I don't want to just end the war, but I want to end the mindset that got us into war in the first place.
--Barack Obama, January 31, 2008
In October 2002 at the Federal Plaza in Chicago, a state senator named Barack Obama gave a powerful and sharply partisan speech opposing the War in Iraq. If not for this position, he probably wouldn't have won the nomination. It not only put him on the right side of the era's defining issue; it represented both progressive credibility and a break with the establishment. Although other candidates, most notably Bill Richardson, managed in fits and starts to get to his left on the Iraq War, Obama remained the leading, and only viable, antiwar (or anti-Iraq War) candidate. You couldn't take it away from him.
During the campaign, Obama took a hawkish stance on the war in Afghanistan. That didn't stop some from thinking he wanted to redefine American foreign policy. Thanks in part to statements like the one at the top of this page, Spencer Ackerman said he was offering 'the most sweeping liberal foreign-policy critique we've heard from a serious presidential contender in decades."
Obama's hawkish position during the campaign, while politically savvy, didn't account for the reality in Afghanistan, where the war had become a disaster. If this wasn't clear in 2008, it certainly was in August of this year when Obama claimed that the war in Afghanistan was one "of necessity."
But in devising a "new" strategy for Afghanistan, Obama was captive less to his own rhetoric than to a hawkish political establishment and the National Security State. Make no mistake, it would have been politically difficult for him to do anything except escalate. Such is the country we live in. If he'd gone in a genuinely new direction, Republicans, the MSM, and elements of the military would've conspired to try to undermine him. The furor could've swallowed the rest of his agenda. Bob Herbert:
It would have been much more difficult for Mr. Obama to look this troubled nation in the eye and explain why it is in our best interest to begin winding down the permanent state of warfare left to us by the Bush and Cheney regime. It would have taken real courage for the commander in chief to stop feeding our young troops into the relentless meat grinder of Afghanistan, to face up to the terrible toll the war is taking — on the troops themselves and in very insidious ways on the nation as a whole.
To have refused to escalate would've been bold, if not revolutionary.
And that's precisely why he should have refused to escalate.
Much has been made of Obama's lofty aims, but there was nothing more important, nothing more transformative, he could've done than end the war. Such a move could've ended the mindset that gets us into, and keeps us in, dumb wars. And perhaps he was just the man for the job. Gary Wills:
It is unlikely that we will soon have another president with the moral and rhetorical force to talk us out of a foolish commitment that cannot be sustained without shame and defeat. If it costs him his presidency, what other achievement can match it?
During his presidential campaign, Barack Obama said he would rather be a one-term president than give up on his goals. Here is a goal no other president we can imagine would have a possibility of reaching. Presidents who just kick the can down the road are easy to come by. Lost lives and limbs are not.
I keep hearing that Obama had no good options. I disagree. One of his options, the more difficult one, could have changed the country and the world for the better. He missed his best chance to be extraordinary.
Today he's just another American president, giving us more of the bloody same.