With the demoralizing loss on finishing last at the International Olympic Committee's city selection, President Obama may have hurt his reputation. The rumored 1.7 million that was used by the government to make a claim at hosting the Olympics in Chicago, may cause doubts about his Presidency. Obama's celebrity status hasn't diminished much since announcing his run for office, but that power has proved to be useless. President Obama hasn't been able to accomplish any major feats, other than filling magazines, newspapers, and television ads. Everyone that has a somewhat understanding of politics may be questioning his true ability to govern the American people. Some may say well he is advocating the Healthcare Reform, he is nothing but a spokesperson at the moment for the reform. His speeches are becoming dull, not enlightening whatsoever anymore. He isn't offering anything to entice the public, as well as his facts are off base a majority of the time. If healthcare is passed, it will have been just force fed to the people of this country. That is just the tip of the iceberg, this country's foreign policy is in question as well. Iran is currently pulling the strings around the world. They have the world on edge, and all the Obama Administration suggested is serious sanctions! I suppose the administration believes Iran is going to obey kind suggestions, and prove to be diplomatic. The economy is supposedly going in the right direction, but jobless rates were up 9.8% in the month of September. So that leaves the stimulus package in question, I believe the only benefit that the stimulus package provided so far, was for the car industry and advertisers. (politicalpluralism.com)
Band Apart
The Obama administration and congressional Democrats have multiple views on Afghanistan.
Email To A Friend
Please fill in the following information and we'll email this link.
President Obama and his advisers are grappling with questions about Afghanistan far deeper than merely how many troops to send. How do they handle the Taliban, the central government, the countryside versus cities? The larger strategy that the troops, however many of them, are there to implement remains unresolved.
The upshot is that the administration's internal discussions about what to do next in Afghanistan—and the doubts gathering steam in Congress alongside it—are less a policy debate than a Rorschach test. Each participant's vision of Afghanistan reflects his or her perceptions of previous wars.
Vietnam is, of course, the folk memory that haunts the Washington establishment, with Iraq now a close second. But Vietnam and Iraq imprinted different lessons on different people.
Does Afghanistan loom as another "quagmire?" Confronting Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s request for more troops, Obama's White House advisers, such as chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, recall that the military's consistent call in Vietnam was for yet more troops. Is McChrystal just doing the same now, they wonder?
Other players—such as Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee—recall that "Vietnamization" was a strategy that very nearly succeeded in that war. (Arguably, it would have succeeded had Congress not pulled the plug on U.S. funding in 1973.) Anxious to keep support for Afghanistan among congressional Democrats, Levin is publicly pushing "Afghanization": training the Afghans' own forces must take precedence, he says, over the dispatch of more U.S. combat troops.
The other congressional Democrat with committee clout—John Kerry, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee—fought in Vietnam. His too-candid reminiscences of the free-fire tactics that his comrades adopted there in frustration at the amorphous conflict they found themselves fighting cost Kerry dearly in his 2004 presidential bid. As he has indicated in recent hearings, Kerry wants to find a way out of Afghanistan, though he doesn't yet know how.
Vice President Joe Biden listens to Kerry. Biden is pushing to limit the U.S. military role in Afghanistan to counterterrorism: kill the bad guys, while scaling back wider U.S. ambitions. In the internal debate, according to administration sources involved in it, Biden is arguing that how Afghanistan governs itself is not of primary concern to the United States. What matters is that Al Qaeda shouldn't again find sanctuary there. This, he argues, the U.S. can achieve with Special Operations Forces aided by deployment of the Predator strikes against Taliban leaders that are proving so successful in Pakistan.
- 1
- 2
- Next Page »
Discuss