As I write, I am shaking my head in disbelief and it’s all rooted in this debacle over the McChrystal dismissal.
Should he have gone? Absolutely. There is a chain of command and with that comes a paramount responsibility. And it doesn’t really matter if the General made the reported remarks or if it were merely his aides. You wear the stars and the bars and you get the scars.
But here's the part of that social contract that Obama will will seemingly never, never get. It works both ways.
Obama doesn’t know squat about taking responsibility for anything, he has never been criticized for anything, he’s always been pushed forward and he’s never been the pusher, and he or his handlers will throw anyone under the bus. What’s the betting that Rahm Emanuel will be next?
But, I’m getting ahead of myself so let’s revisit the recent past.
For the entirety of his term in office, Obama has been trying to have it both ways on Afghanistan — refusing to make any actual decisions, while trying to avoid altogether reneging on his campaign pledge to win the war in Afghanistan at the expense of an Iraq effort he denigrated, and the success of which he has constantly denied.
His unwillingness, if not utter inability, to perform the Commander in Chief’s job was put on display for all to see in 2009, when he took a full 10 months to “review” the situation in Afghanistan (a job done for him, and handed over on a silver platter, by the outgoing Bush administration).
At the end of that interminable period, which saw American troops dying weekly while their National Command Authority wavered and dawdled, Obama finally made his Afghanistan policy public. He then issued a stream of platitudes and half-measures which reflected a lack of understanding about, and an overall unwillingness to accept, the facts on the ground in the region and the gravity of America’s fight there.
Obama eventually issued an order for 30,000 more troops to deploy to Afghanistan, to augment the paltry 33,000 already on the ground in a country the size of Texas. Of course, this bold move by the neophyte president was nothing of the sort; the 30,000-troop ’surge’ had already been set in motion by President Bush in November 2008, so all Obama did was fail to prevent it from being carried out.
While on the campaign trail, Obama decried the surge and ridiculed its proponents. Just as Senator Hillary tried to pillory the worthy General and accused him of being a liar. But, because of some parliamentary protocol or other, she had to insist that accepting the General’s view would require “suspension of disbelief”.
The bad news for most of the players portrayed above is that the surge in Iraq worked.
And here’s more bad news for them and for liberals everywhere. The new commander is called Petraeus and he was Bushs' general.
Remember him now? He was the one that Hillary and Obama tried to crucify and the liberal media swung on his feet as they did so.
When George Soros’ Moveon.org wanted to place an ad in the national media, they got it at a 50% discount from the New York Times. You remember this one surely? This was the one that talked about “Betrayus”.
Would you believe that was still up on Soros’ webpage until Obama appointed the general to take over in Afghanistan?
And would you believe the drive-by media who were howling for Petraeus’ execution now hail his appointment as “brilliant?
But I know at least a couple of people who will regard this as being just fine and I'm afraid there are more who feel the same way.
Fortunately though, those numbers dwindle every day.
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