A piece in the NYT last month discussed the Afghanistan surge. It included this observation: “one of the strategists deeply involved in the White House Situation Room debates put it, ‘We spent a lot of time discussing the fact that the only thing Iraq and Afghanistan have in common is a lot of sand’.” The article continued:

White House officials say it was Mr. Obama himself who pressed the idea of a surge of his own, openly acknowledging in a meeting that he had criticized it harshly during the campaign…

The deployment time in the case of Iraq was six months; when the Pentagon first came to President Obama two months ago with a plan that stretched over 18 months, he offered up some withering questions. He turned to Gen. David H. Petraeus, now the head of Central Command and the commander in Iraq during the Bush surge, and asked: “What takes so long? What’s so hard about this?”

“What’s so hard about this?” Such a telling college-professor-like question, and the Times seems to portray it as evidence of “withering” insight and focus. As if all that needed to be done was put some guys on airplanes and that’s it. Hey, what’s so difficult about that? But Obama’s question came from a Commender-in-Chief who also talked about the “sheer improbability” of the success of the allied invasion of Europe on D-Day, and called the Berlin airlift “the most unlikely rescue in history“. Egad! Let’s just hope we make it out alive and in one piece to February 2013. It looks dicier by the day.

(BTW, the bickering and backbiting about the Afghanistan surge has already begun at the White House.)

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 10th, 2010 at 3:55 pm and is filed under Democrats, General, MSM, War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.