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Further evidence that Obama is not Bush

December 2, 2009 in Politics-Obama | 2 comments

Last night, President Obama delivered further proof of his leadership style. His speech about Afghanistan was 4,582 words long. He mentioned himself 44 times. He mentioned “victory”—well, not at all. This is hardly the kind of speech that will rouse the spirit of sacrifice among the troops, inspire the American people, frighten the Taliban, or reassure the increasingly skeptical Afghanis and Pakistanis about the American commitment. I’ll have more to say later, after some more reflection. Would Bush or Cheney have given this kind of speech?

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2 comments

December 2, 2009 at 2:03 pm

Kevin R. Rosenberg

I’m still up in the air on the speech. Plusses and minuses, and I’ll consider them more after work, today. Rollins has an interesting perspective on the speech which I was wondering if you’d agree or disagree with. My initial reaction is to side with Rollins on this one.

I can say that there have been eyebrows being raised all week by the men and women I work with, and questions have followed with them. Questions like: “What sort of deployments are going to be expected of existing troops? Will they be asking different career fields to deploy which don’t normally go so often? How many times will we have to go back? And if it isn’t us [officers and enlisted I work with], then how will they get the troop numbers?”

And of course, I’m curious how it’s all going to be paid for.

December 2, 2009 at 4:41 pm

knipprath

Thanks for the comment, Kevin. I would have to say that I disagree with much of Rollins’s analysis and am in tentative agreement with some parts. As I mentioned in my earlier post, I think that the delays and dithering, along with the failure to commit the minimum 40,000 troops requested for a reasonable chance of success, along with the artificial deadline (from which the administration is now unconvincingly trying to back off) all show a reluctance and a lack of leadership. It is simple political threading of the needle between what he needs to do for plausible deniability of responsibility for failure and appeasing his base. And no, I think McCain and certainly Cheney would have handled the process quite differently. My earlier post makes just that point. That said, I hope that it all works. I agree with Rollins that the military commanders are extremely competent, which usually happens as a war goes on. The more political peace time commanders make mistakes (on top of the general learning curve that comes with fighting a war) and are replaced by the more skilled wartime leaders that emerge from the fighting. The Iraq War gave us the seasoned and skilled Petraeus and McChrystal. The army’s veteran fighters also are more skilled. But I am not hopeful about our civilian leadership. I’d rather bring the troops home and suffer the eventual costly consequences to peace and American security than have them sit there fighting under onerous rules of engagement and without a clear objective and unconditional support and suffer the consequences anyway.
As far as the cost Obama mentioned, $30 Billion per year, that’s less than 4% of the “stimulus” boondoggle. Moreover, it’s a rounding error in the federal budget.