Whenever the American people are looking for leadership from the president, Obama and his administration have systematically put forth conflicting and ambiguous messages. As Maureen Dowd recently noted in a recent column for The New York Times: “He’s with the banks, he’s against the banks. He’s leaving Afghanistan, he’s staying in Afghanistan. He strains at being a populist, but his head is in the clouds.”

Obama’s flip-flopping on the “ground zero mosque” issue was no different from his handling of the Gulf oil spill, when he sought both to blame BP and assert federal responsibility, all the while seeking to distance his presidency from the crisis. There, as with the administration’s publicized internal debate over Afghanistan, no clear policy has been articulated. The president supported a surge in troops while simultaneously pledging to withdraw by 2011. In internal documents published in September 2009, General Stanley McChrystal, then the commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, warned of “mission failure” if U.S. forces did not increase their presence significantly in the country, while U.S Ambassador Karl W. Eikenberry warned that McChrystal’s request for new troops might be counterproductive. Meanwhile, Gen. David H. Petraeus has said that notwithstanding the set transition date of July 2011, we are “in this to win” and “it takes the accumulation of a lot of progress ultimately, needless to say, to win overall, and that’s going to be a long-term proposition, without question…I think that we will have an enduring commitment here in some fashion.”