Obama has had a tough time with foreign policy. No single event has captured the full attention of the nation yet and let us hope that nothing catastrophic happens, but in all truth, Obama has fumbled nearly everything beyond our shores. He goes to Europe and apologizes. He gives a speech on disarmament the same day that North Korea fires a rocket over Japan. He claims that the United States is one of the largest Muslim countries in the world during his Islamic appeasement speech. He chastises allies like Israel and Honduras while reaching out to communist Cuba, Chavez’s Venezuela, and terror-sponsor Iran. In other words, he has turned US foreign policy on its head… remember people, the US is the world superpower and our foreign policy had at least a ‘little’ to do with that. Even during the campaign, it was equal parts comical and worrisome when then-candidate Obama vowed quick retreat from Iraq and brashly declared that he would invade our ally Pakistan if we had Osama bin Laden in our sights. So is he a pacifist or a war hawk?

This is Obama’s problem: he doesn’t know what, exactly, to do. So he sends more troops into Afghanistan while started a phased withdrawal from Iraq. The bad part is that our reduced presence in Iraq has only emboldened Al Qaeda while our increased presence in Afghanistan has similarly emboldened the Taliban. Commanders on the ground say that they need more troops, but Obama cannot commit many more troops because it would alienate his far left base, a group that is already mad at him for extending the Iraq withdrawal timetable and not withdrawing from Afghanistan. If he keeps this level of troops or reduces it, then he risks losing significant ground to the Taliban. The president needs to seriously consider increasing our presence, but because of politics he probably will not increase it by much. That is one good thing about former president George W. Bush, he did not care about politics when it came to the war, he took flak for sending more troops into what was starting to turn into a civil war in Iraq, and the surge succeeded. Obama, on the other hand, has his “popularity” and liberal base to take care of. He is between a rock (no pun intended) and a hard place.

Obama’s Far Left Base

Today, he is going to address the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention which will bring this issue to the forefront. Right now, most people are more worried about health care reform and the economy than the threat posed by a resurgent Al Qaeda and Taliban, so he has been getting a pass on his foreign policy blusters. This will eventually change. We cannot turn a blind eye to the events taking place in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan… bombings are occurring over there on a nearly daily basis. Al Qaeda and the Taliban are not taking a break for us to debate health care… and with Obama, they smell blood in the water. We should drop the bulk of American military power on their heads, not go in halfway.

-AG