The only thing the Left can get right about warmaking is the primacy of deception as a tool to be used against your enemy.

Exchanges between Washington journalists on this week’s Washington Week in Review highlighted, to a controlled extent, just how poorly the Obama administration is advancing national defense issues.

One of the most startling admissions about the White House policy drift concerning the war in Afghanistan was made by a panelist, National Journal writer James Kitfield, in an Oct 17 issue where he described a White House that was “nervously eyeing the polls about Afghanistan…” much the way Obama’s Republican predecessor did. Politics isn’t what’s on the line here, though. The lives of America’s soldiers are at stake.

Another admission by Kitfield is that White House staff are reading books about the Vietnam war:

“…where U.S. soldiers fought and bled for five years after the 1968 Tet offensive arguably broke the will of the American public”

Lovely. Way to distort US military history, Mr. Kitfield. It is almost as if he wants to underline the fact that the Left’s knowledge of history is seriously lacking in policy debates.

We probably should have taken the hint with the Obama World Apology Tour 2009 this last spring that the Obama administration was not interested in winning against an armed foreign enemy.

More than two and a half months after the original request for more troops by Obama’s handpicked successor in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, we are just now learning that for at least a month meetings have been held with Obama’s foreign policy and defense staffs on Afghanistan to deal with those additional troops.

In a vain attempt to give his stamp of approval Kitfield said:

“In some ways, I think he’s more deliberative. President Bush was very gut instincts and so he made decisions pretty quickly. Obama is much more a logical sort of going through all the options and comparing and then debating those with people and he obviously likes to encourage people to speak up, where it wasn’t really what Bush was known for.”

Really?

According to an article published by The Weekly Standard, the Bush White House already went over all the options two years ago for several months before it became so important to consult the polls. The only reason why the effort in Afghanistan was not reinforced was because of the lack of available troops.

Despite the Left’s attempts to blame Bush for everything, there is one thing Kitfield got right: Afghanistan is quickly becoming Obama’s war.

If you could trade with a mortal enemy, would you do it “without preconditions”? Would you do it if the government of your trading partner deploys snipers against it own domestic protesters? Could you be certain you’d even get paid?

In a book published by State Department adviser Vali Nasr, a professor at Tufts University, trading without preconditions is precisely the course prescribed.

Last Tuesday night, PBS talk show host Tavis Smiley conducted an interview with Vali Nasr, now a US State Department adviser to Richard Holbrooke, himself a special State Department adviser on Pakistan and Afghanistan. Nasr was on the program to hawk his book, Forces of Fortune: The Rise of the New Muslim Middle Class and What it Will Mean for Our World.

The central thesis of Nasr’s book is that the Muslim world is changing, as evidenced by a growing middle class in Muslim countries.

Nasr believes where authoritarian Muslim governments have previously maintained a small middle class and closed economies, a new prosperous middle class is emerging in Muslim countries and is demanding access to global markets as well as the political and social liberalization that will inevitably follow.

Nasr believes that free markets will ultimately open up and stabilize Muslim countries.

Smiley was good enough to point out that the decline of the US middle class is an “interesting irony”, as he put it, in light of the fact that a growing Muslim middle class will be far more adept at bringing positive changes to a previously closed society.

As Jon Stewart joked in a September 22 interview of Nasr: “It’s so interesting that in the Muslim world, the middle class is now rising just as we here in the United States have decided to destroy ours”.

To Smiley, Nasr diplomatically offered this response:

“… stability, prosperity, and democracy needs a large middle class tied to the market. So, its decline in America is not a good thing and its absence in the Muslim world is not a good thing either.

“So, the Muslim world needs much more of that middle class that the United States has had for a very long time, and the United States needs to preserve that middle class in order to be able to maintain the stability of its democracy and the prosperity of its society.”

Nasr’s criticism of Muslim nations is that initiatives to aid the middle class must come from the middle class, not from “above,” as he put it.

To be fair, Nasr mentioned in the Jon Stewart interview that it is not recommended to open all closed economies, and that it is not advisable to open the toughest ones first. Presumably that would include Iran.

The Overseas Private Investment Corporation announced last Friday the formation of a new technology fund tasked to provide capital for technology businesses overseas for a variety of technology products, including information technology, telecommunications and pharmaceutical products, almost as if on cue.

“Without preconditions” may not be an acceptable standard for diplomatic relations when it comes to the use of private monies for investment.

The Obama administration has shown some incredible ineptness regarding domestic economic matters, and thus is apparently willing to try internationally the things we know will work, while shunning those very solutions at home.