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WASHINGTON -- The commander in chief's Dec. 1 lecture at the U.S. Military Academy has to go down in history as one of the strangest presentations ever offered by a wartime president. The robotically delivered address is defended by administration officials as the culmination of a carefully thought-out "strategy review," in which Mr. Obama proffered the "rationale" for deploying additional troops and explained "The Way Forward in Afghanistan and Pakistan." Unfortunately, it failed to do any of this.
Though he was standing before West Point's Corps of Cadets, the president's...
Mission Impossible
"The Grand Old Duke of York
He had ten thousand men
He marched them up to the top of the hill
And he marched them down again."
"The Grand Young Duke of Hope has 30,000 men. He’ll march them up the Khyber Pass but he’ll march them down again in July 2011. If you’re some village headman who’s been making nice to the Americans, the Taliban have a whole new pitch for you: In a year and a half, the Yanks are going. But we’ll still be here.
“Our goal in war,” wrote Basil Liddell Hart, the great strategist of armored warfare, “can only be attained by the subjugation of the opposing will.” In other words, the object of war is not to destroy the enemy’s tanks but the enemy’s will. That goes treble if, like the...