An American Lion

 President Harry S Truman casts his vote, Independence, Missouri, 1950

What part of change did you not understand?

President Barack Obama plans to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan over six months, an accelerated timetable — with an endgame built in — that would have the first Marines there as early as Christmas, a senior administration official told The Associated Press.

U.S. troops are expected to start leaving the region “well before” the end of Obama’s first term, the AP reported Tuesday. A senior government official told NBC contributor Col. Jack Jacobs that the president believes that a transition from American-led combat to Afghan leadership of the effort will begin in July 2011.

With the full complement of new troops expected to be in Afghanistan by next summer, the heightened pace of Obama’s military deployment in the 8-year-old war appears to mimic the 2007 troop surge in Iraq, a 20,000-strong force addition under former President George W. Bush. Similar in strategy to that mission, Obama’s Afghan surge aims to reverse gains by Taliban insurgents and to secure population centers in the volatile south and east parts of the country.

What the President should have done is this—he should have fired Gates, Petraeus, Mullen, Odierno and McChrystal and he should have found new blood to lead American forces out of the region and reduce our military footprint around the world. He should have engaged in a diplomatic blitz against Iran and Pakistan, using the carrot and the stick to trade stability for whatever these countries want. Ten billion dollars in aid for Iran in exchange for a promise to stop supporting terrorism in Gaza and to stop trying to weaponize nuclear material. Ten billion dollars for Pakistan in exchange for eliminating al Qaeda and removing Taliban-sympathies from their unofficial way of doing business. Twenty billion dollars versus another trillion, and another several thousand dead and wounded Americans is a bargain I would take, any day. We have no business in that region with that many troops. If we need to hunt down and kill various elements of al Qaeda, then all we need is the will to trade a few billion dollars to the regimes of Iran and Pakistan to look the other way while we go in and kill whoever we need to kill.

We need to end our lack of meaningful engagement with Iran, and kill them with kindness. We need to fight the narrative and change the rules of the game. How can Iran preach anti-Western nonsense when the West is paying to help them feed and clothe their people? How can we, in this day and age, reject the rule of law, economic engagement, and the power of the velvet revolution? You see that assclown over there in the headdress with the beady eyes and the stirring speech about the evils of Western Democracy? Prove him wrong. Show him that we don’t bring remote controlled bombs and economic sanctions. Walk over and give him fifty bucks, a hug, and a laptop with a wireless connection. When he struggles, filch a copy of the list of names he has of suicide bomb ring organizers and weapons procurement officials and then go give them a hug with a belt that has a pneumatic knife in it , okay? Okay. And, Pakistan? Pakistan, you need a hug, too, you goofball. You need help getting rid of kleptocrats and bureaucrats and madrassas. We’re here to help with that.

How hard is this to figure out? It’s great that we have drones that can fire missiles into cars and kill people. What this has caused our enemies to do is to stop talking on cellular phones and to start making sure that they have children with them at all times. Why? Because they like the din and chatter? No. Because they want to die surrounded by little kids so that someone can point to how evil we are. Thus, the narrative continues unabated. What happened to killing the honorable way, face to face? Our enemies are mostly cowards at the management level. They don’t have the stones to do the suicide bombing themselves. Let’s help them cowboy up and find some courage to do their own dirty work.

This President refuses to change the game. He wants to be popular. That makes him ridiculous. Here’s where his entire presidency has just gone off the rails—never, ever believe the generals. If past American presidents had all listened to their generals, we wouldn’t even be alive right now. We’d be smoldering atoms blowing across a moon landscape still on fire. We’d be involved in fifty wars in fifty colonial outposts right now. The business of America would be COIN and war and shipbuilding right now. The best presidents fired generals.

To wit, President Harry Truman fired General Douglas MacArthur. He was threatened with impeachment for doing so. He threw General MacArthur under the bus and laughed the whole time he was backing it up, again and again, and he made himself the most effective leader this country has had since Teddy Roosevelt.

Do you know how many impeachment resolutions were leveled against Harry Truman? Twelve (there might be more, but I’m trying to get through this without blowing a gasket). You see, Harry Truman didn’t give a good Goddamn what anyone thought of him—he did what was right for this country. He led us to war, and when that war needed to be cooled down, he fired the man who was trying to heat it up and he left President Eisenhower the means by which he could find a way to stop the shooting. Truman didn’t abandon the South Koreans, he saved them, and all these years later, you can’t find anyone who doesn’t doubt that Truman made the right choices against overwhelming odds and overwhelming force. Like it or not, Truman did the right thing nearly every time he had to make a tough decision, and he left office one of the most reviled and hated men in America. His approval rating was 22%, just under that of a disgraced and resigning Richard Nixon.

How many times did they try to impeach President Bush again?

This President is too terrified to do anything that will make him unpopular. He is in over his head, he is enthralled by the generals, and he has pissed away his chance at making a difference. There are some who say that he campaigned on escalating the Afghan war. Really? He campaigned on a lot of stuff, and none of that has come to pass. Who would believe a politician with a pocket full of promises, anyway? And, besides—who’s naive enough to think that a man who never served in the military wouldn’t try to run to the right of a man who ran as a war hero?

The decision to announce a drawdown on American forces in the summer of 2011 is laughable. Really? You’re going to start pulling troops out at exactly the same time that your Republican opposition is going to start finding candidates for the Presidency to run against you? How political of you! What if the situation on the ground demands that American troops stay in the quagmire you’ve created? What then?

Right. Anything to stay popular, anything for political gain, anything at all.

President Obama, you’re no different than President Bush. You are no Harry Truman, that’s for sure.