while his leave Iraq by date certain policy continues to move closer to snatching defeat from the jaws of victory in that theater of the struggle formerly known as the Global War On Terror?

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The degree of the political problem that President Obama’s “damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead,” approach to health care reform has caused the ruling party in Washington, D.C. is beginning to become clear from some comments made by cognoscenti of the Democratic Party.

A gray-beard of the liberal establishment, Richard Cohen, wrote today in the Washington Post that the most apt comparison to President Obama is President Jimmy Carter. Ouch!

With regard to the health care debate, Cohen writes:

In the end, the success of the health care reform effort comes down to trust. A lesson of the raucous town-hall meetings is the sense of panic, the fear that this man in the White House does not appreciate the anxiety that middle-class Americans fear about health care — whether they will keep what they have, whether they will have enough or whether their last years will be spent in painful, degrading poverty….

More and more Obama is being likened to Lyndon Johnson, with Afghanistan becoming his Vietnam. Maybe. But the better analogy is to Jimmy Carter, particularly the president analyzed by James Fallows in a 1979 Atlantic magazine article, “The Passionless Presidency.” “The central idea of the Carter administration is Jimmy Carter himself,” Fallows wrote. And what is the central idea of the Obama presidency? It is change. And what is that? It is Obama himself.

Unlike Carter, Obama brims with energy and charm. His brilliance is not brittle but supple. Yet, another teachable moment is upon him and he seems lost. The country needs health care reform and a success in Afghanistan, and both efforts are going in the wrong direction. The message needs to be fixed and so, with some tough introspection, does the man.

Just how badly has the Democratic health reform effort failed? Democratic Senator Feingold (WI) is predicting no health care bill before Christmas, and when he said the most likely outcome is nothing being done at all, he was met with cheers from the voters at his town hall meeting.

As the Lakeland Times reports:

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Ah, the first “Is [INSERT GEOGRAPHICAL LOCATION HERE] [INSERT PRESIDENT'S NAME HERE]’s Vietnam?” article written about a Presidential administration.  Always a magical time.

Could Afghanistan Become Obama’s Vietnam?

WASHINGTON — President Obama had not even taken office before supporters were etching his likeness onto Mount Rushmore as another Abraham Lincoln or the second coming of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Yet what if they got the wrong predecessor? What if Mr. Obama is fated to be another Lyndon B. Johnson instead?

Naturally, the NYT is mostly concerned with Afghanistan as it relates to American domestic policy - the idea that the situation might have either national security or humanitarian implications that might affect the decision-making process is carefully ignored - but that’s not unexpected. As the article itself references (but does not admit), the Left has never been interested in Afghanistan as Afghanistan: it was a convenient club with which to try to beat the (Republican) President with, and now that there is no (Republican) President in office the progressive wing is abandoning the illusion of caring, with happy sighs all around.

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Governor Sarah Palin recently tweeted:

“Got Fed ok for Adjutant Gen Campbell, Command Sgt Major Choate and me to travel to our Ak Army Natl Guard troops on Wed. Glad to go to them”

The 2008 GOP vice presidential candidate’s tweet didn’t say exactly where she would travel to visit the toops. But one has to wonder why she would need permission from the Feds to visit her own state’s Guard troops unless she’s talking… er, tweeting about going overseas to do it. The only other place we can think of that she might need federal permission to visit Alaska Army Guard troops is Fort Greely.  The missile base, however, is a hundred miles from Fairbanks, so a visit to the facility would not involve much in the way of travelling. Also, Gen. Cambell should not need federal permission to visit Greely.

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As a general matter, while I write a fair amount about national security strategy, I’m usually hesitant to wade into military tactics, a subject best left to the professionals. Even among those who know their stuff, military tactical decisions often involve difficult tradeoffs on which reasonable people can and do disagree, plus people who lack a military background (as I do) often make hilarious mistakes when attempting to lay out the facts of such stories, let alone dissect them, without running them by someone who knows their stuff. I’d prefer to avoid the kind of armchair generalship we had among so many on the Left during the Bush years who were hair-trigger quick to accuse U.S. tactical decisions of being (1) incompetent or (2) atrocities.

All that being said, I find myself utterly baffled by this report from the Associated Press on comments made by and on behalf of the new commanding officer in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, and his spokesman, Rear Adm. Greg Smith, and of course I have to wonder if the order comes from McChrystal or originates higher up the chain of command from the political branches:

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[UPDATE]: Shorter Obama administration: “We’re just doing what Bush did!” Which is: a), a direct contradiction of the video below; and b), a direct contradiction of the LA Times article below. Impressive: you would have thought that they’d pick one or the other.

Representative Mike Rogers (R-MI) has a serious problem with our new GWOT strategy in Afghanistan. Specifically, the way we plan to read captured, foreign illegal combatants their Miranda rights:

…the Obama Justice Department has quietly ordered FBI agents to read Miranda rights to high value detainees captured and held at U.S. detention facilities in Afghanistan, according a senior Republican on the House Intelligence Committee. “The administration has decided to change the focus to law enforcement. Here’s the problem. You have foreign fighters who are targeting US troops today – foreign fighters who go to another country to kill Americans. We capture them…and they’re reading them their rights – Mirandizing these foreign fighters,” says Representative Mike Rogers, who recently met with military, intelligence and law enforcement officials on a fact-finding trip to Afghanistan.

Rogers, a former FBI special agent and U.S. Army officer, says the Obama administration has not briefed Congress on the new policy. “I was a little surprised to find it taking place when I showed up because we hadn’t been briefed on it, I didn’t know about it. We’re still trying to get to the bottom of it, but it is clearly a part of this new global justice initiative.”

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Despite taking place in the Information Age, very few of the heroic exploits of American soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines since September 11, 2001, have made their way into the living rooms of ordinary Americans — at least in any lasting way.

Whether this is the result of changing values among the American people, the general population’s perpetually dwindling attention span, or because there are so many things closer to home our nation is choosing to focus on instead of our service men and women’s gallant deeds and efforts (whether that be a rocky national economy or the latest season of American Idol), the fact is this generation has failed to identify and treasure its incarnations of historic military heroes like Audie Murphy, Jimmy Doolittle, Pappy Boyington, Bill Pitsenbarger, Bud Day, and countless others.

This disappointing reality is not unique to the current decade. Who, for example, can name the most recent pre-global war on terror (GWOT) recipients of the Congressional Medal of Honor? The names of Randy Shughart and Gary Gordon — two Army special operations sergeants who received the nation’s highest award for their heroic actions in Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1993 — are utterly foreign to the vast majority of the same American population that can name the latest movie star to file for divorce, the latest starlet to have borne a child out of wedlock, or the latest teen sensation to enter alcohol rehab.

Part of the problem is a lack of reporting on stories of true heroism among the men and women serving this country in war zones around the world. After all, how can people know of the deeds being done by our best and brightest if the news media — whose sole raison d’être is to report on deeds and events — doesn’t the job it exists to do?

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