Wow!? "Commanded in Chief" The Nation - Democratic Underground

amborin

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Thu Dec-03-09 07:37 PM
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Wow!? "Commanded in Chief" The Nation

Edited on Thu Dec-03-09 08:09 PM by amborin

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"....You may not think so, but on Tuesday night from the US Military Academy at West Point, in his first prime-time presidential address to the nation, Barack Obama surrendered. It may not have looked like that: there were no surrender documents; he wasn't on the deck of the USS Missouri; he never bowed his head. Still, from today on, think of him not as the commander-in-chief but as the commanded-in-chief.

And give credit to the victors. Their campaign was nothing short of brilliant. Like the policy brigands they were, they ambushed the president, held him up with their threats, brought to bear key media players and Republican honchos and in the end made off with the loot. The campaign began in late September with a strategic leak of Afghan War commander General Stanley McChrystal's grim review of the situation in that country, including demands for sizeable troop escalations and a commitment to a counterinsurgency war.

It came to include rumors of potential retirements in protest if the president didn't deliver, as well as clearly insubordinate policy remarks by General McChrystal, not to speak of an impressive citizen-mobilization of inside-the-Beltway former neocon or fighting liberal think-tank experts, and a helping hand from an admiring media. In the process, the US military succeeded in boxing in a president who had already locked himself into a conflict he had termed both "the right war" and a "necessary" one. After more than two months of painfully over-reported deliberations, President Obama has now ended up essentially where General McChrystal began...."

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<http://www.thenation.com/doc/20091221/engelhardt>

Laura Flaunders: "All Too Familiar on Afghanistan"

<http://www.thenation.com/blogs/notion/502872/all_too_familiar_on_afghanistan.

The Nation Editorial:

"At a time when the continuing economic crisis is creating ever more hardship for the vast majority of Americans and placing ever greater demands on the federal budget, we need clearheaded leadership that is able to strip away myth and dogma and define afresh our most pressing problems and the right strategy for dealing with them. Sadly, in announcing his administration's decision to send 30,000 more American troops to Afghanistan on top of the 68,000 already there, President Obama has fallen short of this test of leadership.

..Not only did the president and his national security team reject far less costly options that would have allowed us to disengage militarily from the conflict in a responsible way; they have decided on a strategy that is so full of muddled thinking and so wasteful of lives and resources that it must be opposed as contrary to the best interests of the American people. And his vow to begin withdrawing troops in July 2011 seems not so much part of a carefully considered stabilization strategy for Afghanistan as a way to placate growing Congressional and popular opposition to a war entering its ninth year. ..

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<http://www.thenation.com/doc/20091221/editors>