Being in New York is interesting, to hear people assail Obama from both right and left – he’s emasculating this country and bowing down to the Emperor, or is a shill for the military-industrial complex and is “Bush III.” His decision to send more troops into Afghanistan is pleasing no one – it’s not a plan authored by a Republican, so it won’t please the right, and it’s not what Gandhi would do, so it’s not pleasing the left.
I don’t know if what he is doing is prudent, and I don’t know if it will succeed. But I am impressed by the decision, and in fact it is decisions like this which I wanted to see when I voted for him. The immature impulse, given any inherited difficult situation, is to wash your hands of it as quickly as possible. Obama could have played partisan politics here, brought all troops home on January 21st, blamed whatever ensued on Bush, and been done with the whole thing. But by his current actions he is taking responsibility for the war he inherited. He is putting his own popularity on the line to give his generals the chance to win it.
And yet he is also ending it. It is clear that his stated intention is to end the wars this country is in – to close the gates of Janus – before his term expires. If it is his last term, so be it – he will not leave his successor the mess he himself inherited. If he goes down as the worst president in American history, who did nothing but inconclusively end two unwinnable wars, pass a much-adulterated health care bill, and sit back while the country slowly healed itself, then Obama is willing to do that – because he will be leaving the country better off than he found it.
Admittedly, this is not the kind of heroic Cola di Rienzo-esque assault on a corrupt system, but that never really was in Obama’s nature, for anyone who was watching the whole spectacle unfold.
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I’m an isolationist and so do not approve the recent decision. I think it’s sort of crazy that there’s no real idea of what “victory” would look like and think it’s intrusive of a country to ask men and women to die for this pursuit.
Corollary idea: What do you make of the soldier in Iraq or Afghanistan who takes the position, “I’d be working at a Quizno’s in Oklahoma right now if it weren’t for this war and am therefore grateful for the opportunity.” While I consider myself a patriot and deeply respectful of the decision to enter the military this saddens me. Is it that in the face of hyper-capitalized, industrialized, money’d America an individual is reduced to grasping onto some kind of militarized identity in order to secure a sense of worth and purpose? I really don’t want to belittle the decision to fight for America; but I think the fact that many feel as though there’s nothing else out there for them is worthy of more consideration and press.
It’s true that since VJ-Day there really hasn’t been a clear sense of what “victory” is. It’s been much more complicated: witness the Marshall Plan and the (continuing) U.S. occupation of Europe, with the intention of avoiding another war a generation later arising in Germany.
But I still have faith in Obama: he’s using his full term, I think, to not only end these wars but end them as well as possible. (Now if he hasn’t ended them by November 2012 I don’t know what we’ll do. He’ll be running against a hawkish or twofaced Republican we can be sure.)
As for the military being a means of advancement, it’s always been that; there have been days when I’ve thought of joining the French Foreign Legion myself. As for the lack of opportunity, most of the work of society is unsatisfying. I don’t quite know why, but it seems to be universal enough to consider it a feature of life. There are days, though, when I think we need some big, huge artistic projects, like pyramids or something. Or big infrastructure projects. Or big train stations like Grand Central. I’m not quite sure why we seem so incapable of making things we’re proud of.