Three Months

Three Months for the President to make a decision whether or not to add 40,000 troops in Afghanistan was about eighty-nine days too long.

You see, President Obama had the "war thing" all figured out during his campaigning for his current job. He was convinced and convinced voters that Iraq was the wrong war...a "war of choice." On the other hand (he said), Afghanistan was "a war of necessity, and one we had to win." And then Senator Obama assured the American people that he would not make the same mistakes with his war policy as the previous administration did for eight years.

If one considers that President Obama had eight years of history in the region to look back on and learn from, combined with his own hand-picked military hierarchy, his Harvard law degree, and 150 days in the Senate, his war policy should have been in place and strategically perfect and ready for implementation the day Gen. McChrystal, the US commander in Afghanistan, asked for the additional troops. Instead, because Obama was not prepared, US soldiers in Afghanistan, NATO, the American people and the world community had to wait Three Months.

Great leaders have contingency plans. A lot of people thought Obama was a great leader and voted for him. It turns out that not only is he not a great leader, he's not even an average leader. At the very least an average leader would have given some advance consideration to, above all other, a war where American soldiers are in peril daily. One would think the President would have had emergency contingency plans for a war for which he had taken ownership. But he didn't.

The President needed Three Months to come to the decision to send in the troops; but I suppose it was to be expected when one considers Obama had only met with McChrystal once since he assumed leadership of forces in Afghanistan on June 2nd, 2009 three months prior to the General's August 30th request to Defense Secretary Gates for troops. This is a crystal clear case of remarkably poor management of a war by the President. And, there are no excuses for anyone connected with the Obama administration to have enabled the President to be so ill prepared.

Three Months.

Albiwan..