Amid charges that his commitment to "change" is crumbling, an increasingly unpopular President Obama took the stage at West Point on Tuesday to reveal his plan to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan — a strategy that commentators on both the left and right are dismissing as a replay of Bush's Iraq surge. It is fair or accurate to compare Obama’s attempt to end an inherited war with George W. Bush’s policies in Iraq? (Watch NBC's report on Obama’s troop surge in Afghanistan)
Obama's plan evokes Bush at his most despicable: "This year's Nobel Peace laureate just escalated the war in Afghanistan for the second time," says Rachel Maddow on her MSNBC talk show. Though Obama tried to frame the troop increase in his own terms, he called Afghanistan a preventative war. And "that's the Bush doctrine in all its Orwellian extremism…the concept of America at war, globally, indefinitely, against anyone at our own digression." (Watch the clip from "The Rachel Maddow Show")
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