Wednesday, June 23, 2010

It's 3:00 AM Do You Know Who Is On Duty For America

Do you remember this:





Now, two years later, there are several crises confronting America, that telephone is ringing, and President Obama isn’t quite sure what to do about it.

The first crisis is the War in Afghanistan, a lynchpin in the War on Terror and a key to ensuring U.S. security. General Stanley McChrystal, U.S. commander in Afghanistan, reportedly tendered his resignation yesterday following a Rolling Stone article that portrayed him and senior aides on his team as dismissive of top Obama administration officials. Apart for being an embarrassing moment for both President Obama and General McChrystal, the story revealed a larger problem for the president – festering, internal dissension regarding his administration’s Afghanistan strategy. As Politico reports, there are divisions among Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Vice President Biden, General David Petraeus, Richard Holbrooke and others.

Those divisions are of Obama’s own making, stemming from his lack of leadership and failure to make a firm commitment to victory in Afghanistan. It took the president ten months to decide on an Afghanistan strategy, he took a middle road in only committing 30,000 additional troops to the mission, many fewer than General McChrystal had requested, and he imposed an artificial timeline for withdrawal that sent mixed signals to the country, the military, our allies and our enemies about America’s resolve to win the war. Now, as the president contemplates General McChrystal’s potential resignation, it appears he is reaping the bitter harvest of his failure to take decisive action.

There’s another crisis spewing from deep in the Gulf of Mexico, where the environmental and economic repercussions of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill continue to spread, 64 days later. Even after President Obama addressed the nation on the government’s oil spill response, 59 percent of Americans do not believe he has a clear plan for tackling the crisis.

Is it any wonder? Yesterday, a federal judge struck down the president’s six-month ban on oil drilling, concluding that plaintiffs likely could show “the Administration acted arbitrarily and capriciously in issuing the moratorium.”

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