Obama – Unfit to be Commander-in-Chief
It took President Barack Obama nearly one hundred days to respond to Four-Star General Stanley McCrystal’s request of an additional 40,000 troops in Afghanistan to win the war there. A war that candidate Obama had called a war of necessity. And to summarize the President’s response in very precise terms, he told:
- the General, he would only get 30,000 troops (i.e., 75 percent of what he had asked for),
- the enemy, the Taliban and Al Qaida: “We will begin withdrawing troops by July 2011,”
- our Allies: “Please help us out here and send more troops,”
- Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai: “You better shape up and run your country more efficiently and without corruption, otherwise we are out of there for good,”
- Americans : “Don’t worry I know what I am doing” with a strong and lengthy reminder that he had inherited this war from his predecessor.
Us here at Common Sense University are truly bewildered by the above synopsis and have to ask: Why did this take from late August until December 1 to come up with the explanations above? Why can the General do this assignment now with 75 percent of the force he had requested? But most importantly: Why does Obama announce a deadline for the beginning of troop withdrawal? To the best of our knowledge, no American war-time President has ever done this before. We shudder to think of what would have happened if President Roosevelt on December 8 1941 declared war on Nazi-Germany and told Adolf Hitler: “We are coming with about 75 percent of what General Eisenhower asked for in terms of troops but we will start the withdrawal of troops in 18 to 24 months.”
There are only two words for this: Total Incompetence! Barack Obama appears to be approaching and treating the execution of a war like any other issue he faces. He huddles with all his advisors, gets their individual opinions and then tries to come up with a solution that will appease most of them, especially his political base to some extent and soften the appearance of a very tough decision for a military surge by adding a deadline to it. Mr. President, war is a different thing than most other things you are dealing with. Why do you not understand this? On the other hand though, we have to give it to him, he succeeded in his “muddily” objective. As the old saying goes: A camel is a horse designed by a committee! And that is exactly what we got here (no offense to camels) and based on the geographical location of this war, it might appear to some even as appropriate.
We should mention though that the President’s speech at West Point was filled with high-flying rhetoric such as “America’s security is at stake; we will deny Al Qaida and the Taliban a safe haven in Afghanistan; we will train the Afghan military and hope for support from our Allies in NATO and then we will end the war successfully sometime in mid-year 2011.” His leftover arsenal of buzzwords from his campaign was also used but it does not overshadow the fact that he was not convincing to most of those who listened around the world. At least that is our humble opinion and only time will tell if we were correct in our assessment.
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