West Point Liveblogging

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8:00 PM … A pivotal moment tonight …

8:04 PM … Before the President took the stage, Col. Mike Durham, West Point’s chaplain, delivered the invocation. Sgt. Kay Messenger, a soloist, sang the National Anthem, and Col. Ty Seidule, a professor at the academy, welcomed the audience and gave a brief history of West Point, according to the pool report.

8:05 PM … The President immediately ties the present situation to 9/11. Short history lesson.

8:06 PM … The text of the President’s address, as prepared for delivery.

8:07 PM … George W. Bush sure screwed up Iraq, but let’s not get into that.

8:10 PM … Administration officials were referring to this move as a “surge” today with reporters, but the word “surge” appears only once in the prepared remarks and it’s the phrase “civilian surge” — sort of a nation-building effort.

8:12 PM … 30,000 more troops. The focus of so much of the reporting and the debate, but troop numbers are a tactical issue. This was a strategic review, and so far the speech is much more strategic in focus than I might have hoped. Troop numbers secondary to strategic objectives and limited war aims.

8:15 PM … Strategic review requires inclusion of Pakistan, which is mentioned 21 times in the speech.

8:20 PM … Strategic objectives followed by strategic directives to achieve them. Sure, they’re vague (“we will work with our partners”), but there’s a logic and deliberate process here.

8:22 PM … Process may not yield the outcome you want, but it’s much more likely to yield a reasonable outcome.

8:24 PM … He’s mostly right on the differences between Afghanistan now and Vietnam in the 1960s. Mostly.

8:25 PM … The Obama Doctrine: “As President, I refuse to set goals that go beyond our responsibility, our means, or our interests.”

8:27 PM … This is the Peter Orszag section of the speech. Ties war efforts to domestic economy and costs.

More here.

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