Surge 2.0: Not Just Wrong, But Falling Into the Repugs' Trap

If the Afghanistan escalation is really some kind of 11-dimensional-chess move to escape that clusterfuck while avoiding any political penalty, then President Obama better finish the game before next November. Because the repugs are already three steps ahead of him.

Zandar explains:

Now that Obama has gone full in on THE AFGHANISURGE and given the GOP what they wanted, the exact same Republican hawks will now immediately turn on the war for the sole reason that Obama's running it. Reihan Salam lays out the game plan over at The Daily Beast:

SNIP

And so the president is caught in an extremely awkward position. Abandoned by the Democrats, he is relying on the support of a shrinking centrist foreign-policy establishment that, to put it bluntly, has zero political muscle. The conservatives who back the troop surge don’t think the president is going far enough, and most expect that his effort to craft a compromise counterinsurgency will fail. Among grassroots conservatives, there is a growing sense that the U.S. military is too hamstrung by concern about civilian casualties and political correctness to wage an effective military campaign under Obama, which implies that there is little point in offering him political support.

SNIP

In 2010, expect Republicans to say Afghanistan is the wrong war and that we need to get out and move on to Pakistan and other places...and of course, Iran.

The bashing on Afghanistan by the right as "Obama's Vietnam" has already started...that note was hit back in February only a month after he took office for crissakes. Remember the GOP plan: Destroy Obama. He cannot be allowed to take positive credit for anything. When Obama wasn't sending troops into Afghanistan, he was a dithering softy. Now that he's sending 30K plus troops in, he's fighting the wrong war. The Village won't even notice the hypocrisy of course...they're pushing it too. Now that Obama has actually done what he's said he's going to do and that the GOP has complained that he wasn't doing fast enough, doing what the GOP wanted him to do and deploying troops in a lightning-fast six month manner is of course unacceptable to the Republicans.

They'll be running as the anti-war candidates in 2010. Count on it. Don't believe me? Remember the GOP and Bill Clinton in Bosnia? Remember Clinton being attacked for sending in cruise missiles into Iraq? Same thing. We've seen it before. We're about to see it again.