"They must get up and ask who can we kill today and if we can't kill them, who can we make miserable" That they do, plainoldme. I still support our President's decision to send additional troops100% . If anbody doesn't understand why...here it is...Pakistan is a nuclear armed nation and the Taliban are hell bent are getting access to them and, HAVE NO DOUBT AT ALL that they will use them on US as in the U.S.
I believe the President has made it very clear to McChristol that the lat 8 years of fartin around playin cops and robbers, at the expense of our young people lives(when was the last time you heard of a General being killed in the line of duty, huh?), the President has made it crystal clear that with the additional troops he fully expects our troops to exhibit the full force of their might and lets get this thing over with. As far as The President demeanor goes, it's like Rahm Emmanual said, " we do have to try for bipartanship, we DO NOT feel we have to be successful.

To me this has all the earmarks of a successful compromise...both sides are pissed off.

If you want to understand the decision, you need to evaluate all the alternatives. We are not going to get that kind of info. The best we can do is perhaps understand a few alternatives and come to some conclusion about the risk/reward environment.

And even then, look at Iraq. The Gulf War & containment strategy worked until some idiot decided to invade the country for no good reason. How could that eventuality be accounted for in Bush Sr or Clinton's calculations when evaluating Iraq policy alternatives?

The decision about transitioning from peace to war is much easier to to pass judgment on then any plan to pass from war to peace. Have we all decided yet what the best course of action was to end the War with Japan? The Korean Conflict?, Vietnam?

Who said I wanted to 'understand' the decision?

I'm with Two Spirits on this one!

I keep thinking, if only the world would have expected as much from Bush in his first 10 months in office, we might have been spared so much of the pain we are enduring!

Interesting, torry. Bush ran on the notion that he was a "compassionate conservative," proving that most conservatives are anything but. I am certain that the Neo-Cons expectations of bush were met.

Obama has disappointed me.

I'm not sure exactly what we expected from Bush, but most of us certainly didn't expect him to ignore President Clinton's intel on Prince bin Laden's plans on attacking the U.S., we didn't expect him to run and hide on 9/11 (and blame the Secret Service for kidnapping him), and we didn't expect him to allow bin Laden to go free. But there you have it.
As it turns out, the neo-cons wanted us to be attacked and killed, and they wish it would happen again:

rsb said: "we didn't expect [GWB] to allow bin Laden to go free"

There is actually a legal rational for the. The authorization for war covered 'those who attacked us' and 'those who sheltered those who attacked us'. Once the Taliban were overthrown and al Qaeda disbursed, if bin Laden were captured or killed, the authorization for war would have lapsed. Political support as well as legal justification would have quickly evaporated.

Bush might not have gotten to invade Iraq. We have enough evidence that he wanted to.

Is it possible that at Tora Bora the lawyers trumped the military?

You may have hit the nail on the head, SB. One thing we know, come hell or high water Bush was determined to attack Iraq!

Yep, in his mind, he had to defend his father.