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Accusing Obama of playing the 'Bush blame game'
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In his most recent syndicated column, neocon Charles Krauthammer posits that Barack Obama is whining:
…there are 50 or so such blame-Bush free passes before the gig is up. By my calculation, Obama has already burned through a good 49. Is there anything he hasn't blamed George W. Bush for? The economy, global warming, the credit crisis, Middle East stalemate, the deficit, anti-Americanism abroad – everything but swine flu.It's as if Obama's presidency hasn't really started. He's still taking inventory of the Bush years. Just Monday, he referred to "long years of drift" in Afghanistan in order to, I suppose, explain away his own, well, nearly yearlong drift on Afghanistan.
Mr. Krauthammer has ODS --Obama Derangement Syndrome-- and it would be laughable, if it weren't so pathetic.
Charles Krauthammer (Fox News)
After seven years of GOP neglect, it takes a lot of gall to expect an Obama plan to turn things around in seven months, especially with a full plate of issues, not the least of which is a recession that's thrown the world economy into a tailspin --another problem not of his own doing, incidentally.
It takes further gall to feign indignation about a false allegation --Obama playing the blame game-- when Republicans spent eight years blaming Bill Clinton for 9/11 --which happened eight months into the Bush administration (and a month after a daily presidential brief warning about planes flying into buildings).
The fact is, President Bush had seven years to seal the deal on Afghanistan. Instead, he engaged in two wars by abandoning one to start the other, leaving us with one situation that is far from over and another situation it may be over because it's too late to correct. Yet we have a war-mongering neo-con like Mr. Krauthammer who expects President Obama to clean up seven years of foreign policy disasters in less than one.
This White House has hardly engaged in a blame game. If anything, President Obama has bent over backwards to avoid criticizing his hapless predecessor.
Whole shelves of PhD dissertations remain to be written about the blunders of the Bush presidency. For Obama to go almost a year without adequately calling Bush to account is a credit to the current president and an acknowledgement of respect for the office itself.
There's no need for the president to blame his predecessor; the present circumstances are making the previous administration's ineptitude abundantly clear, and history will eventually make the final judgment, provided people like Mr. Krauthammer aren't constantly revising the facts, which he conveniently does in his column:
In both Iraq and Afghanistan, we initially chose the light footprint. For obvious reasons: less risk and fewer losses for our troops, while reducing the intrusiveness of the occupation and thus the chances of creating an anti-foreigner backlash that would fan an insurgency.This was the considered judgment of our commanders at the time, most especially Centcom commander (2003-07) Gen. John Abizaid. And Abizaid was no stranger to the territory. He speaks Arabic and is a scholar of the region. The overriding idea was that the light footprint would minimize local opposition.…What they needed, argued Gen. David Petraeus against much Pentagon brass opposition, was population protection, i.e., a heavy footprint.…the deterioration of the military situation was not the result of "drift," but of considered policies that seemed reasonable, cautious and culturally sensitive at the time, but ultimately turned out to be wrong.
What BS.
We had too few troops in Iraq because then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was playing CYA whild firing the generals who said we needed more.
Nice try revising history.
But fail.
Not to mention that it was money, not troop strength that reversed our fortunes Iraq because we paid members of the Sunni Awakening to join us instead of fight us.
Not that I would expect Mr. Krauthammer to bring up money since it might then be incumbent upon to explain exactly where we'd get the money to pay for an additional 40,000 troops in Afghanistan. Any thoughts on that, sir? Or would you prefer we extend those Bush tax cuts?
The fact is, President Bush had seven years to seal the deal on both of these wars. Now, Krauthammer, a war-mongering neo-con, expects Obama to clean up seven years of Bush's disastrous foreign policy in less than one year.
Mr. Krauthammer asks, "Is there anything he hasn't blamed George W. Bush for?"
Is there anything Mr. Krauthammer and his ilk haven't blamed President Obama for?
Why, of course seven years of startling ineptitude by the Bush-Cheney circus should be reversed in a few months by Obama. That's perfectly reasonable!
Have you ever asked yourself, Charles, what those two bozos were doing in all that time, I mean other than letting bin Laden escape? Did Afghanistan even cross your mind before Obama was elected?
Next year we will have been in Afghanistan longer than the Soviets were. The president's top commander is publicly demanding more troops while his civilian advisors are counseling a different course. Meanwhile, the fate of the Afghan is uncertain, rife with corruption to the point where there's a runoff election scheduled for this weekend in which only one candidate is running --Hamid Karzai, who is the reason why they've scheduled a runoff election.
There's no question that President Obama will have to make a decision and take ownership, but it is sheer lunacy to expect him to decide on a definitive strategy in the face of considerable uncertainty in a land where we no longer appear wanted and where the goal is unlikely to be achieved since we no longer know what the hell it is.
I'm personally hoping he leads us out of the war, though I don't expect that will be his choice. I'm hoping he's listening to the folks preaching counterterrorism, and not General McChrystal's version of counterinsurgency, which seems a blueprint for a Soviet-style quagmire and a Vietnam defeat. Most important, I hope he's not listening to the likes of Krauthammer, because they'll never applaud decisiveness unless it endorses their war-without-end world view, and that's a world view that's destined to fail.
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