Does anyone else find it hard to believe that President Obama is now complaining about the difficulty of the war in Afghanistan by asserting that "Iraq was easier"?
On Afghanistan, Obama said he is looking for a “comprehensive strategy” that stresses diplomacy that includes engagement with neighboring Pakistan. While Obama is studying requests from the military for more troops, he warned that, “there's gotta be an exit strategy. There-- there's gotta be a sense that this is not perpetual drift.”He said Afghanistan is a more complex problem than Iraq. “Iraq was actually easier than Afghanistan. It's easier terrain,” Obama told Kroft. “You've got a-- much better educated population, infrastructure to build off of. You don't have some of the same destabilizing border-- issues that you have between Afghanistan and Pakistan. And so this is going to be a tough nut to crack. But-- it is not acceptable for us to simply sit back and let safe havens of terrorists plan and plot.”
Is this the same guy who called Iraq a "disaster" two years ago and wanted to retreat ASAP?
Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama said Tuesday U.S. combat forces should be out of Iraq by spring 2008 to end "a foreign policy disaster" but he stopped short of endorsing a cutoff in funds. ...Obama's bill would cap troop levels in Iraq at the early January level of around 130,000, when Bush announced he would send 21,500 additional U.S. forces to Iraq. It would require that troops begin coming home on May 1 with the goal of removing all combat brigades by March 31, 2008.
So if Afghanistan is harder than Iraq, shouldn't our President be retreating as fast as his little legs can carry him?
Or, I don't know, maybe he should have looked for an easier job.
Update: Not that Obama was paying much attention to Iraq.
More: Obama lacks "basic understanding" of the War on Terror:
The other illuminating moment in the interview came when Kroft brought up Dick Cheney’s criticism of closing Guantanamo Bay. Again, the unbearable lightness of Barack Obama came shining through like a beacon. Here is the first key quote from Obama’s response,“After all these years, how many convictions came out of Guantanamo? How many terrorists have actually been brought to justice under the philosophy that is being promoted by Vice President Cheney? It hasn’t made us safer….”If Obama believes that the purpose of Gitmo is to get “convictions” of terrorists, you have to question whether he has even the most basic understanding of the war on terror he’s currently in charge of fighting.
Gitmo is there to hold captured terrorists, to keep them from killing more Americans, and for interrogations that are designed to gain information for that same purpose.
