If Bush had sent 50,000 troops to invade Nigeria, no one would have doubted it was a full-fledged war. Obama is leaving 50,000 troops in Iraq as a “residual force”—and nobody cares.
No one fears for the future of our once-great, now collapsing, country more than me. But if everything falls apart, Americans certainly won’t be able to claim it came out of nowhere.
Bush—er, Obama—can’t come up with $1 trillion to fill what Paul Krugman describes as a nearly $3 trillion hole. Yet he, and no one else, ever questions the wisdom of escalating our other doomed war, the one against the people of Afghanistan.