Obama: "Victory" Not Necessarily Goal in Afghanisan, the War He Previously Said Was War We Had to Win

Conservatives have long accused liberals of lying on Iraq and Afghanistan. Liberals' claims to be all gung-ho to win in Afghanistan, we've maintained, were dishonest. They didn't want to win in Afghanistan any more than they wanted to win in Iraq.

Their position was contrived, we claimed, to give them political cover for advocating defeat in Iraq. They thought, correctly as it turns out, that they could blunt their calls for defeat in Iraq by claiming they only wanted to lose in Iraq because they were so determined to get their "eyes back on the ball" in the War That Must Be Won At All Costs, Afghanistan.

Were we right?

It appears so.

President Obama has put securing Afghanistan near the top of his foreign policy agenda, but "victory" in the war-torn country isn't necessarily the United States' goal, he said Thursday in a TV interview.

"I'm always worried about using the word 'victory,' because, you know, it invokes this notion of Emperor Hirohito coming down and signing a surrender to MacArthur," Obama told ABC News.

The enemy facing U.S. and Afghan forces isn't so clearly defined, he explained.

"We're not dealing with nation states at this point. We're concerned with Al Qaeda and the Taliban, Al Qaeda's allies," he said. "So when you have a non-state actor, a shadowy operation like Al Qaeda, our goal is to make sure they can't attack the United States."

Obama made a lot of hay out of the resurgence of the Taliban. Now he says it's not so terribly important to keep the country out of the Taliban's control, merely that we make sure they can't attack us again.

Problem? They didn't attack us under President Bush after the invasion, either, so by Mr. Obama's newly-announced conditions of non-victory President Bush had succeeded in Afghanistan.

Odd that he didn't seem to give Bush credit for what he now says is the only relevant condition of non-victory in Afghanistan. Odd that he promised to win the war as a a candidate but as a president dismisses that scenario as unnecessary.

posted by Ace at 01:28 PM

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