http://blogs.suntimes.com/sweet/2011/10 ... f_ira.html

As a great man once said, "...Fool me once... Shame on... Shame on you... Fool me, can't get fooled again."

I can't help but feel that this is political play in which the POTUS will use during his re-election, and that makes me sick. This is long overdue, and Obama gets a total of ZERO points from me.

Too little, too late, Mr. President. The blood on your hands forms a coat just as thick as your predecessor's. For shame.

Get us the hell out of Afghanistan now, too.

I don't think Afghanistan is ripe yet, and this doesn't seem political. If anything is political, it's the announcement, but this policy has been a long time coming.

IBCoupe wrote:but this policy has been a long time coming.

This is precisely my problem with the POTUS. This has taken forever to accomplish, and should have been tackled before Obamacare.

I don't see how you can detach its timing from the upcoming election. It's not like this is the first time the Iraqi leadership has asked us to pack up and go home.

I'm not so sure I understand what you mean in terms of "ripe," in regards to Afghanistan. I've seen it as rotten from the start...

Means withdrawal could do more harm to our medium- to long-term interests than good.

Ah, okay I understand.

It's hard to approach that without opening up a huge can of worms. I'll just say, without being specific, that the cost of our presence isn't worth the long term benefits of occupying Afghanistan. We may or may not be talking about the same interests, though.

There's all kinds of interests. There's economic interests, there's long-term security interests, they're resource interests, there's reputational interests.

Indeed there are. Perhaps if I have the time in the next few days I will organize a post to address the main issues.

The President makes good on his campaign pledge and you dont like how fast he did it? OK.
At least he gave the order to do so and not pull some lame caveat (which doesn’t really bring them home) or recall them right before he leaves office or recall them earlier so that they come home while he is campaigning. It was a good call.

Cold_Zero wrote:The President makes good on his campaign pledge and you dont like how fast he did it? OK.
At least he gave the order to do so and not pull some lame caveat (which doesn’t really bring them home) or recall them right before he leaves office or recall them earlier so that they come home while he is campaigning. It was a good call.

i am happy that my friends over there have a better chance of coming home alive now that this has been announced. THIS IS A GOOD THING, REGARDLESS OF WHAT THE GOP BELIEVES

Cold_Zero wrote:The President makes good on his campaign pledge and you dont like how fast he did it? OK.

Exactly.

Cold_Zero wrote:At least he gave the order to do so and not pull some lame caveat (which doesn’t really bring them home) or recall them right before he leaves office or recall them earlier so that they come home while he is campaigning. It was a good call.

I agree that it was a good call. That's not my gripe.

My problem is that we essentially went through several years of Obama's presidency without seeing the end to our middle-east campaign.

He was late on bringing home all combat troops, and has made decisions to increase our presence in Afghanistan. I'm just saying that to me, this looks like a political move to position himself for re-election.

Did we accomplish something incredible in Iraq in the last two years? Was it worth it to spend all the money and blood?

mattblancarte wrote:

Cold_Zero wrote:The President makes good on his campaign pledge and you dont like how fast he did it? OK.

Exactly.

Cold_Zero wrote:At least he gave the order to do so and not pull some lame caveat (which doesn’t really bring them home) or recall them right before he leaves office or recall them earlier so that they come home while he is campaigning. It was a good call.

I agree that it was a good call. That's not my gripe.

My problem is that we essentially went through several years of Obama's presidency without seeing the end to our middle-east campaign.

He was late on bringing home all combat troops, and has made decisions to increase our presence in Afghanistan. I'm just saying that to me, this looks like a political move to position himself for re-election.

Did we accomplish something incredible in Iraq in the last two years? Was it worth it to spend all the money and blood?

i dont think it was a bid for re-election. Afghanistan was LARGELY IGNORED AND UNDERFUNDED/STAFFED. He corrected this. When was the last time you heard of forces dying in combat in afghanistan? As for iraq, what he did was live up to the agreement signed between president bush and iraq which had an exit plan at the end of 2011. Obama wanted immunity for the troops, beyond 2011, but iraq refused to give it, and so he had no choice other than to pull them out. Is iraq ready for self governance? maybe. Maybe this is just a good thing rather than a cold calculated political move.

heliochrome85 wrote:i dont think it was a bid for re-election. Afghanistan was LARGELY IGNORED AND UNDERFUNDED/STAFFED.

That argument may have carried weight back in 2003/2004. We have no real mission there nowadays, and certainly no real mission when Obama ordered more troops. He was simply complying with military command, who will always ask for more.

heliochrome85 wrote:When was the last time you heard of forces dying in combat in afghanistan?

Yesterday! It's out of the news because of the clever media campaign spearheaded by the Obama administration.

Iraq isn't like the cold war where we need to keep troops on some kind of border to ensure a major invasion can be stopped. This is simply an occupation of a poor people with rich natural resources.

In terms of Afghanistan, there is no clear reason for being there.

There isn't a dearth of reasons why Afghanistan is out of the news, and some of it is government direction, but some of it is the media themselves. Afghanistan is as much oil-related as Iraq was (though, perhaps, not as oil-driven), and monied interests want a result there. Twenty years ago, there were fifty individual companies providing the news. There are now six. Twenty years ago, television networks saw the news as a loss leader, and only put it on the air because they were required to. Now, cable news has brought us into a news-as-profitmaker format, and every editor looks towards the bottom line. Twenty years ago, newsrooms were not grouped together like a corporate setting - it was an amalgamation of individual reporters, feeding the newspaper its stories. Twenty years ago, we didn't have a single news ticker on TV.

Afghanistan was out of the news about two months after it got into the news, and it didn't really come back until the 2008 campaign, and then it quickly fell out of the news again. Some of it was media self-censorship, some of it was government manipulation in the form of restriction of access and of rewards for media who did not lend a critical eye, and some of it was American ADHD. If I had to guess, the same factors drive it out of the news today, but I wouldn't be surprised if the ratios had changed.

That's a good summary of the current media problem. Specifically, the news-as-profitmaker and news-as-policymaker problems drive me up the wall.