To: J_F_Shepard who wrote (669358 ) 8/26/2012 6:18:36 PM From: Brumar89 1 Recommendation Respond to I never called for closing Gitmo and since Obama has been President neither have you..... Barack Obama's May 13 gaffe regarding Afghanistan and a lack of Arabic translators was far more fundamental, and far more of a mistake, than Mr. McCain's stumbling over an assertion he knew to be true at the time. Bringing up Afghanistan -- a cause celebré of advocates of military withdrawal from Iraq who want to avoid the appearance of total opposition to the War on Terror -- at the Missouri campaign stop, Mr. Obama claimed that the U.S. simply "[doesn't] have enough capacity right now to deal with" the initial front in America's seven-year-and-counting Global War on Terror. Part of the reason for this, said Obama, is that "Arabic translators deployed in Iraq are needed in Afghanistan." "We only have a certain number of them and if they are all in Iraq, then its harder for us to use them in Afghanistan," he said. This statement was a head-scratched for a pair reasons. The first is the fact that Afghans are neither ethnically nor linguistically Arabic; the second, that interpreters are almost 100% drawn from local populations, rather than deployed by the U.S. military. Obama continued, saying that "we need agricultural specialists in Afghanistan," as well -- "people who can help them develop other crops than heroin poppies, because the drug trade in Afghanistan is what is driving and financing these terrorist networks. So we need agricultural specialists. "But if we are sending them to Baghdad, they're not in Afghanistan." archive.redstate.com
