Obama's War: A Surge to the Exits

In a major foreign policy speech last night, President Obama explained his Administration's decision to escalate the war in Afghanistan with 30,000 more American troops. Remarkably, he was able to do so without once using the word "victory." Although I am not given to quoting Vice-President Biden on any subject outside of hair-replacements and baseball, he aptly summed up the President's speech this morning as outlining a "Surge and Exit" strategy.

With emphasis, I might add, on the "Exit." After three months of intense study and debate within his Administration, the best the President could come up with to describe his Afghanistan policy was as follows:

... as Commander-in-Chief, I have determined that it is in our vital national interest to send an additional 30,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan. After 18 months, our troops will begin to come home.

For contrast, let's see what another newly installed leader said, in the face of a much darker moment in his nation's history. In May of 1940, with French and British forces teetering under the Nazi Blitzkrieg in France, Winston Churchill, appointed Prime Minister just days before, appears before the House of Commons and is asked what his Government's war policy will be. He says,

You ask, what is our policy? I can say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us: to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be ...

Churchill's is the language of war-time leadership; Obama's the language of pre-meditated defeat. Faced with the clear and present threat of Taliban terror, it's hard to imagine why the Afghan peoples will choose to side with us, when the American Commander-in-Chief manifests such diffident ambivalence about this war.

This is now Obama's war, to lead where he will. And he is leading, it seems, a surge to the exits.