I saw the Sat. Nite Live skit last night where the pretend president is listing his challenges and marks the major ones as unfinished or undone. MTP played the clip and Gregory asks the panel to comment, and Maddow says it's ridiculous to expect the president to have ended Bush's wars in less than a year.

Fair enough. There is a reasonable dynamic where the president (and his defenders) are able to deflect criticism of his continued occupations by asserting that it's to be expected that he hasn't 'solved' these military missions.

But, most of the criticism from the left has been about the president's priorities in Afghanistan and Iraq than about some 'success' in whatever military missions the president has planned to pursue. The notion that there is some threat to the U.S. from these occupied nations which needs to be defended against with hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops is far-fetched and misleading. There has been more of a threat from the hapless terror plot the Justice Dept. is prosecuting in the eastern U.S. than from the incidental and opportunistic resistance to the NATO and American assaults across sovereign borders in the Middle East and Asia.

The argument that I understand and accept from the 'left' is that our nation should not be staging these military defenses of either the government of Iraq or Afghanistan with the expectation of some 'political' solution that will bring about the 'elimination' or 'defeat' of al Qaeda. The argument that I've been supporting is that our very military presence and activity in these regions has 'fueled and fostered' violent resistance in these occupied nations in a self-perpetuating cycle of attacks and reprisals. That cycle of violence won't end without the most aggravating element of our foreign invasions removed completely.

The policy of the new president has been to double down (at least in the short term) and dig in (in Iraq), instead of following the logic that our very involvement in these escalated occupations has been folly and counterproductive to the stated goals. Just asserting that the president hasn't 'solved' these military missions ignores the assertions by the opposition to Bush (much of that opposition from the election campaign) that the entire military enterprise in Iraq was bogus and opportunistic, and that 'nation-building in Afghanistan was not a legitimate enterprise for our military forces.

The fact that this president has accepted most of the flawed premises about Bush's military missions and has now set out to make good on them is at the heart of the opposition to continuing in Iraq and Afghanistan. It's not a mere point about expecting some 'success' in what the president has embarked on in Iraq and Afghanistan. The point of the opposition is that this president has accepted flawed reasoning for these occupations and is intent on seeing that reasoning through to some expected end. 'We haven't yet furthered 'democracy' in Afghanistan' and the like.

But, the 'left' hasn't asked this president to try and further (or create) democracy behind the force of our military - in Afghanistan, Iraq, or anywhere else. We've demanded an END to the military meddling abroad. Looking for some sort of 'success' out of all of this continued militarism is the expectation of our republican opposition, not our liberal left.