Obama Throws Afghanistan and America Under the Bus
By Larry Johnson on September 22, 2009 at 8:52 PM in Current Affairs
I will beat this dead horse until we get a ton of glue. Barack Obama waffling on Afghanistan has now crossed a line that puts our nation at risk. His word means nothing. Here is what he said to a veterans group a little over a month ago about the nature of the threat in Afghanistan:
A war of necessity? A war worth fighting? He said it damn it, but he sure as hell did not mean a word of it.
But this was not the first time he promised to make the fight in Afghanistan a top priority. He even had the audacity to argue back in 2008 that “we lacked the resources” to do the job in Afghanistan because we were diverting resources to Iraq.
Barack Obama, you are not just a liar, you are a ham-handed buffoon of a liar.
Your commander on the ground has made it very clear that he needs 45,000 more soldiers to do the job that you have claimed repeatedly is a war of necessity and that you also have insisted will be the staging base for the next terrorist attack against the United States if we ignore Afghanistan.
You announced in March of this year you have a “new” strategy. You specifically spoke about the lack of resources and the inadequate number of troops that Bush had devoted to the Afghan effort.:
At the same time, we will shift the emphasis of our mission to training and increasing the size of Afghan security forces, so that they can eventually take the lead in securing their country. That’s how we will prepare Afghans to take responsibility for their security, and how we will ultimately be able to bring our own troops home.
For three years, our commanders have been clear about the resources they need for training. And those resources have been denied because of the war in Iraq. Now, that will change. The additional troops that we deployed have already increased our training capacity. And later this spring we will deploy approximately 4,000 U.S. troops to train Afghan security forces. For the first time, this will truly resource our effort to train and support the Afghan army and police. Every American unit in Afghanistan will be partnered with an Afghan unit, and we will seek additional trainers from our NATO allies to ensure that every Afghan unit has a coalition partner. We will accelerate our efforts to build an Afghan army of 134,000 and a police force of 82,000 so that we can meet these goals by 2011 — and increases in Afghan forces may very well be needed as our plans to turn over security responsibility to the Afghans go forward.
So forgive the Joint Chiefs, General Petraeus and General McChrystal for believing you were a man of your word. But you are a liar and a charlatan. When the commander who you personally selected to lead the war in Afghanistan tells you he needs more troops you let the request sit in your damn inbox and you hop a flight to New York City to yuck it up with Dave Letterman. Here’s what you said on Letterman:
Compare this with what he promised in March of this year:
Barack Obama, you are worse than an average political hack. You are an immature amateur who is putting the nation’s security at risk by your vacillation and hedging. Grow up man!
by Ronald Scott
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