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The Reason’s Simple, Max…. They LIED.

Max Boot in this morning’s LA TIMES: [1]

During last year’s campaign, Barack Obama stressed that while he wanted to withdraw from Iraq, he was no pacifist. “As president,” he said on July 15, 2008, “I will make the fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban the top priority that it should be. This is a war that we have to win.”

He began to make good on his word on March 27 when he announced a “comprehensive new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan” that included 21,000 additional troops. The goal, he said, was to “reverse the Taliban’s gains” and “prevent Afghanistan from becoming the Al Qaeda safe haven that it was before 9/11.”

On Aug. 30, the president’s handpicked commander in Afghanistan delivered a plan to do just that. Implementing his counterinsurgency strategy, Gen. Stanley McChrystal wrote, “requires more forces.” If extra troops are not sent, and soon, the “likely result” would be “failure.”

One would expect, based on his past statements, that Obama would rush to give McChrystal the forces needed to win what the president described in August as a “war of necessity.” Yet that’s not the case. The White House has been sitting on the general’s report for a month, refusing to allow him to submit his resource request or testify to Congress and leaking to the news media that the president may decide to downsize the entire war effort.

Yes, well, look. I called Obama a liar of the first magnitude when he made that claim. I did so loudly and without reservatio.  I said at the time that playing different theaters of the very same war as completely different situations was a political ploy for the consumption of these here in the states.  The far left even admitted as much recently. Witness digby over at Hullabaloo [2], for example

The Democrats backed themselves into defending the idea of Afghanistan being The Good War because they felt they needed to prove their macho bonafides when they called for withdrawal from Iraq. Nobody asked too many questions sat the time, including me. But none of us should forget that it was a political strategy, not a serious foreign policy.

There have been many campaign promises “adjusted” since the election. There is no reason that the administration should feel any more bound to what they said about this than all the other committments it has blithely turned aside in the interest of “pragmatism.”

So it was as I said back when the leftie tripe about Afghanistan vs Iraq was originally offered… they lied.  Interesting that he admits Obama lied in many other f his campaign pledges as well, and thinks that’s OK, eh?   The fact of the matter is that they’ve been lying all along on this stuff, and nobody should be surprisedin the least by that. It is in fact, the only explanation for yet another of Obama’s campaign promises disappearing.  He lied.