describes that the surge of troops did not lead to the decline in Iraqi violence. The article states: "However, there's an opposite way of reading the same data " that Bush's surge increased the Iraqi violence in late spring 2007, including a spike in U.S. casualties, and that only a political-military decision to pull back from offensive operations that summer began the gradual reduction in the killing. That drop has grown dramatic since mid-2009 when U.S. forces withdrew to bases
on the edge of the cities.
The GOP trusts our media and populace to be lazy and as the article states "During last year's presidential campaign, Obama first tried to make a more sophisticated argument, crediting the surge as only one factor in the decline in violence. But network anchors pummeled him in interviews, demanding that he accept that Republican John McCain " and President Bush " had been right about the surge and that Obama had been wrong to oppose it. Unwilling to pay the price for challenging Washington's conventional wisdom, Obama finally ceded the point and admitted that the surge had "succeeded beyond our wildest dreams.
If Obama had stood his grounds then would he now be surging troops in Afghanistan?
Obama retaining Bush 43 military advisors ascertained that their failed Iraq tactics would be used in Afghanistan as the article states "That concession " and Obama's decision to retain Gates and Petraeus " are now having real-life consequences for Afghanistan. Having bought into the "successful surge conventional wisdom, Obama is now "surging" some 30,000 additional troops into the Afghan war zone on top of some 22,000 that he sent in the spring, more than doubling the force there when Bush left office.
Could the situation in GWOT and in the Afghanistan theatre of GWOT specifically be better?
The article "Rep. Hinchey: Bush ˜intentionally let Bin Laden get away' at
http://rawstory.com/2009/11/rep-hinchey-bush-intentionally-bin-laden-away/
makes the assertion that "The Bush administration permitted the world's most notorious terrorist mastermind to escape because it needed additional justification to invade Iraq, according to a Democratic lawmaker from New York. Rep. Maurice Hinchey (D-NY) leveled the allegation during an interview with MSNBC host David Shuster on Monday afternoon.
"Look what happened with regard to our invasion into Afghanistan, how we apparently intentionally let bin Laden get away," he said. "How we intentionally did not follow the Taliban and al-Qaeda as they were escaping. That was done by the previous administration because they knew very well that if they would capture al-Qaeda, there would be no justification for an invasion in Iraq"
The leader of the military operation in the United States called back our military, called them back from going after the head of al-Qaeda because there was a sense that they didn't want to capture him."
The GOP is the Daddy party which succeeds when it is in war, and they accuse the Democrats of being weak on national security.
What does Hinchey use to validate his assertions? The article "Entitled "Tora Bora revisited: how we failed to get Bin Laden and why it matters today," the report -- commissioned by Senator John Kerry, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee -- says Bin Laden expected to die and had even written a will.
Dennis Kucinich doesn't have Obama's charisma, but when he was running for President he vowed to get us out of Bush 43's GWOT quagmires. The article "Kucinich: Afghans want to be saved from us, not by us at
http://rawstory.com/2009/12/kucinich-afghans-saved/
describes that no one in Afghanistan values our effort there. "Why are we still in Afghanistan?" Kucinich asked on the floor of the House of Representatives on Wednesday morning. "Al-Qaeda has been routed. Our occupation fuels a Taliban insurgency. The more troops we send, the more resistance we meet."
"The people of Afghanistan don't want to be saved by us," Kucinich continued.
"They want to be saved from us. Our presence and our Predator drones kill countless innocents, creating more US enemies and destabilizing Pakistan."
The article "President Barack Obama delivered the best speech George W. Bush ever gave in his life at
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/print/25286/
describes the hatred that many progressives have for Obama's Afghanistan, making the worst attack possible of the 44th President "comparing him to his predecessor.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
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