Reply #9: The headline, while technically accurate, is spin. Arguably, it is also the least [View All]

[tekisui]

important point of the article. Obama is losing Democratic support and support of the nation at large. As for the 40% who would like to remain until US objectives are achieved, I bet you would be hard pressed to get an actual coherent answer as to what our objectives are.

I thought this part was the most promising. Hopefully the more liberal Democratic caucus, with a handful of repugs/teabaggers, will say enough and cut funding.

Last year, when the House considered war funding, 32 Democrats voted no. This year, that number more than tripled, to 102, and Democratic leaders had to twist arms on the House floor.

With the defeat of many centrist "Blue Dogs" in this month's elections, the House Democratic caucus will be more uniformly liberal and more consistently anti-war. Democrats now hold 255 of the House's 435 seats; in the new Congress, that number is likely to fall to 193.

Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., and nine other House members sent an open letter to Obama as he left to meet with NATO leaders in Lisbon last month expressing "grave concerns that the current course in Afghanistan is compromising our national security interests and is unsustainable even in the short term."

"Amongst the Democratic base, the war is a big issue, and the opposition to this war is going to intensify," McGovern said in an interview. "Every time we hear a speech — not just this president but his predecessor — we're told 'another year,' 'another two years,' and then a year goes by and we hear 'maybe another four years.' I don't think we should be there another four years."

Karen Bass, a former California House speaker who was elected to Congress last month from a liberal Los Angeles district, supports Obama but heard constituents express concerns about war costs at a time they see big needs at home. "I do want to see us get out of Afghanistan as soon as we possibly can," she says.

•Some of the newly elected Tea Party Republicans are skeptical.

Many new lawmakers weren't asked to take positions on the war in campaigns dominated by opposition to the health care law and warnings about the national debt, but some in the Tea Party movement have expressed opposition to foreign entanglements generally. About 40 of the 84 new House Republicans have ties to the Tea Party movement.

"If it continues to be defined as it is now, which is a nation-building mission — and that's what we're doing — then I think there is some segment of the conservative caucus that isn't going to like that very much," says Christopher Preble, director of foreign policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. "Over time, as it looks more and more like Barack Obama's war, they'll ask, 'What are we trying to accomplish in Afghanistan?' "