Two wars?

Like many of you, I have spent some of this Thanksgiving holiday travelling. A couple of days ago I found myself standing in line at an airport newstand waiting to buy a bottle of water. There in front of me, while I waited, was a wall of news magazines, each one wondering, what the next week of news from Transition Obama might bring.

There is a lot of debate on the right these days about what needs to be done if we are to win back the White House in 2012. Everyone has a slightly different answer, but the one thing we all agree on is that we have to do a better job of shaping and selling our message. We can't continue to let the Democrats define the battlespace in which we will try to sell our ideas. We've already let them lay the responsibility for the financial crisis at our feet rather than at the feet of Congressional and Senate Democrats, and now we seem prepared to let them define the realities of our traditional strength... what we face in the ongoing war on terror.

Which is why I find it agravating to look at a wall of magazines all featuring the some version of this sentence...

"PRESIDENT OBAMA WILL INHERIT TWO WARS, A TANKING ECONOMY, AND A COSUMER CREDIT CRISIS..."

If we're going to fight to control the battlefield of ideas, let's start by fighting this lie. President Obama is not going to inherit two wars... he's inheriting ONE WAR, and it's the one he wanted.

The war in Iraq is won... you won't find one serious pundit who would disagree with that analysis. Thanks to George Bush, the only thing about Iraq that Obama will have to concern himself with, is how to manage the peaceful withdrawal of victorious American forces.

In Afghanistan, however, we are still at war. And it's THIS war, that Obama has wanted to fight all along. And he will get his chance. I hope he is successful, but I'm getting pretty tired of the beleagured press line that poor Obama is inheriting two wars he didn't start and never wanted, when he's been clear since day one that he would have abandoned the war we have now won, and doubled-down on the war we are currently losing.

Bush has left Obama with the exact war plan he has always said he wanted. So maybe it's time to drop the woe-is-me for poor Barack Obama line and let him do what he's argued he was uniquely qualified to do all along.