Quinnipiac is the latest pollster to find a huge uptick in support for an Afghanistan escalation, making last week’s speech by President Obama — somewhat surprisingly, given the reviews — one of the most politically successful. The percentage of people who say the U.S. is “doing the right” thing More…
In 2007, Gen. David Petraeus, then the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, testified to Congress about how he envisioned the war ending. It turned out that he had a method for the war’s ending phases, but not a timetable for when they would occur. But the final phases he More…
Let’s be very specific about what we mean when we describe the troop increase that President Obama is expected to announce tonight. I see the headline of this Wall Street Journal piece reads:
U.S. Opts for Limited Surge
Two things. First, a “surge” is not the same thing as More…
I detect some snark behind the reporting here:
Obama sought Wednesday to cool that debate, staking out a middle position in an appearance with Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who is planning to withdraw his nation’s 2,500 troops in 2011. Obama said he was not going to decide whether
Remember how I said on Tuesday to keep a watch on what Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, says about Afghanistan now that he’s back from his trip there? This morning, the eighth anniversary of 9/11, he’s giving a speech on the Senate floor More…
Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) didn’t win every fight, as this clip of his January 2007 speech against the troop surge in Iraq at the National Press Club shows. But what’s remarkable about this speech is how, despite the anguished and passionate tone (“We cannot simply speak out against an escalation More…
Drawing on his foreign policy and military expertise, Sen. John McCain, the Republican presidential nominee, has called for a military surge in America, similar to the one he claims has turned around the situation in Iraq.
“Let’s put 30,000 fine young soldiers on the ground right here at home,” the More…
One thing I didn’t mention in my just-published piece about Gen. David Petraeus’ talk before the Heritage Foundation today: Donald Rumsfeld was there. And it was awkward.
For starters, Rumsfeld is the most inconvenient figure in the GOP foreign-policy establishment, a modern-day Robert McNamara whose name is synonymous with self-deception, More…
I don’t really have much to add to Laura and Matt‘s takes. Just one quick item worth mentioning.
These two things cannot coexist: the McCain-Palin insistence on deferring to ground commanders in war and the McCain-Palin insistence that the “surge strategy,” as Palin put it, is necessary in Afghanistan.
Earlier today I wondered what Gen. David McKiernan, commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, thought about empowering tribal forces to augment Afghan police and soldiers — that is, creating a “Sons of Afghanistan” force like the Sons of Iraq. I posed the question to McKiernan at a press conference More…
rss