Posted on 08/23/2009 11:00:54 AM PDT by Steelfish
Obama faces hard choices on Afghan war plans
Military situation is ‘serious and deteriorating,’ JCS chairman says
WASHINGTON - As public support for the Afghanistan war erodes, President Barack Obama is faced with two equally unattractive choices:
increase U.S. troops levels to beat back a resilient enemy, or stick with the 68,000 already committed and risk the political fallout if that's not enough.
The decision is just a few weeks away. Gen. Army Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, is completing an assessment of what he needs to win the fight there. Already, one leading Republican is suggesting McChrystal will be pressured to ask for lower troop totals than he requires.
"I don't think it's necessarily from the president," said Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, in an interview broadcast Sunday. "I think it's from the people around him and others that I think don't want to see a significant increase in our troops' presence there."
(Excerpt) Read more at msnbc.msn.com ...
My point is, Dems always complain about what warmongers Republicans are, yet always seem to expand wars (Vietnam, for ex.) while accomplishing less. I'm wondering if this is a direct correlation with their incompetence as military leaders or their strategy (i.e., Rumsfeld warned about "going into Afghanistan like the Soviets with hundreds of thousands of men.")
I’m worried about the welfare of our troops, if Obama mishandles this and if he ties their hands with senseless rules of engagement, which he already seems to be doing.
Obama is in a difficult situation, since he and the Dems have been saying, for years, that we need to fight the real enemy in Afghanistan and put more troops in there, while abandoning Bush’s stupid war in Iraq. Now the ball is in his court.
It was LBJ who got us defeated in Vietnam with his micromanagement and unwillingness to do what was needed to defeat the enemy. We could have won, but by the time he got through morale was lousy and the country was sick of it. Nixon never had a real chance to turn it around, with all the media against him.
Being a Dem didn’t save LBJ from the scorn of the left, and that may happen to Obama, too, especially if he starts failing in other areas.
I’m not sure what can be done, but I hate to see our troops put in harm’s way for nothing. As Eisenhower told JFK, don’t start a war unless you intend to win it.
Someone needs to put a burr up the fat arsed butts of our mainstream media and get them to push that arrogant marxist freak to get back to the WH ASAP.
YOU DO NOT VACATION WHEN A WAR TAKES A TURN FOR THE WORSE AND OUR TROOPS NEED TO KNOW THAT YOU ARE TENDING TO BUSINESS.
Gosh I am sorry, at times like this, that people are allowed to serve as President who have NEVER served in our military-that would be people with a mindset like uhbama who do not know what it means to give all.
If Obama and his Whizzer Kids are going to wee-wee up Afghanistan in the manner of LBJ by de-emphasizing the war and placing higher emphasis on getting the public support for his domestic policy THEN PULL THE TROOPS OUT NOW!
Dereliction of Duty: Johnson, McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam by H. R. McMaster, an Army officer if I remember correctly.
This covers a period similar I believe to what we're in now. This was the period from Nov. 1963 until LBJ was elected and officially took office in Jan. 1965.
In 1961 JFK recalled Gen. Maxwell Taylor to active duty as his military representative. Later JFK named him chairman of the JCS. In 1964 LBJ appointed him ambassador to South Vietnam. I mention this solely to say
.. it's been awhile since I read the book but it was fun reading how Gen. LeMay would always manage to sit next to Gen. Taylor knowing that Taylor was against smoking. LeMay of course smoked cigars.
McNamara was the biggest fool ever to work his way to the top. I guess he must have had a persuasive personal manner, because everyone thought he was the cat’s whiskers.
He was an idiot.
Only a total idiot or someone bent on getting our troops killed would issue such orders.
One of his biggest f*** ups was not allowing the bores of M16s to be chrome plated, causing the initial jamming problems of the first M16s to reach Vietnam, it was not his only huge mistake but one of the worst ones.
I’ve told this story before, but it typifies the man. When I was out at McGregor Range in the desert, working as a Hawk Pulse Acquisition Radar Repairman, McNamara decided that he could increase the efficiency of the military by confiscating any vehicles that they weren’t using. He issued an order saying that you had to put so many miles a month on your jeeps or your deuce-and-a-halfs, and if you used them less than that, your company would have to give them back.
“Use them or lose them.”
Predictably, our officers didn’t want to lose any vehicles, because even if they weren’t using them at the moment, they might need them for some future contingency. So they assigned us the job of taking them out and driving them around the desert until we had put the requisite number of miles on them.
That was sure efficient, eh? But it was perfectly predictable, if you understood the least bit about the military and human nature.
McNamara also headed the Edsel team, when he was working for Ford and Kennedy tapped him for his Defense Secretary.
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