Meet the New… Ah Fuck It, You Know The Line

Once again, I was listening to On Point, this time checking out their review of Obama’s Afghanistan speech with Robert Kaplan and John Mearsheimer. Mearsheimer, who recently penned a critical piece on America’s involvement in Afghanistan for Foreign Policy, made a comment that immediately caught my attention. In response to a caller who voiced similar criticisms of Obama’s announcement, Mearsheimer said,

I think that the caller Tom is absolutely correct when he says that this talk was supremely political, it was all about domestic politics. Look, what’s going on here is that Obama is a smart man who understands that we can’t win in Afghanistan and that we can’t stay there for ten more years. It’s just politially not possible in the United States. At the same time, he understands that we can’t get out now because the Democrats would be punished by the Republicans greatly over time for cutting and running. Therefore, what he’s trying to do is finesse this, as Tom the caller said, “kick the can down the road.” That’s really what’s going on here.

This isn’t a serious formula for how to win in Afghanistan because nobody knows how to win in Afghanistan. We’ve been there for eight years and things are much worse than they were eight years ago. The idea that we’re going to stay there for another ten years, greatly increase the number of troops, and spend one hundred billion dollars a year given the unemployment and economic problems we have at home is unrealistic. So this is all a very sad situation and Obama is in a situation where he can’t win.

The implications here are pretty stunning, certainly enough to rock me back on my proverbial heels on my way into work this morning. In essence, if Mearsheimer’s analysis is accurate, then he’s applying the same basic analysis to Obama’s decision making with regards to Afghanistan as many have ascribed to Bush and the Rovian politics that dominated his eight years. Certainly Mearsheimer seems to be offering a much sympathetic condemnation to Obama when he says that the President, “is in a situation where he can’t win,” but the underlying motives present in the analysis are the same:you make decisions based not on what’s right or wrong, or on what seems the best course of action, or what your personal convictions are, but rather on what impact(s) your decision will have on the next election.

Of course, to a certain degree one can only say, “Hey, this is politics. What did you expect?” And there is some truth to that. Political decisions don’t happen in a vacuum and what the fallout of a particular decision might be electorally is present in the back of any elected representative’s mind, there’s no avoiding that. But to make a decision to delay the impacts of a challenge you’re facing until such a time as it has fewer potential negative ramifications on an election in which you have a stake that, at the same time, places  and additional thirty thousand soldier’s (one hundred thousand total) soldiers’ lives at risk seems as bald-faced and odious an example of realpolitik as one might imagine. And it is blatant enough that it seems like we ought not to throw our arms up and simply say, “Hey, this is politics. What did you expect?”

Given the implications of major political decisions, there has to be a line in the sand that we’re willing to draw. It is true that, as Helene Rittlemeyer has written, politics is at least in part driven by things like, “money, naked ambition, and team loyalty”, but when one hundred thousand peoples’ lives — and by lives, we mean matters of  life or death –  are on the line, I think there is good reason to stand up demand at least a modicum of integrity where decisions affecting those lives are concerned. And integrity in this instance means an estimation of not only what is in the best interests of the country, but what is in the best interests of those men and women.

Insofar as one can say that Obama has failed to engage in that kind of decision making, one is, I think, entitled to say that he is operating at roughly a Rovian centre of gravity, at least as far as Afghanistan goes.

But Mearsheimer doesn’t go that far, he is willing to cut Obama some slack and, at the end of the day, so I am — sort of.

I’m not wholly convinced that Obama has made this decision out of sheer realpolitik or naked ambition vis-a-vis 2010. I think Obama has done what he thinks needed to be done. But I’m also with Kevin Drum on why Obama’s speech fell flat for so many people,

There are two possible reasons for the speech being so unconvincing: either Obama doesn’t know how to deliver a good speech or else Obama isn’t really convinced himself.  But we know the former isn’t true, don’t we?  You can fill in the rest yourself.

If Kevin is right, and I think there is reason to believe that he is, then Obama, while not operating in the same cold and calculating fashion as a Karl Rove, has failed in his primary charge as Commander-in-Chief and the implications are potentially as disastrous as Rove, Cheney, and Bush’s soulless calculus was.

Channeling Freddie for a second, it is enragingly infuriating that the idea of actually saying, “This is not winnable, we need to find a responsible way of extricating ourselves,” was simply never an honestly considered option. The myopic sense of options and inability to overcome prideful hubris in American foreign policy is, perhaps, the greatest challenge facing the country if it is to really move into a constructive and proactive frame in the twenty-first century. If ever there were an opportunity to make that move, understanding how difficult it would be and how much yowling and screeching there would have been from a myriad of corners, this was Obama’s chance to make it. And he blew it.

Some fancy Obama’s move as just the kind of strategic wizardry that I described in the lead up to the actual announcement. “He’s hemmed the hawks in!” they say, “He’s pegged military action to results!” they crow, “He’ll have perfect justification to pull out in 2011 when this doesn’t work and will have toppled the military industrial complex in the process!” they rejoice. Except that, Obama really hasn’t done any of those things. The hawks will blame the time table for any failure, the results are placing tens of thousands of lives at risk and spending billions of dollars at a time when the country can’t afford such spending on an outcome that many see as preordained to failure, and bringing down the military industrial complex would have been making the decision here and now to recognize that there are limits to American power and having the guts to face the music of having said so when you had perfect justification for doing so and when support for the war was at its lowest.

This was a political speech and a political decision, it always was.  But the nature of the politics at stake wasn’t one of elections and seats, it was of courage. A majority of Americans were behind Obama and they were waiting for him to exert the political courage to make the right call. They were waiting in vain

Tagged as: Afghanistan, Afghanistan surge, obama, On Point