Obama is commandeering prime time TV again.
Recently, his approval ratings have plummeted. I suppose he thinks talking to the American people will change that.
From CBS News:
President Obama plans to announce a substantial drawdown of troops from Afghanistan in a high profile speech in prime-time television Wednesday night, making good on his 2009 pledge to start bringing soldiers home by July 2011.
Mr. Obama coupled his decision to send a "surge" of 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan in 2009 with a promise to bring some of them home this summer.
"The president will keep the commitment he made in December of 2009 to begin the drawdown of U.S. forces from Afghanistan next month," White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters on Tuesday.
The 8:00 p.m. ET speech will be the sixth address to the nation since taking office in January 2009, according to records kept by Mark Knoller of CBS News.
Carney told reporters Obama made a final decision Tuesday and informed a small circle of key advisers, though the spokesman was coy with reporters about the scope and pace of the drawdown.
More, from the Wall Street Journal:
President Barack Obama will announce Wednesday the first steps in a gradual plan to extract the U.S. from the Afghanistan war, including an initial withdrawal of as many as 5,000 troops next month, defense officials say.
Mr. Obama will announce the drawdown in a primetime address to a nation increasingly weary of wars overseas and caught up with economic troubles at home. The conflict in Afghanistan has left more than 1,600 Americans dead in almost a decade of fighting.
The pullouts are expected to commence in July when the first of the 33,000 so-called surge troops head home. Military leaders told Mr. Obama they envisioned having all of the surge troops out of Afghanistan around the fall of 2012, officials said.
Defense officials expected the president to pull a total of roughly 10,000 troops out of Afghanistan by year end. Such a plan is close to what Gen. David Petraeus, commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, had recommended.
...The president decided the pace of the drawdown Tuesday and informed his national-security team in the Situation Room, an administration official said.
...Mr. Obama's address, at 10 minutes long, won't delve deeply into U.S. policy in the region, the senior administration official said, but will lay out for Americans a trajectory for winding down America's role in the war.
In 2001, President George W. Bush led an international coalition into Afghanistan to topple the Taliban regime that had hosted Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda militants as they planned the Sept. 11 attacks. The Taliban fell quickly, but returned as the main element of an insurgency that now engages 100,000 American troops, 30% of them surge forces that Mr. Obama ordered deployed in 2009.
When he announced that escalation, Mr. Obama also promised to begin a "significant" withdrawal this July.
...After announcing his decision, Mr. Obama will travel on Thursday to Fort Drum, N.Y., where he will meet with troops. Fort Drum is home to the Army's 10th Mountain Division, which has been deployed numerous times to Afghanistan and Iraq. Mr. Obama first announced the troop surge in Afghanistan in New York, at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.
In a NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released last week, 54% of Americans said they approved of the way Mr. Obama is handling the war in Afghanistan.
But polls show Americans increasingly war-weary—particularly after bin Laden's death—and, with the federal deficit ballooning, wary of the cost of engagement.
A ten minute address by Obama is mercifully short. I hope that report is accurate.
I do get the feeling Americans are war-weary. U.S. troops have been in Afghanistan for nearly a decade.
Speaking of war-weary Americans, what about Libya?
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