Hey, whaddaya know? Honest debate can even happen here in Elections. 
Setting aside the question of flip-flopping for the moment, here are a few problems that Mitt Romney has that do not apply to the President:
- Lack of charisma
- Wealthy background, and inability to recognize how attitudes based on that background may play to the 99%
- Being poorly perceived outside of the U.S.
- Being a businessman
Personally I find flip-flopping to be pretty much of a non-issue. People do change their minds, for all sorts of reasons. I find the other problems with Romney to be much more significant.
This is true; it’s not the flip-flopping itself, but what it indicates about the candidate. Romney’s can be plausibly interpreted as pandering to whatever constituency he’s depending on to win–that etch-a-sketch comment by a staffer IMO is a clincher.
I don’t see what’s supposed to be the matter with changing one’s mind from being wrong to being right…
The President is a REPUBLICAN???!!!??? :eek:
Who knew?
We all knew. He’s from the Kenyan, socialist, communist, nazi-ist, muslim branch of the Big Tent Party.
Why did he go from right to wrong to right again? At any point was his position in disagreement with the majority of voters he was trying to reach?
This is pretty stupid. His goal is to get out by end of 2014. A goal is something you shoot for, but might not make. Obama has set an absolute exit date. That’s not a goal-- it’s a done deal. Romney is saying that if facts on the ground dictate otherwise, he will adjust the goal.
Have none of you ever set a goal before that you didn’t meet?
n.b.: I’m with Obama on this. I want out no matter what. If we could, I’d get out now. I don’t support Romney’s plan, but I can understand it without supporting it.
I think the reality though is that both candidates will be responding mainly to the facts on the ground and the advice of military commanders.
You have got to be kidding me.
Mitt Romney said his goal is exactly the same thing as what the President and Hamid Karzai have already laid out, and you’re really going to pretend that that’s somehow different? Are you seriously suggesting that President Obama would just yank every last combat troop out of Afghanistan if some event occurred that would indicate that wasn’t a wise move? … because of a calendar date? For real?
Yes. That’s what he said he would do, and I hope he keeps that commitment.
Do you want to keep troops in Afghanistan longer? Do you think that keeping US troops there for x number of months more is going to make any difference?
I would say that depends on what we need to accomplish there. Afghanistan isn’t Iraq. We went in there in response to a direct attack on this country. Much of the enemy is still there and has not surrendered or been eradicated. Elective wars like Iraq and Vietnam can just be ended when we decide we don’t like fighting them anymore. Wars in response to direct attacks, we don’t have that option. The enemy decides when we’re done, by surrendering or dying.
Now one could say that for all intents and purposes, Al qaeda is done and the Taliban is no longer a threat. Just be sure you’re right, because it’ll be awfully expensive to pull up stakes in Afghanistan just to go back a few years from now.
And now we come full circle back to the OP’s title
No, I think (hope) that Obama realizes there will never be a “good” time to leave, that Afghanistan is a lost cause, and that we just need to get out. There isn’t really any way to prove that their military is ready, and all he has to do is show head count to demonstrate that they have enough men to do whatever job they’re supposed to do. That is not to say we won’t have “advisers” there for a long time, but we need to stop the deaths and our NATO partners are not going to hang around to help us any longer anyway.
Americans want out, and Romney is a fool for thinking it’s good policy or good politics to prolong our combat involvement there.
I recognize that most Americans and the political class side with you on this. And you’re probably right. But what if you’re wrong? What if Al Qaeda and the Taliban regroup in our absence and launch another attack on US soil? The only options will be unacceptable: either we go back and do it all over again, or we just let them get away with it.
If we leave, does that mean Al Qaeda and the Taliban are no longer at war with us? We might want to ask them what their plans are, since we’re leaving a hostile force intact that has already demonstrated a willingness to come to our doorstep.
This will be the first time in history the US has left the battlefield with the enemy still in the field fighting, in a war in which we were attacked first.
If AQ sets up training camps again in Afghanistan, we send in the drones. That’s what we’re doing in Pakistan and Yemen. If the Taliban take over again in Afghanistan, that’s their problem, not ours.
No. AQ is in Pakistan, not Afghanistan. The Taliban is not AQ.
Care to delineate the extent of the Taliban’s involvement in the direct attack on America?
Polls show Republicans about evenly split on the should we stay or should we go question, but Independents are almost identical to Democrats with overwhelming agreement that we should get the hell outta there.
Drones require human intelligence on the ground to be effective. Otherwise they are only marginally more useful than cruise missiles.
They are attached at the hip.
that’s like making me prove that the Lebanese government or Iran are responsible for Hezbollah attacks. In the case of Lebanon, Hezbollah is part of the government, and therefore as responsible for Hezbollah’s actions as the US would be if the Republican Party had a terrorist wing attacking other countries.
Likewise, the Taliban and al qaeda were close allies running Afghanistan together. Al Qaeda was effectively part of the government. And we found out just how intertwined they were when we tried to get the Taliban to give up al Qaeda.