If actions speak louder than words, President Obama is cutting America free of George Bush's wars and coming home. For his bottom line Tuesday night was that all U.S. forces will be out of Iraq by mid-2011 and the U.S. footprint in Afghanistan will, on that date,...
I'm actually pretty surprised to see that many liberals and progressives are not climbing on board Obama's war wagon – notably Rachel Maddow, who made a stinging criticism of the escalation by comparing the rhetoric of the Bush administration and that of the New...
[Note for Readers: Last week, I wrote an address for the president, "The Afghan Speech Obama Should Give (But Won't)," which got a fair amount of attention. Now that the president has given a far more predictable speech, I thought some of you might still be...
Congressman David Obey (D-Wis.), the powerful chairman of the House Appropriations Committee and an opponent of President Barack Obama's Afghan War escalation, recently proposed a special "temporary" income surtax to fund the war. Although his intentions are...
President Barack Obama presented a case Tuesday for sending 30,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan that included both soaring rhetoric and a new emphasis on its necessity for U.S. national security. Obama said the escalation was for a "vital national...
An underlying conceit of the new spin about benchmarks and timetables for Afghanistan is the notion that pivotal events there can be choreographed from Washington. So, a day ahead of the president's Tuesday night speech, the New York Times quoted an unnamed top...
President Obama will announce his big decision about Afghanistan on Tuesday. The sanctioned leaks about what he'll say are coming fast and furious. According to various reports, he'll commit somewhere between 30,000 and 34,000 extra U.S. troops to the region. When he...
Michael O'Hanlon, a war hawk tank-thinker with the Brookings Institution who encouraged us to invade Iraq, says we should "remain hopeful" about Afghanistan. Even though the news about Afghanistan has been "dispiriting," O'Hanlon tells us,...
The pressure that has been on Barack Obama with respect to reinforcement of the war in Afghanistan resembles that placed on John F. Kennedy to send American combat troops to Vietnam during the 18 months before his assassination. Kennedy made an early decision that...
Another Thanksgiving for which to count our blessings – though a new president and administration will be pardoning one turkey and cutting up another on White House china this year. We also have another year of war, and for that, no one in this readership could...
