Word: argument
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...President made the best possible argument for a rather iffy proposition: the expansion of a war that is 51% necessary and 49% futile (or vice versa). But you can't argue a people into war, especially one that seems so indistinct and perplexing. Once you have made the decision to go, or to redouble your efforts, you must lead the charge - passionately and, yes, with a touch of anger. Obama's attempt to do that, his peroration about the ideals that cause us to fight, was lovely but abstract: "It is easy to forget that when this war began...
...romance of the fight, the band-of-brothers bond, the ethos of ultimate sacrifice is at the heart of military culture. If a President wants to send young people off to war, he must buy into that culture. It is not enough to construct the best argument - or the best policy - in a bad situation, as this President has done. (See pictures of life in the Afghan National Army...
...question the President was expecting. He said he rejected that argument "because if you follow the logic ... then you would never leave. Right? Essentially you'd be signing on to have Afghanistan as a protectorate of the United States indefinitely." And the time limit, he suggested, might give him leverage over Hamid Karzai, the recalcitrant Afghan leader: "In my discussion with President Karzai yesterday," Obama said, "I was able to articulate to him exactly what he's going to need to do over the next two years to be prepared for this transition." (See a video about the soldier...
...easy," he said. "I mean, we are choosing from a menu of options that is less than ideal." Indeed, over the past few months, I've heard members of the Administration make cases for and against each of the decisions the President has made. There is no completely convincing argument that 30,000 - or 40,000 - more troops will turn the tide in Afghanistan; you can make an argument, nearly as plausible, that they will make a bad situation worse - Afghans have, historically, not reacted well to tens of thousands of armed foreigners on their turf. (Which leads in turn...
...surge; why won't he just wait us out? (But there's a counter-counter here as well: Isn't this just posturing? Doesn't Karzai know that without American protection, he could be swinging from a lamppost in Kabul like several of his predecessors?) And as for the argument, made passionately by some in the military, that a specific date for starting the withdrawal is an invitation for the Taliban to lie low until we leave: "They simply won't do that," says Leslie H. Gelb, former president of the Council on Foreign Relations. "If you stand down...