Word: afghanistan
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Iran and Syria and his rhetoric about groups like Hizballah and Hamas. Obama's not trying to end the war on terrorism, but he is trying to downsize it - so that it doesn't overwhelm the U.S.'s capacities and crowd out his other priorities. (See pictures of Afghanistan's dangerous Korengal Valley...
...Obama, on the other hand, must find space (and money) for what he sees as equally grave domestic threats. Bush loved the ominous, elastic noun terrorism. Obama, according to an analysis by Politico, has publicly uttered the words health and economy twice as often as terrorism, Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan combined. Even his decision to temporarily send more troops to Afghanistan was framed as a way to allow the U.S. to eventually disengage from...
...loud, he's scaled back Bush's assessment of American power. When Bush invaded Iraq, the U.S. was coming off a decade of low-cost military triumphs - from Panama in 1989 to the Gulf War in 1991 to Bosnia in 1995 to Kosovo in 1999. And back then, Afghanistan looked like a triumph too. It was easy to believe that the U.S. military - through a combination of force and threats of force - could prevail over a slew of hostile regimes and movements at the same time. And it was easy to believe that the U.S. could afford these military adventures...
...These days the U.S. doesn't look quite so omnipotent. Insurgents in Iraq and now Afghanistan have learned how to throw sand in our war-fighting machine. Economically, our gaping deficits are making it harder to run the war on terrorism on a blank check. And ideologically, violent, illiberal movements like Hamas, Hizballah and the Taliban have proved that they have deeper roots in native soil than the Bushies assumed. At West Point, Obama said he would not "set goals that go beyond our responsibility, our means or our interests." Bush never spoke in that language of limits...
...Obama is trying to make a virtue of necessity. Since the U.S. can't defeat all terrorism-supporting movements and regimes, he's arguing that it doesn't have to, since most of them are not committing terrorism against us. As Bruce Riedel, who ran Obama's initial Afghanistan and Pakistan review, puts it, "He's going after the organization that attacked the U.S. on 9/11 and before and since rather than pursuing a vague and murky war on terrorism everywhere." Team Obama has junked the phrase war on terror, not to mention Islamofascism. And the World...