Great Article by Victor Davis Hanson...

The Perpetual Whine: 'Bush Did It!' — Not Us [Victor Davis Hanson]

Robert Gibbs is once again trashing George Bush, nine months into the new presidency, for the growing violence in Afghanistan. Some observations on that:

1) Obama's crash in the polls has come with record speed, and is not just because all of his policies are both to the left of the voters and are at odds with a bait-and-switch veneer of moderation in the campaign. Just as important is this sense that Obama serially whines ("reset button," "Bush did it," etc.), and in his comments about doctors, insurance companies, Super Bowl attendees, Vegas visitors, the Special Olympics, the wealthy, the police, etc. shows a surprising meanness of spirit, at odds with the supposedly upbeat "no more red, no more blue state" campaign rhetoric. We know clearly that Americans do not like most of Obama's policies, but if they begin not to like Obama the man either, then he is in real Jimmy Carter-like trouble.

The American people sense now that a Hugo Chavez or a Saudi prince gets far more deference than do other Americans, and they are quite tired of it.

2) The Robert Gibbs lament that Bush "took his eye" off Afghanistan and now Obama is paying the price for neglect could well in part be true. The military has always wanted more men and money. But that is only part of the story. Consider casualties: Years after the removal of the Taliban, Afghanistan was still relatively quiet, and a year's fatalities there often were exceeded by a single month's deaths in Iraq (e.g. cf. 48 American dead in Afghanistan in 2003, 52 in 2004, 99 in 2005; 98 in 2006; etc. Yet more have been killed already in the first part of 2009 (183) than in all of last year combined (155). So why is Afghanistan heating up precisely as Iraq cooled off, and why the spike in violence when additional American money, manpower, and attention are now being directed to it?

No one really knows, but there may well be reasons other than either we are escalating, stirring up hornets, and offering more targets, or suffering the wages of George Bush's supposed past neglect (when 48 or 52 Americans were killed in an entire year).

All the talk of leaving Afghanistan, the constant trashing of the war on terror, the serial presidential proclamations to the Muslim world that America has been in the past culpable for a variety of sins and has underappreciated Muslim genius, the vows to investigate and even try members of the CIA, the overseas apology tour, etc. may well have emboldened a once dejected and battered Taliban and al-Qaeda into thinking that the U.S., not themselves, is tired, feels that it was wrong, and simply wants to call it quits and go home and accept the consequences of its "incorrect" thinking — sort of like the possible ripples to Dean Acheson's controversial January 1950 statement that South Korea was outside the sphere of U.S. security protection or April Glaspie's June 1990 assurances of U.S. uninterest in Iraqi-Kuwait border disputes.

Even more controversially, between 2003–2008 the United States military was eliminating thousands of al-Qaeda terrorists who flocked to Iraq, in a manner (given the open terrain, and lack of a mountainous refuge like a nuclear Pakistan), that was not possible then in Afghanistan. That topic has been a taboo subject the last six years, but the high losses that al-Qaeda-affiliated killers suffered in Iraq surely attenuated their ranks, and may have sent a message for some that to fight the U.S. military was to die.

We also do not like to think there are several theaters in roughly the same war, or that events in Iraq affected Afghanistan and vice versa, or that impressions and intentions sometimes are as important as facts on the ground, but history would suggest otherwise. In WWII how the U.S. fared in the distant Pacific affected to some degree what happened in Europe and vice versa (through perceptions, skills acquired, morale, and allotment of resources) despite the fact that Germany and Japan rarely knew what the other was doing.