Obama at Odds With Advisers on Afghan Exit Strategy, Woodward Book Reports

Politics Daily ^ | 22/9/10 | Tom Kavanagh

[Eleutheria5]

Frustrated that his top military advisers failed to provide him an exit plan for Afghanistan, President Obama crafted his own strategy, according to a new book by Bob Woodward.

In "Obama's War" -- Woodward's meeting-by-meeting account of the 2009 Afghan strategy review -- the president stressed that the plan to add 30,000 troops in a short-term escalation "needs to be . . . about how we're going to hand it off and get out of Afghanistan. Everything we're doing has to be focused on how we're going to get to the point where we can reduce our footprint. It's in our national security interest. There cannot be any wiggle room."

Obama rejected the military's request for 40,000 troops as part of an expansive mission that had no foreseeable end. "I'm not doing 10 years," he told Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. "I'm not doing long-term nation-building. I am not spending a trillion dollars." After much delay and apparent deliberation, Obama announced his strategy in an address at West Point last December.

[Eleutheria5]

Was he cherrypicking?

[Ev Reeman]

Dems know how to start wars and know how to lose wars but they almost never know how to win them.

Truman was the last dem president to actually win a war.

Obama is no Truman, not even close.

[DrC]

“I am not spending a trillion dollars.”

“I am not spending a trillion dollars in Afghanistan. I need that money to hand out to my union buddies in the U.S.”

[jetson]

BOzo does not understand peace through power, and never will.

[savedbygrace]

Exactly. Putting his entire statement together, he’s really saying that it’s OK if thousands or even hundreds of thousands of Americans get murdered in a terrorist attack, as long as he can spend that trillion dollars on his Marxist agenda.

We are expendable on the way to his agenda. The expendable include Democrats. In fact, if you give it a little more thought, you realize that when/if terrorists succeed in an attack, the attack will be in a major city, and Obama’s most dependable supporters are the majority in several U. S. major cities.

Obama is suggesting the murder of his own people, so to speak, is OK as long as he can continue to spend our money on his programs.

[DrC]

“Obama is suggesting the murder of his own people, so to speak, is OK as long as he can continue to spend our money on his programs.”

What’s particularly frightening is his arrogantly overruling his own generals in pursuit of what obviously is a purely political calculation. Bush also had to override some generals on the surge strategy, but he clearly made the calculation based not on what might be popular with the American people, but what would be the best resolution of the Iraq war. He knew that a hasty retreat—such as advocated by Obama during the 2008 election—would have meant that all the soldiers who had died up until that point would have died in vain.

[Wuli]

Can you imagine Roosevelt and Truman insisting to MacArthur how the objective was not to DEFEAT Japan but simply how to most expeditiously end OUR fighting against Japan?