Obama news

[Matt]

I wonder why when Bush did the surge in Iraq the right wholeheartedly supported it, but Obama's doing the same in Afgan and they are against it.

Why is Moore an idiot? He obviously doesn't care who the president is. He just wants him to stand by their campaign promise and end the war. Sticking to a side no matter what would be idiotic.

[HaloGirl]

I wonder why when Bush did the surge in Iraq the right wholeheartedly supported it, but Obama's doing the same in Afgan and they are against it.

I'm not saying we should have been in Iraq, but once we were there, we needed to try to get the place stabilized, and the surge seemed like a good strategy and seemed to accomplish what it was supposed to.

Afghanistan, on the other hand, is known as the "graveyard of empires," so I question if we can accomplish much there even with more troops. While it was the "right" place to be after 9/11, I'm not convinced it is any more. I thought the goal of being in Afghanistan was to fight Al Qaeda, not the whole country. I don't believe we can "nation build" there, and most of Al Qaeda is gone or buried deep in the mountains, so what will be considered a success in Afghanistan?

[hobkyl]

Why is it our duty to nation build anyone? I just dont understand why America has to be the big brother to all these nations. Isnt that what United Nations is for? Our troops are dying for no reason. We are spending billions of dollars we dont have. No amount of US military presence or take over is going to "right" these countries. These countries have been at war with themselves since before the birth of America, and they will continue to be long after we bring all of our troops home.

[cascade]

I wonder why when Bush did the surge in Iraq the right wholeheartedly supported it, but Obama's doing the same in Afgan and they are against it.

He is getting a lot of support from the right.

Why is Moore an idiot? He obviously doesn't care who the president is. He just wants him to stand by their campaign promise and end the war. Sticking to a side no matter what would be idiotic.

He is an idiot for saying everyone who didn't vote for Obama is a HATER. He also leads me to believe that he thinks Obama isn't just another politician. And finally Obama made a campaign promise to go into Afghanistan so he is standing by his campaign promise.(He just wants him to stand by their campaign promise)
http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/20 ... -promises/

I don't want to be there as I have said before. My son is there. He doesn't have heat,electric & most of the time they eat nothing but MRE because they are not on a base. They don't have showers (no running water let alone hot water) & have buckets with bags for toilets. They do nothing but patrol & maybe sleep 3-4 hours a day.He sustained a grade 1 concussion from an IED earlier this month. One day of light duty & back to work. Believe me I want him home, but if we are going to be there they need to listen to the MILITARY (not a loud mouth like Michael Moore) experts about the needs of the troops. If not bring then all home. I am not a hater but I know of lot of the people who voted for Obama HATED Bush so I think mister Moore has things ass backwards.

[HaloGirl]

Why is it our duty to nation build anyone? I just dont understand why America has to be the big brother to all these nations.

I agree it isn't our duty to "nation build" (which is why I put it in quotes in my previous post). I was merely trying to point it out as a possible measure of success. I also don't think it's our place to make preemptive strikes - which is what I think we did in Iraq.

That all being said, once we've gone into a country, it is our responsibility to try to make things as right as we can. In the case of Iraq, that means nation-building. With Afghanistan, I don't see nation-building as a viable option.

[cascade]

I wonder why when Bush did the surge in Iraq the right wholeheartedly supported it, but Obama's doing the same in Afgan and they are against it.

This could be a reason why some people on both sides might be against the new surge.
http://www.militarytimes.com/news/2009/ ... is_120409/

Analysis: One surge doesn’t fit all

By Brian Murphy - The Associated Press
Posted : Friday Dec 4, 2009 9:08:27 EST

BAGHDAD — America's military "surge" in Afghanistan shares the same goal as the first one in Iraq nearly three years ago: to stem runaway violence. But the comparisons quickly fade from there.

The U.S. reinforcements that poured into the Baghdad region in early 2007 had clearer objectives, better-trained local forces as allies and an established supply network to keep them moving. What awaits the 30,000 additional soldiers in Afghanistan is much more a work in progress.

As Davood Moradian, senior adviser to the Afghan Ministry of Foreign Affairs, cautioned: "Afghanistan is not Iraq. Therefore, we have to be very careful about that."

The differences begin with what the Pentagon seeks to accomplish.

In Iraq, it was rather straightforward: to use the extra military muscle of 20,000 troops to calm a sectarian bloodbath between Sunni insurgents and the majority Shiites who took command of Iraq's politics and security forces after the fall of Saddam Hussein. Then-President Bush described it as giving some "breathing space" for the Baghdad government.

The timing for the Iraqi surge also worked in America's favor. Sunni tribes in western Anbar province — where the surge began — were turning against al-Qaida in Iraq and other insurgent groups that used Anbar as a base. Sunnis also had been driven out of many mixed areas of Baghdad and were feeling vulnerable.

To the tribal sheiks, the real danger was being sidelined by Iraq's new Shiite leadership and its cozy links to Shiite giant Iran. The surge gave the tribal militias a chance to become deputized as allies by the U.S. military and win some serious political chits with Washington for their help.

In Fallujah, a Sunni food store owner Ziyad Abbas recalls people applauding the joint patrols of American soldiers and Sunni tribal militiamen. "More troops in the street meant more chances to give them information and tips and that was very difficult when they were kept in their camps," said Abbas.

In Afghanistan, it's less clear how the Pentagon hopes to deal with this dual mission of battling the Taliban and trying to win over civilians.

Much of the surge doctrine is built on the premise that the Taliban is a natural host for al-Qaida — the Taliban refused to turn over Osama bin Laden after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. But al-Qaida has morphed over the years into more of franchised brand of jihadi with groups linked together by the Web — and less in need of a physical base of operations and recruitment. The links between al-Qaida and the Taliban are no longer as apparent.

It is also harder to make deals with the Taliban because — unlike Iraq's rival groups — it has little vested interest in affairs of state and finance.

The Taliban has its own turf: the ethnic Pashtun areas in southern Afghanistan where it can flex its ultra-strict interpretation of Islam and take cuts from drug and smuggling trades. Taliban ideology has very little sway over other areas and ethnic groups in Afghanistan.

The top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, said the Afghan government and its Western military backers should seek to offer the Taliban a way to rejoin the country with "dignity."

That's assuming, however, a vision of nationhood that is similar to the West. Afghanistan's central authorities have never held firm control of the entire country, which in reality is a patchwork of fiefdoms and ethnic enclaves that give main allegiance to local chiefs and warlords. The Kabul government of President Hamid Karzai has full sway over only a portion of the country.

"There isn't the sense of strong, central government as in Iraq," said Ayesha Khan, an expert on Afghanistan for the London-based Royal Institute of International Affairs. "The tribal and fragmented nature of Afghanistan make it quite a different place from a military point of view."

The level of help from local forces is another complication for the new surge.

Iraqi military forces — built from scratch after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 — have a blemished record. But they have received extensive training and generous funding in recent years. The Iraq surge was one of their first major tests as side-by-side partners with America, and they generally came through in crucial roles such as neighborhood patrols and intelligence gathering.

Afghanistan's military trails well behind. Training Afghan forces has been slowed by problems such as lack of equipment and weapons and a high rate of illiteracy which makes instruction manuals useless. Reports of Afghan soldiers going AWOL are common.

Sen. Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said Wednesday that the ratio of U.S. troops to Afghan soldiers was 5-to-1 in the Taliban stronghold of Helmand province.

"Doubling the number of U.S. troops in the south will only worsen a ratio under which our forces already are matched up with fewer Afghan troops than they can and should partner with," Levin said at the opening statement at a committee hearing.

Although details of the surge have not been announced, the strong likelihood is strategic deployments in rugged Helmand province and smaller units to reinforce Canadian-led forces in and around Kandahar, the second-largest city in Afghanistan.

This presents some serious problems with basic logistics.

Iraq's surge was incorporated into a well-established military supply network in and around Baghdad to funnel food, fuel and ammunition to the troops. In Helmand, the added troops will compound an already difficult effort to shelter and supply the forces. The region has only one major airfield and road transport is slow on rutted roads that are also vulnerable to attack.

The numbers will be roughly even. There were more than 166,000 U.S. soldiers in Iraq at the height of the surge in late 2007. The Afghan surge will increase American troop strength to about 100,000 alongside at least 40,000 allied forces. NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said he expected allies to bring more than 5,000 additional troops.

In Washington, Defense Secretary Robert Gates tried to sell a war-weary Congress on the merits of the Afghanistan surge and the $30 billion price tag. It hasn't been lost on skeptics that his boss, President Barack Obama, was highly critical of Bush's strategies in Iraq.

"This is the second surge I've been up here defending," Gates said.

Brian Murphy, the AP's bureau chief in Dubai, has covered the Afghanistan and Iraq wars since 2001. AP Writer Sameer Yacoub contributed to this report.

[Matt]

One of the most insightful columns (keep in min it is Op-Ed) about the healthcare "debate." Read it with an open mind.

Here's an excerpt:

To find a prototype for the overheated reaction to the health care bill, you have to look a year before Medicare, to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Both laws passed by similar majorities in Congress; the [e]Civil Rights Act[/e] received even more votes in the Senate (73) than Medicare (70). But it was only the civil rights bill that made some Americans run off the rails. That’s because it was the one that signaled an inexorable and immutable change in the very identity of America, not just its governance.

The[e]apocalyptic predictions[/e] then, like those about health care now, were all framed in constitutional pieties, of course. Barry Goldwater, running for president in ’64, drew on the counsel of two young legal allies, William Rehnquist and Robert Bork, to characterize the bill as a [e]“threat to the very essence of our basic system”[/e] and a [e]“usurpation” of states’ rights[/e] that “would force you to admit drunks, a known murderer or an insane person into your place of business.” Richard Russell, the segregationist Democratic senator from Georgia, said the bill [e]“would destroy the free enterprise system.”[/e] David Lawrence, a widely syndicated conservative columnist, bemoaned the establishment of [e]“a federal dictatorship.”[/e] Meanwhile, three civil rights workers were murdered in Philadelphia, Miss.

[e]That a tsunami of anger is gathering today is illogical[/e], given that what the right calls[e]“Obamacare” is less provocative than either the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or Medicare[/e], an epic entitlement that actually did precipitate a government takeover of a sizable chunk of American health care. But the explanation is plain: the health care bill is not the main source of this anger and never has been. It’s merely a handy excuse. The real source of the over-the-top rage of 2010 is the same kind of national existential reordering that roiled America in 1964.

READ IT

The Rage Is Not About Health Care

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/28/opinion/28rich.html

[angerina]

How has Obama and the democrats managed to bring so much division to our country? We were told by the main stream media how wonderful things would be under Obama,his charm and charisma would unite the nation.Less than two years into his term he has divided the country more than George Bush and two wars did,the complete opposite of what the media told us would happen,how could they have been so wrong about Obama?