see, there, where it says "eternal hostility"?

It means what it says. So... while I'll surely give due approbation to Obama when he does good, I'm not going to stop being hostile to doing bad just because he's the one doing it. Let's just hope there's more of the former than of the latter.

Case in point: "In his first troop deployment to a war zone as commander in chief, President Barack Obama on Tuesday authorized sending as many as 17,500 additional troops to Afghanistan beginning this spring..."

Now, I haven't studied the Afghanistan situation enough to have an opinion as to whether this is prudent or necessary. I will just note that: (1) pouring troops and other military resources into this particular piece of real estate didn't work out all that well for the Soviets, and (2) though the part of the quoted sentence above represented by the ellipsis reads "a move that appears to mark the formal U.S. troop shift from Iraq to Afghanistan", the fact is that Obama has yet to pull any troops out of Iraq, and though he has confirmed his intention to do so, he has yet to announce any specific plans for getting out -- despite having had 3+ months to develop such a plan.

Ok, though, he's been in office less than a month and I don't really have a strong view yet on the general concept of this escalation.

But: if you read further down in the article you see this: "The Marines and soldiers will be deployed to southern Afghanistan, where U.S. forces are expanding to take on the poppy trade there..." Seriously? Is this really what they plan to use this deployment for? To kill plants? WTF?

On second thought though, this kind of thing has been very effective in Latin America, where it has drastically reduced violence and put a huge dent in the drug trade.

Oh, wait, sorry. I meant to say that this kind of thing has been massively counterproductive in Latin America, where it has drastically increased violence and has had no discernible effect on the drug trade:

Latin America ex-leaders urge reform of U.S. drug war

Former Colombian President Cesar Gaviria said there was no meaningful debate over drugs policy in the United States, despite a broad consensus that current policies had failed.
[...]
Gaviria has joined with former Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso and former Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo to try to change the debate on drugs in Latin America, where trafficking gangs have killed tens of thousands of people and weakened democracies through corruption.
[...]
They pointed to falling street prices for cocaine and still high levels of consumption in the United States despite decades of policies focused on punishing users and cutting supplies from Latin American countries such as Colombia.
[...]
Organized crime has flourished around drugs and is now threatening the stability of Mexico, where a spiraling war between rival gangs killed more than 5,700 people last year.
[...]
Despite winning power on broad promises of change, drugs policy featured little in U.S. President Barack Obama's election campaign and there are few indications that he will embark on a major overhaul.

Sigh.