"No one talked about the fact that in this year under the Obama administration you've seen the highest casualties in Afghanistan. And the fact that it took him almost 90 days to figure out what his strategy is going to be was absolutely appalling"
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The line is engineered to do two things at once: indict a president and indict the conversation around him. West isn’t only arguing that Afghanistan got bloodier under Obama; he’s alleging a media-and-elite conspiracy of silence. “No one talked about the fact” is less a factual claim than a rhetorical frame: it positions West as the lone truth-teller, daring an audience to feel duped and therefore primed for outrage.
The numbers matter less here than the sequencing. He stacks “highest casualties” against “almost 90 days” to suggest moral causality: delay equals deaths. That’s a powerful shortcut, because it converts a complicated war - with troop rotations, shifting Taliban tactics, and inherited strategic realities - into a simple negligence story. The phrase “under the Obama administration” is doing quiet work too, collapsing “happened during” into “happened because of,” a classic political move that turns chronology into culpability.
“Absolutely appalling” lands as a verdict, not an argument, the kind of emphatic closure that plays well in cable segments and campaign stops. The broader context is early Obama-era Afghanistan, when the administration conducted a high-profile policy review before announcing a surge and a counterinsurgency approach. West’s intent is to puncture Obama’s post-2008 brand of calm competence by reframing deliberation as paralysis - and by extension to cast Democrats as soft, slow, and costly in wartime. The subtext: leadership is speed, and any hesitation is betrayal.
The numbers matter less here than the sequencing. He stacks “highest casualties” against “almost 90 days” to suggest moral causality: delay equals deaths. That’s a powerful shortcut, because it converts a complicated war - with troop rotations, shifting Taliban tactics, and inherited strategic realities - into a simple negligence story. The phrase “under the Obama administration” is doing quiet work too, collapsing “happened during” into “happened because of,” a classic political move that turns chronology into culpability.
“Absolutely appalling” lands as a verdict, not an argument, the kind of emphatic closure that plays well in cable segments and campaign stops. The broader context is early Obama-era Afghanistan, when the administration conducted a high-profile policy review before announcing a surge and a counterinsurgency approach. West’s intent is to puncture Obama’s post-2008 brand of calm competence by reframing deliberation as paralysis - and by extension to cast Democrats as soft, slow, and costly in wartime. The subtext: leadership is speed, and any hesitation is betrayal.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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