BARBARA'S TCHATZKAHS

by David Warren President Barack Obama announced this week, in his latest glamour speech -- this one choreographed among cadets at West Point -- the substance of the new U.S. "Afghan strategy." I last wrote about this on Oct. 28, when we'd been waiting seven months for particulars to accompany the glamour-speech "comprehensive, new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan," that was delivered last March. I suggested that Obama had shown himself to be a president unable to make hard decisions. He makes speeches instead -- vacuous speeches that sound very grand to a poorly-informed mass audience, but on reading we find only posturing narcissism. This is a serious flaw in the "leader of the free world." But even presidents who can't make decisions get cornered by "events," and eight months after his initial rhetorical offering, with much additional posturing, Obama finally gave the U.S. and allies a policy of sorts. It was designed to provide ...

The Deniers’ Club What good is the bipartisan commission’s new, last-ditch plan for Iraq if President Bush still has his heart set on victory? One big reason so much of the debate over the war has been reduced to semantics—civil war versus sectarian violence, benchmarks versus timelines versus milestones, withdrawal versus redeployment versus “speeding transfer” to the Iraqis—is that it’s easier to bicker about the meaning of words than it is to argue with conviction for a particular course of action in Iraq. General Abizaid, the U.S. commander for the Middle East, says we can neither decrease nor significantly increase troop levels. The incoming secretary of Defense conceded last week that we aren’t winning—his most positive spin was that we’re “not losing,” either. There are no attractive policy options, a fact that Americans understand: Only small minorities think we ought to pull out right away (16 percent) or send more troops (17 percent). We know we owe it to the Iraqis to keep t...