A New Low, Even for Krauthammer

The WaPo's Obama-hater-in-chief and neocon flag-waver (and also one of its leading apologists for Israel; don't know how I could have left him off my earlier list) reaches a new low today.  Charles Krauthammer is all over Mr. Obama for the hypocrisy (though he doesn't actually use that word) of having sent more troops to Afghanistan when he's already announced a withdrawal date, and when (according to CK) Obama's heart really isn't in it anyway.  CK may indeed have a point in noting that Obama (and Kerry before him) campaigned on Afghanistan as the "good war" (as opposed to the Iraq "bad war" - which, in Krauthammer land, the Bush-Petraeus "Surge" won for the US - which must explain why the Iraqis obviously feel so comfortable with the result that they're perfectly happy with having just established a new record for a country to go without a government after an election).  But CK completely omits any mention that it was his own sweetheart, Mr. Bush (soon to be enriched by royalties from the forthcoming memoirs that will undoubtedly argue the case for his bold and brave leadership), who left this stinking turd for Mr. Obama to have to try to clean up.

Actually, truth be told, Bush left Obama a pile of them, none of them bigger and smellier than an economy devastated by his complicity in letting Wall Street brokers party hard and then drop the bill on all of us, and by trying to wage two horrendously expensive wars while cutting taxes, borrowing needed war-funds from China, and running the deficit (which was already in the ionosphere) to the point where it's, for all intents and purposes, lost in space.  

Truth be told - and as a real expert on Afghanistan, Gilles Dorronsoro, makes plain - the war in Afghanistan is lost (indeed, Petraeus himself admits - as is recorded in Bob Woodward's new court stenography book - that it's not the kind of war one wins, but that one more or less sticks with, perhaps well into our children's lifetimes).  And it's a war that the US simply no longer has the financial wherewithal to fight.  When (as a recent piece in Maclean's magazine points out) our bridges are crumbling (or even collapsing) and paved roads are being returned to gravel, when members of a local community in Ashtabula County, Ohio, have to take up personal arms (at a local judge's recommendation) to detain a criminal so that its remaining single squad car can get to the scene, and when our education system is taking a standing 8-count, then it's time to recognize that the US can't keep pouring millions of dollars into a lost war in a country where the elections that we touted are rigged and where the neighbors (themselves at risk, both from us and from their own home-grown insurgency) are blackmailing us by blocking the convoys that supply US troops in Afghanistan.  (And one of those convoys was attacked and torched today in Afghanistan.)

Most of this is not of Obama's doing, but if he is to save the country from being completely sucked into the Afghan black hole, he needs to get the US out of there as quickly as possible - and not be tarred by the likes of Krauthammer for doing so.