Senator Chuck Grassley says President Obama should scale back domestic spending if he intends to prolong the war in Afghanistan.
Obama is scheduled to publicly reveal his strategy for the Afghan war this evening and he’s expected to send more than 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan. Grassley, a Republican, says Obama has to maintain “credibility” with our foes and our friends around the world by following through on those plans.
“I have to take the president at his word. In the campaign, Iraq was kind of irrelevant and Afghanistan was a war worth fighting and then he announced his new strategy in March,” Grassley says. “He fired the general, hired (General) McChrystal and McChrystal says he needs additional people and so all I do is expect the president to follow up on what he said was so important during the campaign and his own strategy.”
Grassley, a Republican, says the Obama Administration is increasing domestic spending by 12.5 percent.
“We’ve got this big debt and the war…isn’t going to help the debt any,” Grassley says. “But we need to shift some resources from that 12-and-a-half percent that’s not sustainable over to the war effort so that we don’t have the big national debt that we’re going to have.”
Grassley has supported most of the congressional resolutions which have extended war funding for Iraq and Afghanistan and the overall “War on Terror” which started during the Bush Administration. In March of 2007, Grassley voted against spending another $122 billion on the overall war effort because it included a timeline for withdrawal of troops from Iraq. President Bush vetoed the measure and another bill was forwarded to provide war funding, without the call for withdrawing troops from Iraq.