Obama Quits Afghanistan: Bergdahl was useful for closing Gitmo and winding down the war.

National Review ^ | 06/12/2014 | Victor Davis Hanson

[SeekAndFind]

Soon we shall get to the bottom of the swap of five Taliban kingpins from the Guantanamo Bay detention facility for one Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl.

In time we will learn whether Bergdahl really served with “honor and distinction” and was “captured on the battlefield,” as National Security Adviser Susan Rice has stated. Or whether, as fellow soldiers of his platoon insist, he was a deserter who left his comrades to seek out the Taliban.

We will soon discover whether Bergdahl’s serious health problems or imminent danger prompted President Obama to make the sudden swap. Or whether, as administration skeptics insist, the deal was a rushed political gambit to divert attention from the Veterans’ Affairs scandal — and a way to whittle down the Guantanamo population and erode laws demanding congressional approval before such detainees are released.

Amidst the swap conundrum, the president has defended the trade by referencing history and the American experience in past wars. But here, too, what the president states is not always accurate.

Obama insisted that “we have a rule, a principle, that when somebody wears our country’s uniform and they’re in a war theater and they’re captured . . .  we’re going to do everything we can to bring ’em home . . .  and regardless of whatever circumstances there are, it is our obligation to bring them home.”

Yet the United States has not routinely sought to bring captives home, “regardless of whatever circumstances there are.” During the Korean War, and for decades afterwards while on patrol in Korea, some American soldiers simply walked across the DMZ and turned themselves over to the North Koreans.

Both in war and peace, the United States often did little to bring them back, even when the deserters had second thoughts and wanted to return. Charles Robert Jenkins stayed in North Korea for nearly 40 years after deserting in 1965. Japan sought to pressure the U.S. government to pardon him and helped obtain his release. On his return, Jenkins pled guilty to charges of desertion and aiding the enemy and was given a dishonorable discharge.

Robert Garwood left his post in Vietnam under disputed circumstances in 1965. He was not included in prisoner swaps at the end of the Vietnam War.

(Excerpt) Read more at nationalreview.com ...

[Graewoulf]

Taliban Mullah in Chief Obama fights Wars to lose, by running away and leaving OUR troops behind.

REMEMBER BENGHAZI !

[RedMDer]

[jagusafr]

Treasonous hubris. This defines Barack Obama.

[klb99]

This is what you get when you elect a president who didn’t set foot on American soil till he was 18 years old!!!!

[nathanbedford]

Three days ago I published this reply which parallels in part and anticipates in part Doctor Hansen's comments. I might have more presciently noted the other fiasco currently underway in Iraq which resembles nothing so much as the final humiliating bug out in Vietnam from the embassy roof:

The author has omitted in his catalogue of failures to explore Obama's failure in Iran which could be the most serious fiasco of all the Obama years.

Obama's pattern in Iran has been replicated throughout Islam and may well explain the recent prisoner swap. The pattern is to say what is necessary to get elected and then proceed to negotiate away every American national interest that can be identified. If Iran gets the bomb, which now looks to be a moral certainty, the entire balance of power in the Middle East will be radically altered and not to our favor. Iran will be able to intimidate the entire Gulf where much of the world's oil is still produced and we can expect one regime after another to face the choice of arming themselves with nuclear devices or appeasing Iran. The likelihood of atomic war will have increased more than arithmetically.

Note, all of this is being done under the color of successful negotiations no matter how implausible they might appear under a close examination. The same charade was probably contemplated by Obama in the prisoner exchange. He has ordained that America's time in Afghanistan must come to a close and his legacy is in danger; Afghanistan will be left a shambles. So Obama is undertaking a series of negotiations of which the prisoner exchange is merely his opening gambit in order to redefine as a victory that which is in reality a tragic and futile ending to a war costing so much American blood and treasure. He will walk away from an Afghanistan which is breeding and nurturing terrorists proudly declaring victory and citing a series of empty promises which he will tell America is successful policy.

We see the pattern repeated in Israel in which Obama would force Israel into extremely dangerous negotiations with inevitable surrenders but the craven surrender tidied up with a "peace" treaty declaring that black is white.

Everywhere Obama turns we see rhetoric substituted for reality. We see bluster camouflaging surrender. We see a pattern here replayed everywhere Obama casts his gaze. America is under threat from China, Russia, Islam, and communism in Latin America and every threat has metastasized and become more lethal because of Barack Hussein Obama. That is the international picture but we have not even considered the domestic threat to America represented by the shadow government of Barack Hussein Obama.