Obama's fear of the antiwar pukes

Mike Allen:

White House officials are increasingly worried liberal, anti-war Democrats will demand a premature end to the Afghanistan war before President Barack Obama can show signs of progress in the eight-year conflict, according to senior administration sources.

These fears, which the officials have discussed on the condition of anonymity over the past few weeks, are rising fast after U.S. casualties hit record levels in July and August.

The aides also expressed concern that Afghan election returns, still being tallied, will result in a narrow reelection for President Hamid Karzai that could result in qualms about his legitimacy — “Tehran II,” as one official put it, in reference to the disputed Iranian election.

The result: some think Afghanistan - not health care - will be the issue that defines the early years of the Obama administration.

“There’s no question that the drumbeat is going to get louder and louder on the left, and you’ll see some fall-off on the right,” said Matt Bennett of the think tank Third Way, the moderate voice of the progressive movement. “His supporters on the Hill are fighting a really serious political battle to keep the criticism under control.”

The Afghanistan conflict, which has gotten relatively little attention in part because Obama talks far more often about domestic concerns, is roaring back to the top of the Obama agenda as Congress is about to return from weeks of meetings with often unhappy voters.

Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wisc.) last week called for a timetable to pull U.S. troops out of Afghanistan — the same tactic he and other war opponents used to build congressional support for forcing an end to the Iraq war.

But Obama officials — including National Security Adviser James Jones and Defense Secretary Robert Gates — know the problem is much bigger than Feingold and timetables. They anticipate a growing number of anti-war liberals will call, with increasing force, for an end to the conflict when lawmakers return. Cost could become an issue, too. With deficits high, there will be heavy pressure on Obama to find savings somewhere in 2010 — and war critics see Afghanistan as a good place to start.

George F. Will opened a new fissure among conservatives with a column Tuesday calling for the U.S. to pull all ground troops out of Afghanistan, on the theory on the French general Charles de Gaulle that genius “sometimes consists of knowing when to stop.”

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George Will will not carry many conservative hawks with him in his retreat. If Obama wants to cement the Democrats' reputation of being soft on national security he can bow to the chicken dove wing of his party. But a retreat from Afghanistan would not end this war. The enemy would have his sanctuary back and use it to launch more attacks against US noncombatants. We would risk the enemy getting Pakistan nukes for those attacks.

What liberals want is to go back to the pre 9-11 era where we use lawfare instead of warfare. That the policy was an abject failure does not matter to them. In fact Obama still thinks it was a success even after 9-11 demonstrated its failure. The antiwar left has a point of view that is not worthy of respect. If they get their way they will get a lot of Americans killed.

The enemy cannot hope to defeat our military. It is looking to the anti war left to defeat us in Washington. They seem eager to oblige.