In the middle of the 2012 Presidential campaign it was easy to end a war:
President Barack Obama came out swinging at his Republican rival over the issue of Afghanistan on Saturday and Sunday but may have swung a bit too hard, making claims more sweeping and definitive than what he’s previously said on the subject.
After slamming GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney for ignoring the issue during his speech at the Republican National Convention last week, Obama said he had put the U.S. on a sure path to military withdrawal from Afghanistan.
“I put forward a specific plan to bring our troops home from Afghanistan by the end of 2014. We are in the process of doing that right now,” Obama said Saturday during a speech in Sioux City, Iowa. “And when I say I’m going to bring them home, you know they’re going to come home.”
During a stop Sunday in Colorado, the president was even more categorical, seeming to promise a pullout of 100 percent of U.S. troops in Afghanistan by late 2014.
“We are bringing our troops home from Afghanistan. And I’ve set a timetable. We will have them all out of there by 2014,” Obama told an audience in Boulder.
Joe Biden in 2010:
It will not be a token amount, but the degree to which we draw down — if I can make an analogy to Iran, excuse me, to Iraq, which I’ve been put in charge of — What happened there? We signed three years ago an agreement with the Iraqis saying that what we’re going to do is two summers ago we’re going to draw all combat troops out of the cities, populated areas. Then we said that our administration, we’re going to draw 100,000 troops out the next summer, and we’re going to be totally out.
In the meantime, we’ll help to build a government. We’ll transfer responsibility and we’ll be gone. That’s exactly what we did at the recent Lisbon conference, NATO conference, where we said we’re starting this process like we did in Iraq.We’re starting it in July 2011, and we’re going to be totally out of there, come hell or high water, by 2014.
Fast forward to 2014. Obama:
“The bottom line is, it’s time to turn the page on more than a decade in which so much of our foreign policy was focused on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq,” he said in comments from the White House.
The 9,800 troop level will be cut in half in 2015, and when Obama’s presidency nears its completion at the end of 2016, he said the only U.S. troops in Afghanistan will be those guarding the U.S. Embassy there.
Obama pleaded victimhood as the excuse for another Obama empty promise. Making guarantees is easy. Presidentin’ is hard.
“I think Americans have learned that it’s harder to end wars than it is to begin them,” Obama said. “Yet this is how wars end in the 21st century — not through signing ceremonies but through decisive blows against our adversaries, transitions to elected governments, security forces who are trained to take the lead and ultimately full responsibility.”
As though none of us ‘muricans ever seen no war buhfor. Barack Obama is, was and always will be a liar.
Biden, on the other hand, is still a clown:
It’s not the first time Biden has ended up on the losing end of a White House debate on Afghanistan. In 2009, he pushed for the president to drawdown the more than 50,000 U.S. troops that were there at the time and transition to a smaller force focused on a counterterrorism mission.
Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates was critical of Biden’s push for a smaller troop presence in his memoir Duty, saying the vice president had been “wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”
If staying is the right thing to do, then it should be done. I doubt anyone wants to see Afghanistan fail after all of the US losses but the politicization of the war, his empty promises, for his re-election goals is typical of Obama.
Abominable.
DrJohn has been a health care professional for more than 30 years. In addition to clinical practice he has done extensive research and has published widely with over 70 original articles and abstracts in the peer-reviewed literature. DrJohn is well known in his field and has lectured on every continent except for Antarctica. He has been married to the same wonderful lady for over 30 years and has three kids- two sons, both of whom are attorneys and one daughter on her way into the field of education.
DrJohn was brought up with the concept that one can do well if one is prepared to work hard but nothing in life is guaranteed.
Except for liberals being foolish.
