Posted by
Bill Crawford on Sunday, June 26, 2011 4:01:34 PM
Listening to Obama speak publicly isn’t enough by itself anymore. I always feel like I’m missing something. As in, he couldn’t have said…that. Did I skip a paragraph? Did I fall asleep?
So now it is a few days, in between life’s crude interruptions. Download the transcript. Make sure it is a trusty source. Go over it sentence by sentence. Then I can see if my shoot from the hip WTF reactions have any basis.
This was all supposed to be a speech on Afghanistan. That’s not where it ended, though. It ended as a political campaign polemic on the economy. I won’t go into the economy here, that would end up being another book.
Where can I start? Oh, yeah: this is our strategy for “ending” the war. Not winding it down, but ending it. Clausewitz reality moment number one, Barrack: if you want to announce an “end” to the world, one can hope that you are at a victory. Absent that, why the hell continue to fight it? But I guess, as candidate Obama said so profoundly in 2008, “They’re only words”.
Second: where is any mention of the Generals that you conferred with (hopefully) before your decision? Does Dave Petraeus even exist any more? The last I remember he and the CentCom people musing about the counterinsurgency they were asking for troops for, this was all a process that was likely to drag out into 2014. Did they revise their plans? I know that all the public statements from the Joint Chiefs on this invoke one level or another of disappointment, followed by a ‘we’ll do the bestwe can’ yes man suffix. They don’t sound like hearts and minds have been won. But, as Obama the candidate said repeatedly, “I set the mission”. His Chicago military experience and his Ivy League war college training trump all that, I guess.
This is where one of Obama’s argumentive traits jumps in- the eternal strawman. In this case, the alternative presented to his decision was a chase for making “Afghanistan a perfect place”- a picture I struggle to watch General Petraeus paint with his mouth.
Then there is the bulls**t doublespeak: withdrawing 30,000 troops by next September will allow us to “fully recover the surge”. Withdrawal is now “recovering”? I obviously need an updated Roget’s. My bad.
All this leads to a heartfelt focus on the economy, which he obviously plans to highlight in his re-election campaign by talking about until we’re so tired of hearing him that we will all forget that unemployment is more than double pre-recession levels for almost three years now.
“It is time to focus on nation building here at home now”. Notwithstanding the crude segue, I guess the Constitutional Law Professor is doing a rewrite, it is now ‘providing for the common defense OR promoting the general welfare’. I’m just trying to keep up.
I understand this war has been going on a long time. Yes, even conservatives are tired of it. I understand that his heart is obviously not in it. But he owns the Afghan initiative. He set this as a ‘Afghan war good, Iraq war bad’ thing
during his election campaign. He wanted to step it up there. He took months to sort out how he was going to do it. And now, he is going to “end” it, and this is his best explanation? Seriously?