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Thursday, July 08, 2010

Ann Coulter on the Afghan war: "Bill Kristol Must Resign"

She may have changed my mind about Obama's "Great Afghan Adventure."

Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele was absolutely right. Afghanistan is Obama's war and, judging by other recent Democratic ventures in military affairs, isn't likely to turn out well.

It has been idiotically claimed that Steele's statement about Afghanistan being Obama's war is "inaccurate" -- as if Steele is unaware Bush invaded Afghanistan soon after 9/11. (No one can forget that -- even liberals pretended to support that war for three whole weeks.)

Yes, Bush invaded Afghanistan soon after 9/11. Within the first few months we had toppled the Taliban, killed or captured hundreds of al-Qaida fighters and arranged for democratic elections, resulting in an American-friendly government.

Then Bush declared success and turned his attention to Iraq, leaving minimal troops behind in Afghanistan to prevent Osama bin Laden from regrouping, swat down al-Qaida fighters and gather intelligence....

Obama hasn't ramped up the war in Afghanistan based on a careful calculation of America's strategic objectives. He did it because he was trapped by his own rhetorical game of bashing the Iraq war while pretending to be a hawk on Afghanistan.

At this point, Afghanistan is every bit as much Obama's war as Vietnam was Lyndon Johnson's war. True, President Kennedy was the first to send troops to Vietnam. We had 16,000 troops in Vietnam when JFK was assassinated. Within four years, LBJ had sent 400,000 troops there....

Republicans used to think seriously about deploying the military. President Eisenhower sent aid to South Vietnam, but said he could not "conceive of a greater tragedy" for America than getting heavily involved there.

As Michael Steele correctly noted, every great power that's tried to stage an all-out war in Afghanistan has gotten its ass handed to it. Everyone knows it's not worth the trouble and resources to take a nation of rocks and brigands.

Based on Obama's rules of engagement for our troops in Afghanistan, we're apparently not even fighting a war. The greatest fighting force in the world is building vocational schools and distributing cheese crackers to children.

...

But now I hear it is the official policy of the Republican Party to be for all wars, irrespective of our national interest.

...

Our troops are the most magnificent in the world, but they're not the ones setting military policy. The president is -- and he's basing his war strategy on the chants of Moveon.org cretins.

She has excellent points. So far, Republicans have stood solidly behind the escalation of the Afghan war, unlike Democrats who repeatedly said the the war in Iraq was lost. I think it's partly due to the fact that we support the troops wherever they are. But ... but we are losing the war in Afghanistan and ... should we support a policy that will result in another Viet Nam - that is a war where we pull out after losing thousands of our brave soldiers? Keep in mind that the politicians ran and lost Viet Nam. The war in Afghanistan is under the supreme direction of Team Obama (even to the extent of planning to award medals for NOT shooting the enemy). How successful do you think that will be?

Let's re-think our support of Obama's was in Afghanistan.

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