"He's sending a signal: he doesn't want to be a wartime president who wins the war, and that is deadly"

The above quote is from Bing West, who says that President Obama has now spent a couple of months openly questioning his own military--"that's just about unprecedented for a president to do."

The video discusses a couple of books about Vietnam which illustrate two fundamentally different views of the war: 1) Lessons in Disaster, by Gordon M Goldstein; and 2) A Better War, by Lewis Sorley. Gordon's thesis was that the Vietnam war was was unwinnable, that the war was a "tragic mistake." This is a book evidently given to Obama by Rahm Emanuel. Soreley, on the other hand, says we lost Vietnam not because of a poor military strategy, but because of Capitol Hill's lack of resolve.



Kudos to Calvin Freiburger at NewsReal who says (and I'm paraphrasing) that Obama has his foreign and domestic strategies upside-down. The Founding Fathers believed that careful deliberation should dominate domestic policy, but understood that defense of the nation in times of war required prompt, bold action. What we have is a president who shows indecision and hesitation on war policy while he jams through his domestic agenda. GP suggests that Obama read the Federalist Papers, a series of 85 essays outlining how the new government would work--read them "the sooner the better."

Update: People are certainly getting fed up with Obama and his unwillingness or inability to make a decision in Afghanistan. This was just one of the posts this morning from a commenter at HotAir. As the frustration level increases, the rhetoric is heating up as well.

I don’t know what Gen McChrystal thinks about all this dithering but, IMO, there should come a point when he offers up his retirement letter as a show of no confidence in the dithering coward that is more interested in worldwide apology tours than the fact that American troops are getting killed while he is out there on the party circuit like some sort of Eurotrash playboy.

My feeling is that Gen McChrystal won't bail on the troops, but I do hope he'll find some way to hold Obama's feet to the fire. As any adult knows, part of making a good decision is making it in a timely manner. If I want to buy a house and I find one I want to buy, but I dither around because I feel like I need to know every possible detail, not only about the move now but also about my life as it may be ten years from now, then chances are the house is going to be sold out from under me because I can't pull the trigger on the decision. So Obama, you may make the "perfect" decision six months from now, but your perfect decision won't be any good if it's eight months too late.