I guess the saying "Never get involved in a land war in Asia" is not as well known as I thought. CBS news is reporting the Presidential decision is 40,000 more troops:
Tonight, after months of conferences with top advisors, President Obama has settled on a new strategy for Afghanistan. CBS News correspondent David Martin reports that the president will send a lot more troops and plans to keep a large force there, long term. ...
The first combat troops would not arrive until early next year and it would be the end of 2010 before they were all there. That makes this Afghanistan surge very different from the Iraq surge, in which 30,000 troops descended on Baghdad and the surrounding area in just five months.
This seems like madness to me -- worse yet, in slow motion -- but I guess I'll just have to hope to be proven wrong. The article includes quotes about how Karzai has to clean up government. Please. He just stole an election.
So what will our five Republican Congressmen do? Will they vote to support the war -- this seems to be what they wanted -- or will they take the opportunity to bring down the President by voting no on military budgets?
And will our ten Democrats do? Are they going to allow $4 billion or more a month to be borrowed and thrown away after we endured all these lectures about the deficit? Will they tie war funding to a tax so that we find out if the American people really support this indefinite occupation? Rush Holt's website says "Rep. Holt does not believe the U.S. military commitment in Afghanistan should be open ended. He has co -sponsored legislation that would require the Secretary of Defense to present to Congress an exit strategy for Afghanistan." According to CBS, this is the opposite of an exit strategy:
With 68,000 Americans already there, the Afghan surge would mean there would be 100,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan by the end of the president's first term.
In any case, the last NBC/WSJ poll says Obama just picked the least popular option (49% saying this choice is not acceptable, with only 43% saying it is acceptable.) so I wonder how Democrats expect to win any elections. Our country is being looted by the elites and I guess there's nothing anyone can do about it. We are stuck on the path of Empire.
Does anyone think calling Congress will do any good?
Update: I was sent this Bloomberg story with an on-the-record denial:
Obama hasn't received final options that he has requested, neither has he reviewed those alternatives with his national security team, said National Security Adviser James Jones, responding to reports by the Associated Press and CBS News. The AP reported Obama would add "tens of thousands more forces," while CBS said he plans to send four combat brigades plus thousands more support troops.
"Reports that President Obama has made a decision about Afghanistan are absolutely false," Jones said in a e-mailed statement today. "Any reports to the contrary are completely untrue and come from uninformed sources."
Whether the decision was reached today or not isn't what's important. We'll see soon what happens. |
