I might not agree with him on the war, but Obama deserves respect for how he decided! [View All]

[KansasVoter]

I think Obama is dead wrong on this war. But the NYT article below shows that, unlike Bush, he worked his ass off making the decision. Bush went with his "gut" and Obama took a long time and got a lot of input from many people before making his decision. I have a hell of a lot of respect for his approach! It was not a decision he made easily!

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WASHINGTON — On the afternoon he held the eighth meeting of his Afghanistan review, President Obama arrived in the White House Situation Room ruminating about war. He had come from Arlington National Cemetery, where he had wandered among the chalky white tombstones of those who had fallen in the rugged mountains of Central Asia.

American soldiers conducted a patrol in April in the Korengal Valley in Afghanistan, a remote area near Pakistan.
How much their sacrifice weighed on him that Veterans Day last month, he did not say. But his advisers say he was haunted by the human toll as he wrestled with what to do about the eight-year-old war. Just a month earlier, he had mentioned to them his visits to wounded soldiers at the Army hospital in Washington. “I don’t want to be going to Walter Reed for another eight years,” he said then.

The economic cost was troubling him as well after he received a private budget memo estimating that an expanded presence would cost $1 trillion over 10 years, roughly the same as his health care plan. Now as his top military adviser ran through a slide show of options, Mr. Obama expressed frustration. He held up a chart showing how reinforcements would flow into Afghanistan over 18 months and eventually begin to pull out, a bell curve that meant American forces would be there for years to come.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/06/world/asia/06reconstruct.html?_r=1&hp