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In discussing the president’s political motives for the early troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, Peter Wehner shares a good story about W.
…I have the advantage of having served a president during wartime. And whatever faults one might be tempted to lay at the feet of George W. Bush, he never allowed politics of the Obama kind to infect his decisions. I know of what I speak. In September 2006, with the midterm elections approaching and the war of Iraq floundering, Senator Mitch McConnell, then the Republic whip, asked to see the president alone in the Oval Office. “Mr. President,” McConnell said, “your unpopularity is going to cost us control of Congress.” When President Bush asked McConnell what to do about it, McConnell said, “Bring some troops home from Iraq.”
Four months later, Senator McConnell got his reply. President Bush – who faced far more ferocious political opposition to the war than Obama ever has – not only did not withdraw troops; he increased them while embracing a strategy that came to be known as the “surge.” And he blocked every attempt at a premature withdrawal.
There are many factors that explain why the Iraq war turned around, but the fortitude of President Bush surely ranks high among them. That quality looked impressive then; it looks even more impressive now.
Max Boot discusses what will be lost if the president continues with the early troop withdrawal, in Contentions.
…During the past half year our troops had taken back large portions of Helmand and Kandahar provinces from the Taliban. They are now holding that ground against determined Taliban counterattacks. But this is only stage one of a well-thought-out campaign plan designed by Gen. David Petraeus. Stage two calls for extending the security bubble to Regional Command-East–to the treacherous, mountainous terrain where the Haqqani Network, the Taliban, and the Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin have their strongholds. By electing to pull out 10,000 surge troops this year and 20,000 more by next summer, Obama is making it virtually impossible to implement this campaign plan. He is even throwing into doubt our ability to consolidate gains in the south.
…As usual Obama said nothing about seeking victory in Afghanistan over the Haqqanis, the Taliban, or other extremist groups closely allied with Al Qaeda. Instead he spoke above all of his desire to get out of Afghanistan. “This is the beginning — but not the end –- of our effort to wind down this war,” he said.
That is all our enemies need to hear. They will now be convinced that we do not have the will to see the war through and will act accordingly. …
Jennifer Rubin highlights important points made by Robert Kagan.
…”The entire military leadership believes the president’s decision is a mistake, and especially the decision to withdraw the remainder of the surge forces by September 2012. They will soldier on and do their best, but as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, put it, in characteristic understatement, they believe the decision will increase the risk to the troops and increase the chance that the mission will not succeed. It bears repeating that the deadline imposed by the president has nothing to do with military or strategic calculation. It has everything to do with an electoral calculation. President Obama wants those troops out two months before Americans go to the voting booth.
This may prove a disastrous political calculation, too, however. If the war is going badly in the summer and fall of 2012, it will be because of the decision the president made this week. Everyone will know he did it against the advice of his commanders. Everyone will know he did it for political reasons. So if the war is going badly a year from now, whom do you think the American people will blame? There will still be 70,000 American troops in Afghanistan, but as part of a losing effort. Will Americans reward Obama at the polls under those circumstances?”
Put differently, it is one thing to bring up your foreign policy and national security credentials in a campaign (or the other guy’s shortcomings) and quite another to let an election drive war policy. …
In the National Review, Rich Lowry adds his criticism.
…Gen. Douglas MacArthur was wrong. There is a substitute for victory. It’s “ending wars responsibly.”…
…A cruder, more simplistic president from a bygone era might have couched the war in terms of our effort to win. For Obama, the paramount goal is ending, not winning. But ending “responsibly” — which in the case of Afghanistan may mean ending with enough of an interval of relative stability that our exit doesn’t seem an obvious defeat.
…Obama cited the cost of the war and the need to “live within our means.” Only when it comes to the Afghan War is the president interested in fiscal retrenchment. Whatever the incremental savings of a swifter drawdown of the surge than our military commanders recommend, it will be a blip compared with our $1.4 trillion annual deficit. The path to national solvency does not run through the Hindu Kush. …
Roger Simon wonders what is wrong with Democrats.
…I used to be a Democrat — for decades. Was it always this bad? Was I that blind?
…Why can’t these people wake up? Don’t they have children, grandchildren? Don’t they realize we are going broke? The evidence is everywhere — from Michigan to Madrid. Keynesian economics — the welfare state itself — has become completely inoperative, morphed into a Ponzi scheme by an aging population.
… Why is it that, in these times, there is nothing less liberal than a “liberal,” less progressive than a “progressive”? …
…I think there are three things at work — habit, fear of change, and pure, unbridled, screw-the-rest-of-us, self-interest. …
In Forbes, Paul Roderick Gregory looks at recent airlines’ bankruptcies versus the Union Bailout at GM.
…The White House estimates an eventual $14 billion price tag for the GM and Chrysler bailouts. What has the $14 billion bought us? It certainly hasn’t saved millions of jobs–more like 4,000, and probably fewer. If we dig deeper, we find that most of the taxpayer money went to protecting members of the United Auto Workers.
Chapter 11 bankruptcy restructures insolvent companies with the aim of allowing them to emerge as viable concerns. It corrects past errors and is a vital link that makes market capitalism work. If we now have the federal government rather than an impartial bankruptcy judge leading this process, capitalism has lost.
Government intervention is a terrible precedent because it fosters corruption and political favoritism. It allows the current government to reward contributors to its political campaigns and, perhaps more significantly, to scare others into costly political activities. All of this lowers the productivity of the economy and makes all of us poorer. If GM becomes the precedent, we are headed toward third world status and a loss of rule of law.
Bret Jacobson, in the NY Post, discusses how the Obama administration is increasing union power through the NLRB.
…But the Obama NLRB has clearly signaled that it puts the interests of Big Labor ahead of everything else, including its proper role as neutral enforcer of the nation’s labor laws. Examples from just this year:
* The board is pushing to give unions the right to enter a workplace even if their intent is to harass customers and employees. The NLRB says companies shouldn’t be allowed to treat union officials any differently than they do charitable organizations they let on their premises, such as the Girl Scouts or the Red Cross.
…* The NLRB is also pushing to let unions cherry-pick groups of workers within a company to organize, without giving those who oppose the union the opportunity to vote, changing an established definition of a “bargaining unit” that has been in place for more than 50 years. The result would be a costly, chaotic mess for businesses trying to juggle multiple unions and different sets of work rules, benefits and wage rates.
* The board is now pushing through rules that eliminate key checks and balances from the process by which a workplace can be unionized — in the name of speeding things up, it’s upending decades of precedent to make it easier for unions to force themselves on workers, who will have less information. …
In Market Watch, Bret Arends dispels the myth that quantitative easing has done any good.
…The flood of cheap money has helped the big banks rake in profits hand over fist. (Last quarter, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (NYSE:GS) made trading profits every single day.) Commodity speculators have grown rich. And the stock market has boomed, at least when measured in paper dollars. Since Ben Bernanke unveiled QE2 last August, the S&P 500 Index (SNC:SPX) has jumped about 24%.
…But the latest analysis weakens still further the claims that QE2 has helped the economy substantially.
Even before Tuesday’s grim news on home sales, we already knew that the housing market was actually worse now than it was before QE2 was launched. We already knew inflation and unemployment were higher today than they were then. We already knew economic growth is slower.
The kicker? Even the so-called boom on the stock market has been as much illusion as anything else, caused by the devaluation of the paper dollar. If you measure the stock market in a hard currency, there hasn’t been much boom at all. Indeed, the turmoil of the last few weeks means the S&P 500 is now less than 2% higher, when measured in Swiss francs, than as it was on Aug. 27, when Bernanke first unveiled his big idea. …
In Forbes, Rich Danker explains that, for everyone getting a government paycheck, the economy’s going great.
The stimulus program didn’t work, a fact even President Obama acknowledged late last year when he admitted to the New York Times that “there’s no such thing as shovel-ready projects.” But it did succeed in remaking Washington, D.C., into a boomtown as the rest of the country struggles. With a relatively low unemployment rate (6%) and rising home values, the area has turned into a poster-child for Keynesian economics and liberal sensibility.
The Economist reports that federal employment in Washington rose by 20,000 jobs through the recession. This refers to only a portion of the metro area’s workforce — 13% — that works directly for the federal government. Contractors, consultants, vendors and support services round out the modern government-industrial complex. President Obama’s push to turn legions of the contractors into “feds” will further solidify the job security in this pool of workers. D.C. and its environs, which created 6% of the nation’s job growth in the past year despite having just 2% of the country’s population, is now a one-way bet for strong economic growth thanks to a concentrated effort of federal spending and intervention in the economy.
Despite some commentators who have taken to celebrating the city’s newfound cultural diversity, the truth is that D.C. got this way by becoming more like itself: a government town. The Economist again: “The government added workers to oversee intervention in the financial-services and car industries, and financial-regulatory agencies have continued to add staff since. Washington has frequently grown stronger in the wake of economic calamity, often because of public demand for more market oversight.”…
Karl Rove has an interesting analysis of Obama’s likely demise in 2012.
…The last president re-elected with unemployment over 7.2% was FDR in 1936. Ronald Reagan overcame 7.2% unemployment because the rate was dropping dramatically (it had been over 10%) as the economy grew very rapidly in 1983 and 1984. Today, in contrast, the Federal Reserve says growth will be less than 3% this year and less than 3.8% next year, with unemployment between 7.8% and 8.2% by Election Day.
…There’s more. Approval among younger voters has dropped 22 points, and it’s dropped 20 points among Latinos. Even African-American voters are less excited about Mr. Obama than they were—and than he needs them to be. For example, if their share of the turnout drops just one point in North Carolina, Mr. Obama’s 2008 winning margin there is wiped out two and a half times over.
While many voters still personally like Mr. Obama, they deeply oppose his policies, and he tends to be weakest on issues voters consider most important. In the June 13 NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, 56% disapprove of Mr. Obama’s handling of the economy. Fifty-nine percent in the Economist/YouGov poll of June 14 disapprove of how he’s dealt with the deficit.
…Finally, Mr. Obama has made a strategic blunder. While he needs to raise money and organize, he decided to be a candidate this year rather than president. He has thus unnecessarily abandoned one of incumbency’s great strengths, which is the opportunity to govern and distance himself from partisan politics until next spring. Instead, Team Obama has attacked potential GOP opponents and slandered Republican proposals with abandon. This is not what the public is looking for from the former apostle of hope and change. …