October 22, 2009
The Kitty-Cat Who Roared
By Victor Davis Hanson President Obama keeps roaring out deadlines like a lion – only later to meow like a little kitty. Remember, for example, how he bellowed to cheering partisan crowds that he would close down the detainment facility at Guantanamo within a year? The clock ticks — and Guantanamo isn’t close to being shut down. It once was easy for candidate Obama to deplore George W. Bush’s supposed gulag. Now it proves harder to decide between the bad choice of detaining non-uniformed terrorist combatants and the worse ones of letting them go, giving them civilian trials or deporting them to unwilling hosts. Going back further to September 2007, candidate Obama postured about Iraq that he wanted “to immediately begin to remove our combat troops. Not in six months or one year — now!” That “now!” sure sounded macho. On Iraq, candidate Obama also railed that “the American people have had enough of the shifting spin. We’ve had enough of extended deadlines for benchmarks that go unmet.” Talk about “unmet” deadlines and “spin”- here we are in October 2009, and there are still 120,000 U.S. troops in Iraq. The reason why Obama fudged on his promised deadline is that the surge in 2007 worked. American deaths plummeted. The theater is quiet. Iraqi democracy is still there after six years. Obama cannot quite admit these facts, but on the other hand he does not want to be responsible for undermining them. via RealClearPolitics – The Kitty-Cat Who Roared.
