An Instability of Ideas

Notions on the war in Afghanistan are tumbling through my mind and tugging on my emotions, demanding to be processed, refusing to coalesce, and threatening me with the dreaded bugaboo, cognitive dissonance. Don't want to write about them; can't stop thinking about them; let's see what happens when I throw them into the blog blender.

[But, first, the disclaimer: I support Democratic candidates, except where they are obviously unqualified, in which case I support the Green candidate (think SC, where they let me vote). I think Obama has done an heroic job. I think it's time for liberals and progressives to pull together. Having said that much, perhaps I should just stifle my issues with the war. Robert McNamara once said, when he was damned if he did and damned if he didn't on Vietnam, "And I would rather be damned if I don't," meaning that he'd finally decided it was time to STFU. Because, of course, he'ds actually been damned for what he did. So, should I bring this controversial topic up at a time when we need to pull together? Damned if I won't.]

Charles Krauthammer's Op-Ed for the Washington Post, Monday, Oct 4, 2010: "Has Obama Abandoned The Troops He Sent To War?"

"What kind of commander in chief sends tens of thousands of troops to war announcing in advance a fixed date for beginning their withdrawal? One who doesn't have his heart in it. One who doesn't really want to win but is making some kind of political gesture."

Krauthammer goes on to Bob Woodward's book, O'bama's Wars, and the quotation by the CinC that can be spun so many ways: "I can't lose the whole Democratic party." Krauthammer's spin is:

First, isn't this the party that in two consecutive presidential campaigns--John Kerry's and then Obama's--argued vociferously that Afghanistan is the good war, the right war, the war of necessity, the central front in the war on terror? [....]

Did he suddenly develop a faint heart? Or was the party disingenuous about the Afghan War all along, using it as a convenient club with which to attack Geroge W. Bush over Iraq, while protecting the Democrats from the charge of being reflexively anti-war? [....]

One can only conclude that Obama now thinks Afghanistan is a mistake. Maybe he thought so from the very beginning.

Krauthammer is shrewd. He's given the "weak president" spin to what had to have been and continues to be the toughest decisions a president is called on to make. That spin is predictable, despicable, typical of the right at the moment.

What I recall is that in the first days the new president was under enormous pressure from top military advisors to go all out in Afghanistan, to throw everything we had at a war he had doubts about. What I recall is that the surge and withdrawal target date announcement struck me as compromise, forcing me to trust that the President knew things I didn't...had come to know things he hadn't known during his campaign.

I continue to believe that the compromise was not politically based, but was chosen because Mr. Obama saw some possibility that a troop increase could further the goals of our war with Al Qaeda, but wanted to see smaller scale results before committing all our treasure and all our soldiers to the effort.

As to the effects of Bob Woodward's "revelations," I haven't yet read the book, but I have read more articles and blogs on the book than I can count. I've assumed that pundits like Krauthammer have culled what they consider to be the most damning quotations and I think they fail to damn. What I find damning is Krauthammer's conclusion in this piece:

"Sen. Kerry, now chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, once asked many years ago: 'How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?' Perhaps Kerry should ask that of Obama.

"'He is out of Afghanistan psychologically,' says Woodward of Obama. Well, he may be out, but the soldiers he ordered to Afghanistan are in.

Some will not come home."

I had my doubts about the surge then and I have them now. I wanted the soldiers home then and I want them home now. And I wish the President had worked harder to communicate with us about his decisions. But I find Krauthammer's conclusion to be a cheap shot in a profoundly significant discussion.

I believe these statements by the President, also quoted in Woodward's book and reported in the NYTimes and Washington Post, depict a leader wrestling with the best information and advice he could get his hands on, including interviews with former Sec'y of State Colin Powell, who advised, “don’t get pushed by the left to do nothing. Don’t get pushed by the right to do everything.”

 “I’m not signing on to a failure,” President Obama is quoted saying near the end of this book. “If what I proposed is not working, I’m not going to be like these other presidents and stick to it based upon my ego or my politics — my political security.”

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“Everything we’re doing has to be focused on how we’re going to get to the point where we can reduce our footprint. It’s in our national security interest. There cannot be any wiggle room,” 

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 “In 2010, we will not be having a conversation about how to do more. I will not want to hear, ‘We’re doing fine, Mr. President, but we’d be better if we just do more.’ We’re not going to be having a conversation about how to change [the mission] ... unless we’re talking about how to draw down faster than anticipated in 2011.”  

What I want to know is, what's the Right's position on Afghanistan? Are they still sorting that out? Michael Steele was roundly condemned for calling Afghanistan "a war of Obama's choosing," and, "not something the United States had actively prosecuted or wanted to engage in," (July, 2010). For once, Lindsey Graham said something I value in response to Steele's idiocy: "It was an uninformed, unnecessary, unwise, untimely comment. This is not President Obama's war, this is America's war. We need to stand behind the president."


The Republican Pledge To America acknowledges that we are a nation at war and makes not one statement on how it intends to deal with the war in Afghanistan other than that tired old phrase about supporting our troops, as if only Republicans fight. As if only Republicans care or worry for those who fight.

Last night, I watched "The Fog of War," a documentary based on a long interview with Robert McNamara on the Vietnam War. Certain quotations haunt me:

On the workings of President Johnson's mind, "People did not understand there were recommendations and pressures that could carry the risk of war with China and of nuclear war."

On allies, "If we can't persuade nations with comparable values of the merit of our cause, we'd better re-examine our reasoning."

On escalation, "This has gone from being a nasty little war to a nasty middle-sized war."

"How much evil must we do in order to do good." 

 Quoting LBJ for a memorandum on the war, "This morning, Senator Scott said, 'The war which we can neither win, lose, nor drop is evidence of an instability of ideas.'" (my emphasis) 

 I cannot sort out the jumble. I am relieved that Obama set a date to begin withdrawal, pending conditions (which ones?!). Must we maintain another presence in the region to contain Iran? Is Afghanistan our only door to terrorist training camps? Does the warrior nation mentality, which Obama opposes, demand that we keep an active front somewhere, always, and--if not in Iraq--well, then we never should have lost our focus in Afghanistan? That may well be the mindset of what Andrew Bacevich calls the Washington rules, but that is not, to my understanding, the mindset of Barack Obama.

Bob Woodward on Sept. 28th, to George Stephanopoulos:

He is an intellectual, as we know. He's the law professor...And so, intellectually, he realizes [that the situation is] real, real, hard. He knows as commander in chief, he has to do something.

And for the first time, you can see his internal struggle, his intellectual struggle. His dealing with the military. He's dealing with his political advisers.

I see a country, its political advisors, its military advisors, and its President struggling hard to do the right thing in Afghanistan--right for the Afghans, right for the Americans, right for the soldiers. There is another total review of the war scheduled for December. That process will be exhaustive, of that I am sure, because that is this President's way.

Charles Krauthammer turned this agonizing national decision into political fodder by exploiting our pain and our anguish about the human costs of war. Those costs are too real to be politicized. To imply, as Krauthammer does, that President Obama has lost interest in Afghanistan, that he doesn't care about the soldiers he's committed to that war, is the ultimate in irresponsible partisanship. Mr. Krauthammer would have been better off following McNamara's STFU motto, "I'd rather be damned if I don't."

P.S. For an excellent review of the President's decision process on the surge and withdrawal date, go to the Washington Post's Interactive Timeline for the period of September through December of 2009.