The New Republic has suggested that an op-ed I wrote last month with my colleague Pat Egan, and which I previously discussed in a Monkey Cage post here, ought to be recommended reading before viewing the president’s speech tonight. The first half of the piece draws on the issue ownership literature to explain why Afghanistan is a particularly difficult challenge for a Democratic president, while in the second half of the piece we lay out some suggestions for how Obama ought to try to present his decision to the American public once he made it. This included (1) framing his decision entirely in terms of US national security and (2) possibly invoking a similar logic to the “surge” in Iraq—bringing in more troops in the short term to improve the situation sufficiently so you can take out more troops in medium term—if he did indeed decide to add a significantly large number of new trips.
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