Obama to Troops: I Promise You I Will Furnish You With Every Resource You Need, So Long As What You Need Is Reasonably-Priced and Available as a Factory-Irregular from Marshall's

Bear any burden, eh?

As President, I refuse to set goals that go beyond our responsibility, our means, our or interests. And I must weigh all of the challenges that our nation faces. I do not have the luxury of committing to just one. Indeed, I am mindful of the words of President Eisenhower, who – in discussing our national security – said, “Each proposal must be weighed in the light of a broader consideration: the need to maintain balance in and among national programs.”

Over the past several years, we have lost that balance, and failed to appreciate the connection between our national security and our economy. In the wake of an economic crisis, too many of our friends and neighbors are out of work and struggle to pay the bills, and too many Americans are worried about the future facing our children. Meanwhile, competition within the global economy has grown more fierce. So we simply cannot afford to ignore the price of these wars.

Allah writes:

This part is cute too, coming as it does from the master of the trillion-dollar deficit...

We can afford to ignore the price of everything else, but not the $30 billion or so a year — less than one-fifth of the deficit incurred just in the month of October — that it’ll cost to staff Afghanistan with new troops.

Remember, Obama will become the deficit-reducin' president next year, or something. The military is the first to have to tighten their belts. Fair is fair -- they've had it too good for too long.

Now, he says that his dithering didn't cost any troops any reinforcements because, supposedly, not a single plan presented to him called for troops before 2010.

First of all: What?

Second of all: It will take about nine months just to get these surge troops into place (I base this on the Iraq experience taking five months -- and they had seaports and good roads). So there will be a delay -- McCrystal said we had a year to win this thing, and that was three months ago. Obama's dithering means that we won't have the troops in place before McCrystal's war's-over date.

Third: He says in almost the next breath all troops will be out of Afghanistan in 2011.

As a commenter points out -- this means the troops will just be built up in-country by the middle/late 2010 and then he's going to immediately start evacuating them out again.

Huh?

Most of the speech was directed to the left, which I guess is expected. I don't mind explaining this to the left. I mind throwing them substantive bones like cheaping out on the military and promising, effectively, to begin evacuating the moment we've just gotten all the surge troops in place.

I will give him one point:

Telling the troops you'e sending to war you're going to nickle-and-dime them in order to reduce the outsized deficits you're creating back home?

That truly is, as Robert Gibbs promised us, unprecedented.

posted by Ace at 08:49 PM

| Access Comments