Obama’s New Afghanistan Strategy, Explained In Video
President Obama’s new strategy for the war in Afghanistan, explained briefly in video.
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Faced with declining poll numbers among middle class Americans and increasing pressure from the left wing of his party, President Obama yesterday took what administration officials are calling a “a decisive stance of resolute vacillation” on the subject of the war in Afghanistan during his speech at West Point.
In what White House spokesman Robert Gibbs called “the most significant military decision ever,” President Obama simultaneously announced the deployment of 30,000 new troops to Afghanistan and their subsequent withdrawal date of 2011, a tactic insiders are calling “The Verge.”
Gibbs explained the moniker.
“As we kicked around names for this new Afghan initiative,” he said, “we knew we needed something that accurately captured the brilliant dichotomy of build-up and withdrawal, of charge and retreat. And we knew it would be particularly kick-ass if it rhymed with ‘Surge.’ So we are calling it “The Verge.”
Gibbs went on to note: “A multitude of factors come into play when making this kind of decision, factors based not on the painfully outdated notion of ‘realities on the ground’, but on the much more complicated and subtle interplay among human dignity and environmental decency, allocation of political capital, and polling of likely voters.”
12-20-2009, 08:12 PM
Obama’s New Afghanistan Strategy, Explained In Video
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