Obama pulls a Bush move, adds troops

After several months of meetings with top advisers, President Barack Obama has finally settled on a new strategy for Afghanistan.

CBS News correspondent David Martin stated Obama plans to send a lot more troops and plans to keep a large force there, for a long term.

Recently, Gen. Stanly McChrystal asked for an additional number of troops several months ago, but Obama tentatively decided to not make a decision until absolutely necessary.

Although Obama plans to send 40,000 new troops, none will arrive until 2010 and it won’t be until the end of that year all will have arrived. This is very different than the surge of troops in Iraq, in which 30,000 new troops descended on Baghdad in just five months, according to the Washington Post.

Fred Kagan, of the American Enterprise Institute argues the slower surge will produce slow results.

“If they’re going to be sort of trickled in very slowly over the course of the year than it’s unlikely to have a decisive impact in the course of 2010,” Kagan said.

This is a very interesting point, because if you look at Iraq, which began to turnaround significantly in favor of the U.S. after the surge was implemented. If Obama wishes to produce the same results a faster approach may be necessary. According to CNN, there are currently 68,000 Americans in Afghanistan and with the surge over 1000,000 would be there before 2011.

So, what’s the big deal about all this? Obama was careful about making a difficult decision, so what? The big deal is Obama was elected to be a new kind of president. Obama promised to bring the troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan. He planned to be the change America wanted to have.

Even the strongest supporters of former President George W. Bush knew something had to change in the American foreign policy – but nothing has.

It appears Obama is merely continuing the failed policies of Bush in a more amplified approach. If he didn’t honor the wishes of McChrystal, it’s possible he would have alienated himself as a traitor and ignoring the elephant in the room. However, if Obama does in fact go through with the General’s wishes, he suffers to lose any credibility as president.

Obama banked his election on two things: 1. Driving down health care costs through universal health care and 2. Getting out of these “ludicrous” wars, according to an interview with Fox News Channel in 2008 with Obama. Sadly for Obama there is no middle ground here.

Obama can’t wait too long to make a decision. The more casualties there are in this war, the less people will trust his judgment on anything.

Pick a side, Obama and fight for that cause, because the American people deserve a leader who will make the decisions, easy or hard.

Posted by Colonnade Archives on Nov 13 2009. Filed under Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry