Sunday, September 27, 2009
Time for Obama to start collecting letters
Letters of resignation, that is. And the first place he needs to clean out is the Pentagon. Carrying over Bob Gates as Sec Def may have seemed like a good idea back in January, but now that he is showing his true colors, calling for a Bushovik exit strategy from the Kabul Quagmire, i.e. doing nothing, it is time for him to retire gracefully.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates said on Sunday it would be a "strategic mistake" for the U.S. to put a timeline or exit strategy on its presence in Afghanistan -- a position that appears to put him at direct odds with the president.The reality is his former lord and master, George W Cheney, spent 7 years working to guarantee that the Kabul Quagmire would have no possible chance of success. The sooner President Obama realizes this, the fewer American lives will be sacrificed on the altar of GOP megalomania.
Appearing on CNN's "State of the Union," Gates insisted that far from being a quagmire, Afghanistan was a country that could be pacified and stabilized if the right policy was adopted. One thing the United States should not do, he added, was set deadlines or outline an approach by which military forces would eventually leave the country.
"I think that -- that the notion of -- of timelines and exit strategies and so on, frankly, I think would all be a, a strategic mistake," said Gates. "The reality is, failure in Afghanistan would be a huge setback for the United States. Taliban and Al Qaeda, as far as they're concerned, defeated one superpower. For them to be seen to defeat a second, I think, would have catastrophic consequences in terms of energizing the extremist movement, Al Qaeda recruitment, operations, fundraising, and so on."
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