But a small group of hawkish foreign policy experts – who have lobbied the White House since August to escalate U.S. involvement in Afghanistan – are christening Obama the new "War President."....
The White House’s rollout of the 30,000 troop surge did little to convince an already skeptical Congress, but foreign policy hawks who have accused the president of "dithering" in making a decision on Afghanistan are praising the administration’s willingness to make the "tough" commitment to escalate the U.S. commitment in the war in Afghanistan.
Indeed, their approval of the White House’s decision to commit 30,000 troops is the culmination of a campaign led by the newly formed Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI).
FPI held its first event in March, titled "Afghanistan: Planning for Success," and a second event in September – "Advancing and Defending Democracy" – which focused on counterinsurgency in combating the Taliban and al-Qaeda.
The newly formed group is headed up by the Weekly Standard’s editor Bill Kristol; foreign policy adviser to the McCain presidential campaign Robert Kagan; and former policy adviser in the George W. Bush administration Dan Senor.....
The core leadership of FPI has waged their campaign in countless editorials and columns published in the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the Weekly Standard.
These articles have often been highly critical, at times suggesting that Obama’s unwillingness to give Gen. Stanley McChrystal the 20,000 to 40,000 troops requested in his September report to Defense Secretary Robert Gates amounted to "dithering" and projected U.S. weakness to the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and U.S. allies in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Senor described himself as "pleasantly surprised" and "quite encouraged by the president’s decision" in a Republican National Committee sponsored conference call.
"It seems to me that Obama deserves even more credit for courage than Bush did, for he has risked much more. By the time Bush decided to support the surge in Iraq in early 2007, his presidency was over and discredited, brought down in large part by his own disastrous decision not to send the right number of troops in 2003, 2004, 2005, or 2006," wrote Kagan in the Washington Post on Wednesday.
"Obama has had to make this decision with most of his presidency still ahead of him. Bush had nothing to lose. Obama could lose everything," Kagan concluded.
The theme of heralding Obama as a stoic decision-maker in the face of an administration and Congress that seek to "manage American decline" – as Kagan wrote – was also echoed by Bill Kristol in the Washington Post on Wednesday.
"By mid-2010, Obama will have more than doubled the number of American troops in Afghanistan since he became president; he will have empowered his general, Stanley McChrystal, to fight the war pretty much as he thinks necessary to in order to win; and he will have retroactively, as it were, acknowledged that he and his party were wrong about the Iraq surge in 2007 – after all, the rationale for this surge is identical to Bush’s, and the hope is for a similar success. He will also have embraced the use of military force as a key instrument of national power," wrote Kristol.
