11 June 2008

BHO's Big Problem

I'm seeing others comment on it more and more, and I think in the long run it will be his biggest problem...
The war in Iraq.

I may be the biggest idiot on the face of the earth, but I've lived 61 years and I've learned to pay "attention to details".
I wish I could place a bet on my gut feeling...

History will prove this war was necessary.
Hussein had those WMD's, we know that. Our intelligence on them may have been faulty, but I find it hard to believe the intelligence community as a whole was wrong on the issue. So the question is, what happened to those weapons?
The best guess I've seen relates to all those Russian trucks that were seen outside the facility in Al-Qagaa.
If you come here and read comments, you know others disagree. the most vocal of those are 20 somethings... intelligent, idealistic, but naive (or refusing to pay attention to detail) about history and politics in general. (I realize they may still be proven correct, but they are still naive.)

So here is Obama's problem as I see it:
Most folks in my circle agree with me. I have NO WAY of quantifying how many people that amounts to, but it's a bunch. I don't think BHO can win without considerable support from these folks. BHO is gonna have to move in such a way that this chunk of voters are comfortable with how he'll handle the war after the election. To get that support he'll have to make a major change in his rhetoric, and doing so, he'll alienate the naive 20-somethings presently swooning over his wonderful "changiness".

The creaking sound you hear is the stress being subjected to the Democrat party, and if you're paying attention you can already see fissures starting to separate him from voters he needs. He finds himself in "Catch-22"...
His present position is untenable. It'll be interesting to watch how he squirms over the next months, and how the MSM and his followers react to the change he has to make.

Let's see if he's the brilliant politician the swooners believe he is.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Anything can happen. And I agree with most of your post. In my view Senator Clinton lost because of her Iraq vote plain and simple. Had she not voted for that resolution she would have clinched the nomination way back in the first Super Tuesday. I'm not quite sure how Barry will construct his general election message. And I'm not swooning over Barry's anti-war posture either. I tell my friends they're crazy for thinking Barry will actually pull out troops within a year because we can't predict what's gonna happen on the ground. What matters to me most is eliminating the *mindset* that got us into war. We need to eliminate this continuous brainstorming of how we will *stay* as opposed to finding constructive ways to *change course*. As Barry is quick to point out we don't want a precipitous withdrawal. That would be immoral.

"We must be as careful getting out as we were careless getting in"

There are very few good options left in Iraq. But what is evident is that our presence there isn't strengthening our country. We need to diffuse the tension over there so we have a better chance of negotiating rationally. I'm not naive to think we can reason with the likes of Bin Laden but like Americans, Muslims come in many stripes. Not everyone hates America and if we can build allies as opposed to alienating them we might just come out of this on top.

There's no doubt Saddam Hussein had WMDs at one point or another. What happened to them is a good question worth exploring but unfortunately lack of evidence makes that difficult to do. Did our eliminating the grip of the madman allow Al Qaeda to take it? We may never know. But more important was the revelation that our administration lied about the *imminent* nature of this threat. Every administration sells war in some form or another but this was the wrong war to sell. Was Saddam working alongside Al Qaeda to use WMDs? No.

Greybeard said...

Preachify all you want, R. My point still stands. I disagree with you about much of the above, as do a HUGE block of voters. I don't think he can be elected with his present stance, and I don't think he can be elected if he changes his position.
Let's pop some popcorn and watch the contortions!

The Old Man said...

Rodolfo, it appears that you suffer from BDS. Let us assume that the Tikriti madman had no WMD (a lie, BTW, we have recovered >36 155mm shells with binary warheads. It those aren't WMDs, lets spin one up on the Senate floor during a televised session.) but assume it. Should we have left Kuwait in his grasp? Or let Saddam wage a low-level war on our AF while proclaiming his progress toward more WMDs to replace those he had used against the northern Kurds? Personally, I think that crime alone would justify his removal and execution.

Or do you think that human beings should be the broken toys of whatever psycho/sociopath that manages to seize power, Rodolfo? I'd like to think we as the human race are better than that - but I have been wrong before...

Anonymous said...

Saddam was contained and would have withered away in the dustbin of history had we not gone into Iraq. Am I saying we should never go into places at all? No. Afghanistan was the correct move immediately after 9/11. Iraq was unnecessary because he posed no imminent threat. Am I denying any progress we have made over there? No. But the fact is if we send American firepower in any hotzone in the world we'd prevail. The problem is we have no stretegy for anything other than this messianic idea that democracy will flower in a region that doesn't value freedom of speech.

btw BDS is not an actual disease. If it were tell me what medicine I need to take for it so I can fall in line with the remaining Bush loyalists (28%) who still think he's doing a great job.