{"id":6549,"date":"2009-12-02T16:58:49","date_gmt":"2009-12-03T00:58:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=6549"},"modified":"2009-12-02T16:58:49","modified_gmt":"2009-12-03T00:58:49","slug":"what-a-difference-a-week-makes-for-bill-kristol","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2009\/12\/02\/what-a-difference-a-week-makes-for-bill-kristol\/","title":{"rendered":"What a Difference a Week Makes for Bill Kristol"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>One day out from Obama\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s long-awaited announcement on troop deployments to Afghanistan the White House is getting plenty of criticism from both sides of the aisle.<\/p>\n<p>Democrats, including Rep. David Obey (D-WI), the influential chair of the House Appropriations Committee, have expressed concerns about both the cost of the war and the difficulty of achieving victory in defeating the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan.<\/p>\n<p>Republicans, such as John McCain (R-AZ), have hammered Obama for setting a timeline for troop withdrawals beginning in 18 months.<\/p>\n<p>Despite the widespread lack of enthusiasm, however, the White House has made striking progress in turning around <em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.rightweb.irc-online.org\/profile\/Weekly_Standard\">Weekly Standard<\/a><\/em> editor and outspoken Obama critic (and Sarah Palin booster) <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rightweb.irc-online.org\/profile\/Kristol_William\">Bill Kristol<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>On November 23rd, Kristol <a href=\"http:\/\/www.weeklystandard.com\/Content\/Public\/Articles\/000\/000\/017\/213yivpg.asp\">wrote in the <em>Weekly Standard<\/em><\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\u00e2\u20ac\u009dJust what is Barack Obama as president making of our American destiny? The answer, increasingly obvious, is \u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 a hash. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s worse than most of us expected. His dithering on Afghanistan is deplorable, his appeasing of Iran disgraceful, his trying to heap new burdens on a struggling economy destructive,\u00e2\u20ac\u2122\u00e2\u20ac\u2122<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>But <a href=\"http:\/\/voices.washingtonpost.com\/postpartisan\/2009\/12\/obamas_afghanistan_speech.html\">in today\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s <em>Washington Post<\/em><\/a> Kristol was hailing the new \u00e2\u20ac\u0153War President\u00e2\u20ac\u009d.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153By mid-2010, Obama will have more than doubled the number of American troops in Afghanistan since he became president; he will have empowered his general, Stanley McChrystal, to fight the war pretty much as he thinks necessary to in order to win; and he will have retroactively, as it were, acknowledged that he and his party were wrong about the Iraq surge in 2007 \u00e2\u20ac\u201d after all, the rationale for this surge is identical to Bush\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s, and the hope is for a similar success. He will also have embraced the use of military force as a key instrument of national power.\u00e2\u20ac\u2122\u00e2\u20ac\u2122<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The extent to which Kristol\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s reassessment reflects his political agility, or Obama\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s, remains unclear.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One day out from Obama\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s long-awaited announcement on troop deployments to Afghanistan the White House is getting plenty of criticism from both sides of the aisle. Democrats, including Rep. David Obey (D-WI), the influential chair of the House Appropriations Committee, have expressed concerns about both the cost of the war and the difficulty of achieving [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":71,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-6549","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6549","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/71"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6549"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6549\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6550,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6549\/revisions\/6550"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6549"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6549"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6549"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=6549"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}