“Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair has said he would have found a justification for invading Iraq even without the now-discredited evidence that Saddam Hussein was trying to produce weapons of mass destruction. ‘I would still have thought it right to remove him. I mean, obviously you would have had to use and deploy different […]
12/13/2009
” ‘The United States really has gotten its head into this conflict [in Afghanistan],’ Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said [in The New York Times on December 13, 2009], ‘only in the last year [2009].’ “ – Bing West, The Wrong War, Page xxi […]
12/13/2009
“At a December 13 [2009] regional security conference hosted by the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, [Central Command leader General David] Petraeus gave his interpretation of [President Barack] Obama’s [December 1] West Point speech. He noted, ‘In July 2011, we will begin–and I stress the word begin–to draw down our forces [in Afghanistan] in […]
12/10/2009
From information in the classified State Department documents exposed by WikiLeaks: ” ‘All Iraq’s neighbors were interfering, albeit in different ways, the Gulf and Saudi Arabia with money, Iran with money and political influence, and the Syrians by all means,’ Jalal Talabani, Iraq’s president and the senior Kurdish official in the government, told Defense Secretary […]
12/2/2009
“Secretary of Defense Bob Gates told Congress recently [on December 2, 2009] that ‘the Taliban and al Qaeda have become symbiotic, each benefiting from the success and mythology of the other.’ “ – Bruce Riedel, Deadly Embrace, Page 100 […]
12/1/2009
“On December 1st [2009], in a speech at West Point, the president [Barack Obama] laid out all the reasons why fighting the war in Afghanistan is a bad idea: It’s expensive; we’re in an economic crisis; a decade-long commitment would sap American power; Al Qaeda has shifted its base of operations to Pakistan. Then, without […]
12/1/2009
On December 1, 2009, “President Obama announced his revised strategy. ‘It is in our vital national interest to send an additional 30,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan,’ he said in a televised speech at West Point. ‘After eighteen months, our troops will begin to come home.’ ” – Bing West, The Wrong War, Page 189 […]
12/1/2009
On December 1, 2009, “President Barack Obama told the world that 30,000 additional U.S. troops would be headed to Afghanistan in 2010, on top of the nearly 20,000 he had already added since he came to office in January 2009.” – Dov S. Zakheim, A Vulcan’s Tale, Page 1 […]
12/1/2009
In a speech at West Point on December 1, 2009, President Barack “Obama announced the thirty thousand new troops of the Afghan surge, but most news accounts of the speech seized on the fact that the president also said that some of those troops would be coming home in July 2011 as they transferred responsibility […]
12/1/2009
At West Point on December 1, 2009, President Barack Obama “announced he was sending 30,000 more U.S. troops [to Afghanistan]. ‘I make this decision because I am convinced that our security is at stake,’ Obama said. ‘In the last few months alone, we have apprehended extremists within our borders who were sent here from the […]