Notes on the President's War Speech

It's as odd as can be to see the President I helped elect stand before an auditorium filled to the gills with West Point Cadets and lay out his strategy for adding 30,000 troops to our commitment in Afghanistan. Yet he ran on the platform that we needed to get our of Iraq and finish the job in Afghanistan, and he laid out information that the recently apprehended terrorists in the U.S. had come from the Afghan border region. And I believe in mentioning Pakistan over twenty times he did the most he could to hint that the mission is maybe more about that country.

Here's some interesting notes that had been embargoed until after the speech, from Marc Ambinder who attended the special journalists lunch with the President today (an hour long discussion). You see a President who could not be more different than the previous one (or two, if you count Cheney as well as Bush) in articulating a convincing rationale for his Commander-in-Chief decision. For example:

At one point in the session, Obama gave a thumbnail sketch of the three basic arguments he's heard about escalation.

"One argument is that this is Vietnam and we should just abandon the field completely. I don't know anybody who has looked at this very carefully who thinks that we are going to be as effective as we need to be in targeting Al Qaeda and other extremists if we simply allow Afghanistan to collapse. The other argument is that we can sort of stand pat, whether it's at 30,000 or 40,000 or 50,000, you have some platform there, you're basically pulled back and hunkered down but you're able to prevent Kabul from being overrun; you can still project some counterterrorism operations in the region. The problem there is whether that level is 50 or 60 ot 70, you have sort of a flatline, where there is no inflection point, there's no point at which, we can say conditions have changed conditionally sufficiently so that we can start bringing out troops home. The strategy that I'm pursuing is designed to say let's see if we can change the conditions on the ground in a time certain period. There are risks associated with that, but in the absence of that push, we are in a situation that doesn't change, and there are big costs associated to troop presence, to casualties, to a slowly deteriorating situation over a course of years that are at least comparable and probably worse than us going ahead and making this big push now."

Gotta give the guy credit: he even named the cost in his speech tonight. When did W. ever do that?

Meanwhile, the GOP/Foxers are still just trying to bring him down. Filthy.

Even Sen. John McCain, watching him on MSNBC right after the speech supporting the President but all up in arms about the time limit, it became comical at the end as he desperately tried to get back in that "I support the President!" as Brian Williams was movin' on.