Word: decisional
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To understand Barack Obama's Afghanistan decision, it's instructive to go back to one history-shifting sentence, uttered by his predecessor more than eight years ago. It was Sept. 20, 2001. The nation was in agony, and George W. Bush stood before a joint session of Congress, telling Americans...
But downsizing also has its costs. The first is moral. Obama may be right that the U.S. can't vanquish movements like Hizballah and the Taliban or even an embattled regime like Iran's. Legitimizing them, however, will be hard for some Americans to swallow. Already, hawks have slammed Obama...
Obama, by contrast, doesn't need to go hunting for grand challenges. From preventing a depression to providing universal health care to stopping global warming, he has them in spades. Bush could afford to define the war on terrorism broadly because he didn't think anything going on at home...
Obama is also shrinking the war on terrorism because, although he won't say so out 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...
The Taliban's local roots, Obama officials suggest, also make it harder to vanquish than al-Qaeda. The implication is that as with Hizballah and Hamas, the U.S.'s only realistic goal is to bring the Taliban into the political process. Despite his decision to send 30,000 more troops...