(admiring) AEI's Danielle Pletka: "... it could be Bush speaking...”

Link

Politico/ here

" ... Obama seemed to take for granted that the unpopular, confusing war will never again be a cherished national cause. He argued for a stringent, grudging, and time-limited military commitment to Afghanistan, dropping all discussion of human rights and civilian nation-building.

The policy was largely imposed upon him from outside, and an intense three-month review produced no short cuts or discoveries that were not visible three months ago. Instead, a politically and practically hemmed-in president carefully steered between the generals and their Republican allies demanding a rapid, large deployment to Afghanistan, and leaders of his own, increasingly restive party, who heard Obama explain that sending more troops was actually a step toward bringing more home.

Though Obama’s policy found support from hawkish Republicans who also backed President George W. Bush’s aggressive actions overseas, his philosophy was a clearly stated, limited realism that became the consensus position of the Democratic Party in the wake of Bush’s grand adventures and moralizing rhetoric.......

The relatively brief, 34-minute speech was narrow, defined as much by its gaps as by its content. Absent were the words “win” and “victory.”.....

Obama also found himself once again on the defensive as part of one of the oldest dynamics in American politics, as a Democratic president being attacked as weak on national security, and in particularly for “dithering” through a long policy review, in the words of former Vice President Dick Cheney.

“Let me be clear: there has never been an option before me that called for troop deployments before 2010, so there has been no delay or denial of resources necessary for the conduct of the war,” Obama said.....

Obama entered the speech with a keen understanding of the limits of American tolerance for the Afghan war, with public support for his policy dropping to 35% in the most recent Gallup Poll......

... if the rhetoric – promises of withdrawal and of a tough new stance toward the Afghan government – was calculated to assuage Democrats, the promised action drew quite measured praise from Republicans and their hawkish allies.

“The President has made the right decision to embrace a counterinsurgency strategy for Afghanistan and to resource it properly,” said Senator John McCain of Arizona, the GOP’s 2008 presidential candidate, adding that “what I do not support, and what concerns me greatly, is the president’s decision to set an arbitrary date to begin withdrawing U.S. forces from Afghanistan.”

That Republican praise took notably unfamiliar forms. Danielle Pletka, a vice president at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, remarked admiringly early in the speech that it “could be Bush speaking.”

“I was very encouraged, because there were a lot of people close to the president arguing for him to do the wrong thing,” Pletka said after the speech. “I am worried about the 18 month deadline ..."

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Posted by G, Z, or B at 10:03 AM