Video: The Wesley Clark Mute Button

posted at 10:25 am on July 24, 2008 by Ed Morrissey
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This clip from Morning Joe has two remarkable events.  First, an MS-NBC show talks about the facetiousness of the recent pushback on the surge, including the spurious “McCain gaffe”.  But perhaps even better, one of the guests admitted that he reaches for the mute button whenever he sees NBC’s own military analyst appear:

The Anbar Awakening only preceded the “surge” if one defines it strictly as an increase in troops. But the “surge” was much more than that, and it long preceded the troop increase. The troop increase intended to fully support the change in tactics and strategy that had been adopted with success by local American commanders in Anbar to a true counterinsurgency effort, which coincided with Sunnis in the region switching sides and opposing the insurgents.

Barack Obama reveals a lack of understanding by harping on this point. He doesn’t grasp — and he never has — the difference between merely increasing troop levels and laying out a comprehensive strategy for attacking insurgents. That’s what led him to assert in January 2007 that adding 20,000 or more troops would not reduce violence in Iraq, and might in fact provoke worse violence. As events proved, the counterinsurgency strategies employed in the fall of 2006 and expanded into theater-wide doctrine as more troops arrived succeeded, and exposed Obama as not terribly adept at military strategy.

What makes this even more odd is that Obama at once refuses to acknowledge the success of these changes in Iraq and yet insists on increasing troop levels in Afghanistan. He doesn’t explain how he would use these extra troops, although John McCain has laid out a comprehensive plan for integrating command and adapting the counterinsurgency strategy for Afghanistan. If more troops didn’t bring the security that Iraq now has, why increase the troops in Afghanistan? And if it will work in Afghanistan, why won’t Obama acknowledge that it worked in Iraq and that he had it wrong all along?

Military strategy has more layers to it than just troop levels, but Obama still doesn’t grasp that. As one commentator at the end says, Obama would be better off dropping the subject. And MS-NBC would do well to create that Wesley Clark Mute Button on the broadcasting end.

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