My hawkish friends are picking on
Obama's speech. It didn't stir them.
News flash, fellas: It wasn't
meant to. He wasn't speaking to you all, or to me. In fact, he likely is mighty
tired of listening to Afghanistan hawks, having spent much of the last three
months with them. In defense intellectual terms, this homily was written for Andrew
Bacevich and Richard
Kohn, not for Eliot
Cohen and Tom Donnelly and Peter Feaver, to name a few of the usual suspects.
This speech was an ode to ambivalence, an
aria of ambiguity, a rasher of reluctance. It was addressed to those who, like
him, really didn't want to send more troops to Afghanistan. It was for those
who care more about rebuilding New Orleans than Kandahar or Mosul. He was
explaining to them why he was breaking with them. He had after great
deliberation concluded that it was necessary to escalate.
To really get this speech, I think
you had to be someone who voted for Obama, who believed he was elected to end
our wars, and was feeling terribly and personally disappointed with the
president over the possibility of a surge in Afghanistan -- and the failure to
close Guantanamo, and the lift the ban on gays in the military, not to mention
the bailout of Wall Street fatcats. Hence the explicit discussion of the
Vietnam analogy, and the review of the folly of invading Iraq in 2003. (But why
deliver it at West Point, where ambiguity is not a core Army value? That
probably was a mistake.)
Seen in that context, these are
the three most important quotes in last night's speech:
First, there are those who
suggest that Afghanistan is another Vietnam... I believe this argument
depends upon a false reading of history."
I'm mindful of the words of
President Eisenhower, who, in discussing our national security, said, 'Each
proposal must be weighed in the light of a broader consideration: the need to maintain balance in and among
national programs.' Over the past several years, we have lost that
balance. We've failed to appreciate the
connection between our national security and our economy."
And, given what I think was the
purpose of the speech, this was the best line:
That's why our troop commitment
in Afghanistan cannot be open-ended: because the nation that I am most interested in building is our own."
JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images
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