I am going to try to respond to a number of different comments made by Kevin in this thread (I was time shifting the speech about 20 minutes and so was not following along with Kevin in real time).
First I refer both Kevin and everyone else to the transcript of the President's speech (http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/12/01/obama.afghanistan.speech.transcript/index.html), which will answer some of the questions Kevin raises. 1. Kevin wrote "I can't help but notice that the President didn't feel the need to explain WHY we need to be in Afghanistan. He says we need to be there, and he expects that to be reason enough." This seems like a strange observation Kevin - Obama explained why we need to be in Afghanistan in the first part of the speech. He did not just say we need to be there. He explained that al Qaeda and the Taliban, after escaping to safe havens in the mountains of Pakistan, have been trying to overthrow the elected Afghan government, taken control of large parts of Afghanistan, and engaged in terrorist attacks against Pakistan. Elsewhere in the speech he explains that al Qaeda has continued to plot terrorist attacks against the US from its safe havens, and that the US has arrested persons sent to the US by al Qaeda to engage in terrorist acts here. 0see in particular paragraphs 9 and 17 of the speech] 2. Kevin wrote: Three parts to the plan: "Military effort" ... do we get an A for effort? "Civilian surge" ... are we deploying Jehovah's Witnesses and Shriners to Afghanistan? "Pakistan partnership" ... if the problem is in Pakistan, why are we in Afghanistan? I don't really understand the point Kevin is making here. Obama spend quite a bit of time explaining each of the three parts of this plan. I don't think Kevin has made any real substantive criticism or question about parts 1 and 2. As to question number 3, Obama was quite clear as to why we are in Afghanistan (see above). Since al Qaeda has fled to safe havens in the mountain regions on the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan, they have to be attacked from both sides. We are in Afghanistan because before we invaded them that country was being run by the people who helped ad Qaeda prepare for their attacks on us, and after we invaded the country was incapable of governing itself without us (without falling back into the arms of the Taliban). We are not in Pakistan because they have a functioning government, that has lots of complicated interrelationships and conflicts that involve vital US interests, and they have nuclear weapons. One of the successes of the Obama administration has been to get Pakistan to start moving more aggressively against the Taliban and al Qaeda, which is dangerous for Pakistan because it threatens to destablize their govenment. 3. Kevin wrote: He quoted Eisenhower... odd choice. Why is this an odd choice? Eisenhower was the most successful US General of the 20th century, and also President of the United States. The quote was in the context of paying for the surge in Afghanistan, and Eisenhower is the recognized expert source on balancing real military needs against domestic economic needs. And, of course, the room Obama was speaking from tonight at West Point is named "Eisenhower Hall". All things considered the quote seems like an obvious choice. 4. Kevin wrote: "When this war began, we were united." Speak for yourself, jackass. See paragraph 5 of the speech. Obama recounts the history of the US invasion of Afghanistan. The support in both houses of Congress was unanimous (well, unanimous in the Senate, and in the House unanimous save 1 - I believe that was Barbara Lee, a representative from Northern California). Obama also demonstrates how united the international community was in support of the action (NATO and the UN). He did not cite polling data, but I believe polls from that period will show overwhelming support from the US population for the invasion. I don't think this is one of those subjective issues where people can only speak for themselves, the country, and the world, were pretty much united when the "war" in Afghanistan began. That is an objective fact. It does not mean that every single American supported the invasion, and perhaps you did not, but overall the country was about as united as it ever has been at the start of a "war" (I use the quotes because of course we never did formally declare war on Afghanistan, which I thought was a mistake at the time and still think today). I thought this was an effective and successful speech. He answered what for me was the most pressing question - which is, how is this different than the build up to Vietnam - see paragraph 34 (a case Bill Moyers has made very convincingly lately). He also explained why he is not doing either less or more than sending an additional 30,000 troops. I see McCain has endorsed the Obama plan here, with the exception of the timetable for withdrawal (odd, since this is the same failed argument he made about Iraq. Apparently a President McCain would be making open ended, ten-year plus commitments to expanding troop presence in both Iraq and Afghanistan - yikes!). I was also quite pleased with how using West Point turned out. Kevin seems to have been concerned about an exploitative use of the setting, and I was concerned about that too. Unlike Kevin, I don't think there was anything exploitative about it. Instead, what we saw was a commander in chief looking the young men and women he is about to order into harm's way and explain to them why he was doing it. Come to think of it, it would not be a bad idea if there was a constitutional amendment requiring every President ordering troops into battle to have to do something like that first. And he did not pander to them - he made critical comments about the war in Iraq, and about the war in Vietnam - comments likely to be unpopular with most of the people in Eisenhower Hall tonight. Everything about my political nature makes me want to get the hell out of Afghanistan, and right now. There is nothing easy about what we are trying to do there, and lots of ways for it to go wrong. But I don't see how any American President can basically say "it is too hard and too expensive to find, stop and punish the people who came to our land and killed 3000 of our people, so we are just going to give up and go home and hope they don't try anything like that again". Obama has been very consistent about this, from the start of his campaign, and even from before his time in the Senate. He has always been against the war in Iraq, but he has always been in favor of the war in Afghanistan, and he has always promised that if elected he would bring the war in Iraq to a close, and redeploy US troops to Afghanistan to finish the job there. Tonight he just kept that oft-repeated promise, and those of us who wish he could have found another way out of this problem have no grounds for complaining - he is doing what he said he would do. -- TV or Not TV .... The Smartest (TV) People! You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TV or Not TV" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tvornottv?hl=en
