What Obama specifically promised is beside the point. To a lot of people, it was understood by the way he conducted himself that he would restore respect for the rule of law and abandon the criminal activities of the Bush Administration. He must have known, couldn't have avoided it, that all of the decent, law-abiding people of America interpreted his words as an implicit promise to return to a rule of law, which necessarily implied prosecution of criminals and abandonment of torture and illegal imprisonment. By NOT SAYING ANYTHING to contradict a widespread belief in what he was going to do, I consider him dishonest maybe not in a strictly legal way but in a moral and manly way. He's damaged goods in my eyes and in the eyes of millions of others, even if you can't point to the specific words of the "promises" that he made.
The false dichotomy between escalation and loss of a war that the U.S. has no business being in is meaningless. War is wrong unless defensive and the only real casus belli that the U.S. had in Afghanistan was for a punitive expedition and nothing more. In Iraq the war was totally illegal and immoral from the start. Victory is not a legitimate outcome in either conflict. Besides which victory will never be achieved in either country. Pulling out with apologies and reparations is the only legitimate resolution of both wars, although the reparations to Afghanistan should not be total, the U.S. should exclude reparations for any damage that could have been caused by any legitimate and proportionate punitive expedition.
The Austerity Commission is not an official name but the "bipartisan" commission is one of the administration's proposals for resolving where spending cuts are to be made to bring down the deficit. Thus the administration hopes to de-politicize the spending cuts by blaming them on a non-elected body of appointees who like the Federal Reserve Board can divorce the legislature from the consequences of what are essentially outsourced legislative functions. IMHO, another body blow to the concept of representative democracy. This is more or less a verifiable development in my prediction of a long, slow slide of the U.S. into what I rather loosely choose to call "fascism." The elected representatives of the people taking less and less responsibilities for the decisions that they were elected to make.
