Why Not Address the Nation on Afghanistan?

President Obama recently addressed a joint session of Congress (along with the nation watching) on health-care, an important issue if there ever was one, to rally up support for his vision of reform. While I thought the speech was a re-hash of basic points that have already been made in the past, the point of the address was to win over people. Yet there is another issue the Obama administration can no longer ignore, the drop in support for the war in Afghanistan. The polls continue to be low, with a majority now opposing the war. Yesterday, CentCom Commander David Petreaus gave a speech in London to a wary British public that better days lay ahead in Afghanistan, if only we are committed. Joshua Keating at the Passport commented:

Sending Petraeus to rally British support makes sense, but it makes me wonder why the Obama adminsitration hasn't used Petraeus -- certainly the most well-known military officer in the country and a bona fide pop-culture icon -- to pitch the Afghanistan strategy to the U.S. public.

We need President Obama to make the case for us, not Petraeus. The President needs now to address the nation on Afghanistan and why we need to be there. If he does not do this soon, his own party will start to go against him (really without choice, as Democratic support for the war is currently at 23%) , and he'll be in a worse off situation than he is in today. It was easy to criticize the Iraq war while he was running for president, for good portions of the public were against it. This task will be much harder, yet it will be worth it. Not only for our security, but for generations of Afghans.