Vet in Congress; President’s “politics of war” must not continue

Jeff Bridenstine, a Navy pilot in Iraq and Afghanistan, now in Congress, writes in Breitbart, that we cannot allow the Obama policies in Iraq to continue in Afghanistan. Bridenstine lays our failures in Iraq, what with al Qaeda occupying the hard-won cities of Fallujah and Ramadi, at the feet of Joe Biden, who was delegated by the president to conduct negotiations with the Iraqi government for continued American engagement with insurgents there after the majority of troops were scheduled to leave, and, of course, Biden failed in that endeavor, and Iraq is reaping the fruits of that failure. Bridenstine writes that Obama should take his his own advice;

President Obama’s predisposition to place political convenience above sound judgment weakens our relationships with our partners and allies and emboldens our adversaries and enemies. As we are seeing now, doing whatever it took to secure the SOFA and keep a residual presence in Iraq during the transition would have been the right position. I wish the President would give up trying to follow currently fashionable opinion and remember that he once observed: “The lesson of Iraq is that when we are making decisions about matters as a grave as war, we need a policy rooted in reason and facts, not ideology and politics.” The President should heed his own advice in Afghanistan.

Obama has a tendency to half-ass his war policy by finding a compromise between the realities of war and his flaky stank-ass hippie base, but there is no compromise in war – it is what it is. When he half-asses war, the troops pay with their blood. In fact, CNS reports that 74% of the casualties in Afghanistan have happened since this President took office;

n the more than twelve years that have passed since U.S. troops first entered Afghanistan with the aim of removing al Qaeda from its sanctuary there, 2,162 U.S. service personnel have given their lives in and around Afghanistan in support of U.S. military activities in that country.

1,593 of those 2,162 U.S. casualties—or 73.7 percent—have occurred since Feb. 17, 2009, when Obama announced the first of his multiple increases in U.S. military personnel deployed to Afghanistan.

And, oh, yeah, by the way, head Taliban commander in Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, is planning to release 72 more prisoners from Afghan prisons so they can take up arms against the country when Karzai cashes in his IRA as he leaves the country. Some estimates put his retirement savings at more than $4 billion. So, if Obama sends Biden to Afghanistan to negotiate an agreement with Karzai, well, that’s a recipe for failure.

Category: Terror War