Petraying the Libs

Unhappy with the negative comments from my blog, Obama is pressuring me to resign as blog writer. Wow, what a story. So it all begins a couple years ago. Bush was president. General Petraeus wanted a surge of troops for the war in Iraq to finally break the back of the insurgents. Then Senator Barack Omama voted no on the surge, claiming that the war in Iraq was a civil war between the Sunnis and the Shiites and no amount of US troops would change that. Luckily, Senator Obama was out voted. The Congress approved the surge. General Petraeus got the troops he needed to start the surge and was successful.

Obama had to admit in interviews later that he was wrong and that the surge did work, and was responsibly for winning the Iraq war. To Obama's credit, he did come clean about being on the wrong side of that issue. Obama's argument even sounds reasonable to me. If I didn't have hindsight, I would be a little uneasy with completely disagreeing with his logic(but again, I'm not a senator and it's not my job to deeply analyze these things). We're all human, and no one, no matter how smart they are, is going to get everything right. Especially when it comes to military matters and you're a person with no military experience.

But General Petraeus was Bush's general, and Obama wanted to be the anti Bush in every way. So when Obama became president, he got his own general, General McCrystal. Obama has always been against the war in Iraq, but has been a supporter of war in Afghanistan. Where Iraq was mostly seen as "Bush's War," Afghanistan was "the good war," one that Obama is determined to win as president. Ok, cool.

McCrystal wasn't like Petraeus. For one, McCrystal has admitted to voting for Obama. The left really liked him. And over the course of the war, Petraeus has been demonized by the left. MoveOn.org--a left wing advocacy group, famously took out an add in the New York Times calling Petraeus a liar and a traitor. The headline was "General Petraeus or General Betray Us?" Republicans in Congress unanimously condemned the add, as did some Democrats. I don't know enough about the situation to know why Liberals hate him so much other than he was Bush's general and they hate anything having to do with Bush.

But anyways, so Obama is president now. McCrystal said he needed 60 thousand troops to create a surge to break the backs of the Taliban. Deja vu, right? Obama admitted he was wrong about voting against the surge in Iraq. But he believes in the war in Afghanistan. This is one of the few issues the Republicans are with him on. Obama campaigned saying he would send more troops to Afghanistan, so he would be fulfilling his pledge. So, give McCrystal the damn troops he wants and let's put this war to bed, right? But that's not what happened.

For one, Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize around that same time. That's got to be awkward. And two, were his supporters not listening to him? Obama said he'd send more troops there if elected. All of a sudden, they freak out. Obama panics and ignores the order for more troops. How long was it? 9 months? McCrystal asked for the troops sometime around the beginning of spring and Obama stalled until December. Then he decides to only give McCrystal half what he asked for and gave him a time table of 18 months to win. So McCrystal does what he can with that, but, well, if you pay attention to the war at all, you know how that's going. Some progress is made, but we've lost the initiative. I'm not a war analyst, so I don't claim I know exactly what's going on, but it does seem like we're at a stale mate.

The impression I get is that Obama is incompetent(shocker, I know), has no idea how modern war strategy works(not that I know either), and McCrystal is frustrated at having his hands tied. Finally, McCrystal and his staff vented about Obama's incompetence to a writer for Rolling Stone magazine. Obama, who notoriously has a glass jaw and can't take criticism, of course, got angry at the article. He fired McCrystal and replaced him with, yep, you guessed it, Bush's war general, General Petraeus. MoveOn.Org has completely removed all of their anti Petraeus articles from their website and are now pretending they never existed.

Now, I can say that I agree that Obama should have fired McCrystal. You can't have your top war general publicly criticizing the president. It makes us look disorganized which gives hope to our enemies. If the Taliban thinks, "Just hold on a little longer. The US is starting to crack," then that's bad. After all, the Taliban can't beat us on the battlefield. All they can do is wage a PR war against us, hoping the American people can no longer stomach the war and put pressure on our politicians to bring our troops home. And any division is a victory to them. I don't like Obama(policy wise), but I would like him to "win" in Afghanistan. As an arm chair president, it does seem to me he should listen to Petraeus and give him what he asks for and to hell with what his base thinks. After all, I think the Libs would much rather be able to claim that "they" won the war in Afghanistan than claim victory in pressuring Obama to send the troops home and abandon our mission.