Afghanistan Speech Recap, Part 2

Not to beat a dead horse, but it seems that the press on Obama's Afghanistan speech and strategy has turned decidedly negative as the day goes on, even on the Left.  For example, CBS's Bob Schieffer said this:

How do you on the one hand say: 'We need to send these troops over there; it's critical; this is in our national-security interest to do this.' But then say: 'But we're only going to keep them there for 18 months; we're going to start to withdraw them after 18 months'? I just don't understand the logic of how that works. It seems to me that what the president did tonight was try to make a speech that had a little something for everybody … I don't understand, Katie, how you can set a deadline on what you're going to do. This is not a football game, where the time runs out. To win this war, you have to defeat the enemy." 

It's a great question, and it must be mind-bogglingly obvious if someone like Schieffer is voicing it, that's a very bad sign for Obama.  Many have circled the wagons, but even a significant portion of the legacy media has gone negative, whether because of the idiocy and naivete of the policy or simple disappointment.  Regardless, it didn't go well.

The Right, of course, continues to hammer the whole thing, too.  Howard Portnoy:

What a brilliant military strategist Barack Obama is! Who woulda thunk it? The "plan" he outlined last night is sure to go down in the annals of military history, alongside the Schlieffen Plan and the Battle of the Cowpens. Goes sorta like this: You send 75% of the troops your commander on the ground asks for (why 75%, he didn't say), then you tell the enemy that you that you plan to begin drawing down your forces in 18 months. Utterly brilliant! You arbitrarily make up a number of troops to send into battle that may or may not fulfill the intended need, and could conceivably place more American lives in harm's way. And then, in the same breath, you announce a surrender date.

Good thing this bozo was a community organizer and not a community planner before taking the oath of office as president. As a planner, he might have arranged outings for community members in which he would, for example, put 80 people on one of two chartered buses, 1 on the other.

But let's get serious for a minute. Why did he give the speech he did last night? In a half-baked effort to appease both sides. This decision is supposed to make liberals happy because it entails sending fewer troops and promising to end the war, win or lose, by a fixed date not too far into the future. And it's supposed to make conservatives happy because it gives the illusion of seriousness, this coming from the most unserious president ever to defile the Oval Office with his presence.

Gabor Steingart in Der Speigel absolutely unloads.  Excerpts:

Never before has a speech by President Barack Obama felt as false as his Tuesday address announcing America's new strategy for Afghanistan. It seemed like a campaign speech combined with Bush rhetoric -- and left both dreamers and realists feeling distraught.

Just minutes before the president took the stage inside Eisenhower Hall, the gathered cadets were asked to respond "enthusiastically" to the speech. But it didn't help: The soldiers' reception was cool.

One didn't have to be a cadet on Tuesday to feel a bit of nausea upon hearing Obama's speech. It was the least truthful address that he has ever held. He spoke of responsibility, but almost every sentence smelled of party tactics. He demanded sacrifice, but he was unable to say what it was for exactly.

An additional 30,000 US soldiers are to march into Afghanistan -- and then they will march right back out again. America is going to war -- and from there it will continue ahead to peace. It was the speech of a Nobel War Prize laureate.

...in this case, the public was more disturbed than entertained. Indeed, one could see the phenomenon in a number of places in recent weeks: Obama's magic no longer works. The allure of his words has grown weaker.

It is not he himself who has changed, but rather the benchmark used to evaluate him. For a president, the unit of measurement is real life. A leader is seen by citizens through the prism of their lives -- their job, their household budget, where they live and suffer. And, in the case of the war on terror, where they sometimes die.

Political dreams and yearnings for the future belong elsewhere.

Much, much more at the link.  Check it out.

Don't you think it is interesting that the cadets in attendance at this speech were actually instructed to applause for their Commander-in-Chief?  Call me crazy, but I'm thinking that he's not much of a C-in-C if he has to give orders for his troops to pay him respect.

Andy McCarthy suggests that though Obama largely flopped in the speech itself, the Right has given him an easy out down the road.  An interesting thought.

Donald Rumsfeld also takes issue with the shot Obama directed at him personally:

"In his speech to the nation last night, President Obama claimed that 'Commanders in Afghanistan repeatedly asked for support to deal with the reemergence of the Taliban, but these reinforcements did not arrive.' Such a bald misstatement, at least as it pertains to the period I served as Secretary of Defense, deserves a response."

"I am not aware of a single request of that nature between 2001 and 2006. If any such requests occurred, 'repeated' or not, the White House should promptly make them public. The President's assertion does a disservice to the truth and, in particular, to the thousands of men and women in uniform who have fought, served and sacrificed in Afghanistan."

"In the interest of better understanding the President's announcement last night, I suggest that the Congress review the President's assertion in the forthcoming debate and determine exactly what requests were made, who made them, and where and why in the chain of command they were denied."

Yes, Mr. President, do tell!  I'm not holding my breath for more details, but I suspect some fact-checking White House staffer will be looking for a job soon.

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air has a great analysis of the whole thing, but I'll just copy his conclusion:

The only sense of real mission I get from this speech is that we're going to send 30,000 more troops now so we can start evacuating all of them in the summer of 2011.  It sounds like a slow-motion Dunkirk, and it recalls what Winston Churchill had to say after being congratulated for rescuing the entire British Army and a good portion of the French Army in 1940 from that massive cross-Channel evacuation: "Wars are not won by evacuations."  And apparently Obama agrees, since he didn't bother to talk about victory at all, but instead treated it as a massive responsibility that he reluctantly will fulfill.

That's no way to fight a war.  Under these circumstances, it would be better to start the evacuation now, rather than have any more of our ground troops targeted by the Taliban for a country they'll soon be running again anyway.

Rush Limbaugh raised the point that if this speech was essentially a recycling of previous campaign rhetoric -- and it was -- then why did it take Obama almost 4 months to wrestle with the decision?  The answer: to make him look like he was really struggling with it, and was an uber-thoughtful intellectual.

Bottom line: it was more Alinskyite falseness and doublespeak, born out of a complete lack of leadership or conviction that this was actually a war worth winning, despite his obviously false campaign rhetoric. 

There's my two cents.