You can argue about troop levels, strategies, tactics, but it ultimately all comes down to "Those people can't solve their own problems, they cannot be trusted to, they are inferior, so we have to do it for them."

We are right, everyone else is wrong.

And it never changes.

It simply won't matter that Iraq may be an orange and Afghanistan may be an apple if people hear the same rhetoric they heard from Bush, and objected to then; if he has to play the "but, Afghanistan is different" game, and cannot adequately explain the differences, I think he faces an even harder sell than he is anticipating - especially given what seems to be his belief that his speeches could sell hair remover to a bald man.

Some may see this long period of reflection and consideration of strategy as indications that what he will propose will be the best strategy ever, but I think he made a huge mistake in timing that now has Afghanistan dovetailing with a huge partisan - and intra-party - battle over the cost of expanding access to health care; he is setting up to succeed with hawks on both sides of the aisle for whom no price tag for war is too much, and any price tag for health care is unacceptable, and to fail with millions of Americans who will rightly fear that after billions for banksters, and now billions more for more war, their own needs will be cast aside or diminished to near-irrelevance.

Afghanistan is not Iraq.

at this point, the only difference between them is geography. aside from that, they're both trainwrecks. both were countries, with functioning governments, that didn't attack us. both were invaded, on flimsy grounds, with insufficient manpower to complete the purported missions.

neither conflict will ever be "won" by us, in the commonly accepted sense of the term, the best we can hope for is a decrease in the rates of attrition. the russians, brits and even the ottoman-turks figured out afghanistan is ungovernable, as a unified country. quite probably because historically it never really has been one.

iraq at least had a modern infrastructure, and had been introduced to the (in a dictatorial kind of way) to civilization as the rest of the world knows it. since we managed to destroy most of that modern infrastructure, iraq is pretty much now where afghanistan's been all along.

they are nearly interchangeable, in terms of our situation there, which is becoming more vietnamlike on a daily basis.

A top White House aide said President Barack Obama does not plan to delve into the specifics of paying for the war in Afghanistan during Tuesday night's speech unveiling U.S. strategy for the region.

With reports circulating that Obama has already ordered at least another 30,000 troops to the country, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said Monday that Obama will "certainly touch on the cost" of the war during his address to the nation, but he said he does not "expect [Obama] to get overly detailed."

SNIP

Gibbs said Obama would not likely discuss specific costs, but he did say that "rough math that we've used before is applicable."

"For 10,000 troops, it's $10 billion," Gibbs said. "That's the rough estimate of what I think people have been using both here and at the Pentagon."

"Operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and the war on terrorism have reduced the pace of military transformation and have revealed our lack of preparation for defensive and stability operations. This Administration has overextended our military."

-- Barack Obama, Speech to the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations (12 July 2004)

Still, this pretense that Obama spent months carefully deliberating in order to devise some new and exotic thought pattern about the war seems absurd on its face.

I've been listening to Wes Clark....

http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/must-read/gen-wesley-clark-calls-exit-afghanistan

i find it interesting first of all that raw story has the exact same misleading headline as michael moore.  ha ha!

but of course clark isn't calling for removal of troops he's saying we need an exit plan prior to escalation.

who thinks obama will have one?

In escalating US violence in Afghanistan and threatening more direct military involvement in Pakistan, the administration is defying public opinion in the two countries, where popular opposition to US military operations is pervasive, and in the US itself, where opinion polls show that a majority of the American people is opposed to the war.

In its contempt for the will of the people, as in its policies on the economy, war and democratic rights, the Obama administration is continuing without a hitch the basic policies and methods of the Bush administration, which were repudiated by the electorate when it voted for Obama on the basis of his claim to be the candidate of "change." ...

The militarization of American political life is inseparably bound up with an imperialist policy, continued and intensified by Obama, of ceaseless colonial-style wars, aimed ultimately at bigger powers such as Russia and China.

President Obama is sending 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan but plans to conclude the war and withdraw most U.S. service members within three years, senior administration officials told CNN Tuesday.

The president is ordering military officials to get the reinforcements to Afghanistan within six months, White House officials said.

Obama will travel to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York, later Tuesday to officially announce his plans. It would be his second escalation of U.S. forces in the war-torn Islamic country since he came to power in January.