Agree To Disagree

Now that Obama has gone full in on THE AFGHANISURGE and given the GOP what they wanted, the exact same Republican hawks will now immediately turn on the war for the sole reason that Obama's running it. Reihan Salam lays out the game plan over at The Daily Beast:

Thus far, President Obama has primarily been worried about his left flank as he sends more troops to Afghanistan. He should be just as worried about his friends on the right. I fully expect that over the next year Republicans will begin to abandon the president en masse over Afghanistan.

Obama’s saving grace on Afghanistan has been that conservatives, from the Republican leadership in Congress to Sarah Palin to leading foreign-policy thinkers like Bill Kristol of The Weekly Standard, have backed a troop surge and have been mostly willing to back the White House on this particular issue. But now Rep. Jason Chaffetz, a Utah Republican known for his independent streak, has made a conservative case for withdrawal. And my guess is that by the 2010 congressional elections, dozens of Republican candidates will be doing the same across the country.

Last month, a CBS News poll found that just 23 percent of Democrats believe that an increase in the number of U.S. troops will improve the situation, and some of the party’s 2010 candidates are already on record as opponents of the surge, including Arlen Specter and would-be Ted Kennedy successor Martha Coakley. Throughout the long presidential campaign, Barack Obama called for winding down the American presence in Iraq to focus on the rapidly deteriorating security situation in Afghanistan, so there is no sense the president is pulling a foreign policy bait-and-switch. But among Democrats, and particularly left-of-center Democrats, there is a pervasive sense that the Obama administration has proved too cautious and centrist on domestic issues. That means there is less willingness to give the president the benefit of the doubt on waging an expensive counterinsurgency, particularly as many of the left’s domestic priorities could well be sacrificed on the altar of deficit reduction.

(More after the jump...)

And so the president is caught in an extremely awkward position. Abandoned by the Democrats, he is relying on the support of a shrinking centrist foreign-policy establishment that, to put it bluntly, has zero political muscle. The conservatives who back the troop surge don’t think the president is going far enough, and most expect that his effort to craft a compromise counterinsurgency will fail. Among grassroots conservatives, there is a growing sense that the U.S. military is too hamstrung by concern about civilian casualties and political correctness to wage an effective military campaign under Obama, which implies that there is little point in offering him political support.

In a statement on his House Web site, Chaffetz makes the point explicitly. Deriding the idea of a counterinsurgency strategy, he writes, “our military is not a defensive force for rough neighborhoods around the world.” Rather than fight to protect Afghan civilians, Chaffetz argues that U.S. forces should focus exclusively on al Qaeda’s threat to the homeland by targeting and killing its members. In essence, Chaffetz is recognizing the contradiction at the heart of what had been bipartisan support for the U.S. mission in Afghanistan: Americans have supported the war effort insofar as it is designed to keep Afghanistan from becoming a safe haven for al Qaeda. But the consensus among foreign-policy experts is that the safe-haven argument is weak: The tribal areas of Pakistan and Yemen and Somalia are far likelier candidates for a safe haven, and Islamist terrorists also are found in American and European cities. The more sophisticated case, made by conservative foreign-policy intellectuals like Christian Brose and Daniel Twining, rests on the need to shape Pakistan’s behavior. As strong as this case may be—I happen to think that it is completely correct—it isn’t very politically potent, particularly when it looks to the American public as though U.S. soldiers are dying to protect one group of Pasthun tribesman from another.

Salam is right, of course.  The GOP will run in 2010 on the same plan that the Democrats did in 2008.  Then, the Dems said that Iraq was the wrong war, and that we needed to get out and win Afghanistan.  In 2010, expect Republicans to say Afghanistan is the wrong war and that we need to get out and move on to Pakistan and other places...and of course, Iran.

The bashing on Afghanistan by the right as "Obama's Vietnam" has already started...that note was hit back in February only a month after he took office for crissakes.  Remember the GOP plan:  Destroy Obama.  He cannot be allowed to take positive credit for anything.  When Obama wasn't sending troops into Afghanistan, he was a dithering softy.  Now that he's sending 30K plus troops in, he's fighting the wrong war.  The Village won't even notice the hypocrisy of course...they're pushing it too.  Now that Obama has actually done what he's said he's going to do and that the GOP has complained that he wasn't doing fast enough, doing what the GOP wanted him to do and deploying troops in a lightning-fast six month manner is of course unacceptable to the Republicans.

They'll be running as the anti-war candidates in 2010.  Count on it.  Don't believe me?  Remember the GOP and Bill Clinton in Bosnia?  Remember Clinton being attacked for sending in cruise missiles into Iraq?  Same thing.  We've seen it before.  We're about to see it again.