The Inevitable Vietnam-Afghanistan Comparison

At nearly the same time that the ground war began in Iraq, the Democrats began comparing the war in Iraq to Vietnam. They claimed that Iraq was an un-winnable war. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid declared that we had lost the war, while our troops were still in combat. The bureaucrats in DC tried everything they could to drive down public support for the war. It took them about 4 years to finally depress the American people on the war. President Bush remained resolute in his commitment to our troops in battle and peace in Iraq. Against growing, outspoken negativity by the Democrats, Bush installed General Petraeus as the commanding General in Iraq and fully supported the General’s plan for the “Surge” in Iraq. The result was the declining insurgency and the Iraqi government and security forces standing up to take control of their own country.

President Obama campaigned on the belief that we should never have been in Iraq and that we should be committing more troops and resources to Afghanistan. He believed that Afghanistan should be the center of the fight with Al Qaeda. He promised that as President he would recommit the fight to Afghanistan, sadly he seems to have a very short memory. In August General McChrystal, the General that he personally picked to lead the troops in Afghanistan, asked for a minimum of 40,000 more troops to prevent the country from slipping into chaos. Nearly 2 months after the request, the President has yet to decide whether or not to support our troops with sending the additional forces.

It wasn’t until 60 Minutes aired an interview with General McChrystal, where the General answered a seemingly innocuous question about how often he speaks to the President. The answer touched an embarrassing firestorm for the administration. The President had spoken to his General only once since he sent him to Afghanistan 3 months ago. The President’s reaction was an extremely obvious and rushed set of meetings on Afghanistan.

Since the Democrats were so eager to compare Iraq to Vietnam, I thought it would be appropriate to point out their folly. Their bureaucratic reaction to Afghanistan is precisely the kind of mistakes the politicians of 35 years ago made. The Vietnam era politicians decided that they knew more about fighting a war than the commanders on the ground in the theater of war. It is eerily similar to the idiocy of the DC politicians of today. They are more interested in holding hearings to discuss every possible contingency than to actually support the brave men and women that they claim to care about.

President Obama needs to realize that his role as Commander in Chief is not a political position that he can waffle back and forth on the decisions that affect our troops. It is time for him to grow up and actually make a decision and stand by it for better or worse. He needs to decide if he is going to support the best and the brightest our country has to offer and give them what they need to win the war. Or decide that this is not a battle he thinks is worthy and pull our troops out of there. Although I believe that it will be disastrous for him to pull out of Afghanistan, it would be better than sacrificing our military men and women while he “phones in” his duties as Commander in Chief.

President Obama Thinks He Is Still In The Illinois State Senate

Throughout the Presidential campaign, the legislative record of President Obama was looked at in an attempt to understand how he would lead as President. There was a common theme through out his time in the Illinois state Senate; it was his penchant for voting “Present”. I suppose it should be no surprise that he has continued that them during his tenure in the Oval Office.

He has become very non-committal when it comes to actually making hard decisions or backing up his flowery rhetoric. During his speech to Congress a few weeks ago, he announced a new plan for health care reform; unfortunately he has yet to deliver any such plan to Congress. He claimed that there would be no coverage of illegal immigrants in “his” plan, but yet the plan being worked on in the Senate had an amendment proposed to require a picture ID to receive the government option of health care. The amendment was voted down along party lines in the democratically controlled Senate.

Last week the U.S. General in charge in Afghanistan, that President Obama put in place 2 and a half months ago to implement “his” plan, was on ABC’s 60 Minutes during which he was asked how often he speaks to the President. His answer was shocking at first, but in light of the President’s history it was to be expected. He has spoken to his hand picked General once since he put him in place. If President Obama had downplayed the importance of Afghanistan then we could expect that it would not be that important to him, but he talked at length throughout his campaign about how important Afghanistan was in the “overseas contingency operations”(War on Terror to the rest of us). In August General McChrystal requested 40,000 more troops so that Afghanistan would not slip into failure. Is it too much to ask for the President to call his commander in Afghanistan when he provides such a grim assessment? Maybe the President was busy talking to David Letterman or taking in one of the weekly concerts at the White House.

Last week the President went before the United Nations to apologize yet again for the arrogance of his country. Also performing his stand up routine before the U.N. comedy club was Iranian dictator Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Ahmadinejad took the opportunity to deny the Holocaust and then later told the Iranian press that the U.S. President agrees with him on the U.S. being a “bully”. President Obama even said at the U.N. that the U.S. would no longer tell other countries how they should act. I can’t help but wonder how he will negotiate with Iran over nuclear weapons if he will not be telling them to not build nuclear weapons. It was also revealed last week about another nuclear enrichment facility that was previously undisclosed. The international response was surprising in the fact that embattled British leader Gordon Brown and French President Nicolas Sarkozy were much more forceful and decisive with their response than President Obama. Sarkozy even pointed out “We live in the real world, not the virtual world. And the real world expects us to take decisions. President Obama dreams of a world without weapons … but right in front of us two countries are doing the exact opposite.” For generations the French have been a joke on foreign policy issues and their penchant for surrender, now President Obama is looking to them for leadership.

President Obama has shown that he will make a decision when it concerns stealing our freedom, making a television appearance, or “sacrificing” by flying to Copenhagen to pitch for the 2016 Olympics for his cronies in Chicago. The American people expect the President to lead our country to prosperity not to wait for the international community to decide what he should do. His lack of leadership or ability to make any decision, along with the Congressional plan to slip the behemoth socialist health care reform into an unrelated bill as an amendment just to get it passed will surely spell disaster for our country. The United States of America will recover from Jimmy Carter Part 2 after 2012 when the current crop of bureaucrats in Washington are sent packing back to Chicago to cash in on their Olympic scam.