re: #505 Mich-again

At least Bush seemed to want to actually win the war even if he never really made it clear what winning meant. I think Obama is purposely delaying making a decision regarding General McCrystal’s recommendation for more troops because he has the view that Afghanistan is not a necessary war and the more losses we incur, the more American support for our presence there will wane making his eventual decision to not have a surge in troop levels politically acceptable.

In short, I think he already has his mind made and all the waiting for the right opportunity to announce it is just wrong.

It was really hard to tell that Bush wanted to win the war in 2005 and a lot of 2006. He made pretty much the exact same mistakes in Iraq that Obama is making in Afghanistan. I got into lots of heated arguments here at LGF along those lines back in 2005/2006…Bill Clinton slashed the active duty military force during peacetime to balance the budget. Hillary Clinton was 100% right when she said that Bill Clinton’s military force structure took out the Taliban and Saddam Hussein…because Bush ran on “fixing the military” a la Reagan, but then didn’t do a damn thing about it, and then sent them off to two wars and provided piss poor leadership and idiotic ROEs that got lots of our guys hurt and killed in Iraq in ‘05 and ‘06. Yeah, he made speeches about “supporting the troops,” but until the GOP lost congress, the material support was crap.

Rumsfeld made a glib reply to a soldier who asked in late 2004 why they didn’t have enough armored vehicles. Do you remember the “you go to war with the army you have” answer? That was over 3 years from 9/11/01. They had plenty of time to build the Clinton army structure and materiel, but they didn’t do it.