"The President was talking to several audiences at the same time when he made his comments regarding July 2011."
In other words, as Ray McGovern concludes, "The July 2011 date was pure politics""
Peter Baker buttressed this analysis in the Times, citing one Obama adviser who spoke of the president's calculation that an open-ended commitment in Afghanistan would undermine the rest of his agenda: "Our Afghan policy was focused as much as anything on domestic politics," the adviser said. "He would not risk losing the moderate to centrist Democrats in the middle of health insurance reform and he viewed that legislation as the make-or-break legislation for his administration."
Obama's need for to project an image of toughness ironically by kowtowing cravenly to the very forces that aim to pull him down, the military-media complex may in the end yield little for either him or us. Consider these recent remarks from another general, Ray Odierno, the departing commander of American forces in Iraq. Also speaking to the Times, Odierno said, "We all came in very naà ¯ve about Iraq" We just didn't understand it."
As reporter Anthony Shadid wrote:
To advocates of the counterinsurgency strategy that General Odierno has, in part, come to symbolize, the learning curve might highlight the military's adaptiveness. Critics of a conflict that killed an estimated 100,000 Iraqis, perhaps far more, and more than 4,400 American soldiers might see the acknowledgment as evidence of the war's folly.
Asked if the United States had made the country's divisions worse, General Odierno said, "I don't know."
"There's all these issues that we didn't understand and that we had to work our way through," he said. "And did maybe that cause it to get worse? Maybe."(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
