THE ‘GOOD WAR’ FOR POLITICAL PURPOSES
I don’t blame my friends for the position they’ve staked out.
There is no way this commander-in-chief is going to fight the war that needs fighting. It is useless to push a guy who thinks that America is the problem to go after enemies who, he thinks, have a point. Understandably, the FPI is pressing the president on the Taliban because that’s the best we can hope to get out of him — and even that only because of politics, not conviction.
Obama painted Afghanistan as the “good war,” but not because he actually thought it was good. His view of 9/11 is doubtless more like that of his friends Bill Ayers, Jeremiah Wright, and Van Jones: “America’s chickens,” as the Rev. Wright infamously put it, “coming home to roost.”
But Obama and his handlers are smarter than those other radicals: To launch his revolutionary project in America, he needed to get into power. To do that, Afghanistan was useful: Obama assured voters that he would aggressively prosecute the good war, in contrast to those dastardly Republicans who’d taken the country on a pointless, costly, unpopular diversion in Iraq. Now, having achieved power, Obama is responsible for the war he promised to fight and win. In theory, there’s at least a chance you could get him to fight it.
It is important to bear in mind that
Obama’s portrayal of the war is a fiction. He can’t make the global war smaller than it is by pretending that it is only happening in one place. Iraq was a noble cause. Far from being a superfluous diversion, it was insufficient — it is nation-building that is a diversion, at least if you prioritize it over the more pressing business of defeating the enemy.
Obama did what he could do to secure defeat in Iraq, and the final outcome there remains in doubt. And far from taking on the main culprit in Iran, he’s holding out an olive branch while the mullahs chuckle, build their nukes, and dispatch jihadists against American forces. Terrorist sympathizers, meanwhile, have assumed positions throughout the Obama administration, and — as the president apologizes to the world for the sins of American national defense — terrorists themselves are being released from custody.
To have the stomach for what it would take
to destroy the Taliban, Obama would have to face down opposition from the Muslim world. The Muslim world may not love the Taliban, but it is foolish to presume that they prefer us. I am convinced that, as between the Muslim world and us, Obama believes that the Muslim world has the stronger case.
Obama doesn’t really want to fight the war, but he doesn’t want the political fallout that would come from not fighting it.
What better way to thread that needle than to
escalate troop levels — not for the purpose of eviscerating the Taliban, which is what my FPI friends want, but instead
for the purpose of redistributing American wealth to the Third World (Obama’s signature legislative proposal when he was a senator)
and trying to build a socialist sharia state?
I’d love to be able to sign that FPI letter. But I know that we are not trying to win the overall war and that we have a commander-in-chief whose leanings are highly suspect, to the point of having dipped into the leftist fever swamps of his past to recruit the aforementioned Jones — a man who is as incoherent as he is despicable in claiming that 9/11 was both something America deserved and an inside job.
Meantime, at the
Justice Department, Obama is having
wartime legal policy made by lawyers who spent the last several years doing pro bono work for the enemy.
And at the
State Department, he’s installed a
legal adviser who would make our national defense subject to U.N. control and who is sympathetic to European interpretations of the Geneva Conventions Protocol I (not ratified by the U.S.), which would severely hamper our ability to conduct combat operations. If it were one of my sons on the front lines, I would be horrified at the prospect of his deployment to a dangerous place by a president who, at best, doesn’t seem entirely sure that America should prevail.
We should all be able to admit that, whatever we’re doing in Afghanistan, we’re not really trying to win this war — if we define that as working to
defeat the Islamist enemy in totality. Half-measures already are the order of the day, and so I respectfully suggest that we resist accusing each other of calling for “retreat” and “surrender.”
I don’t understand anyone on the right — from those who share George Will’s position to those who agree with the FPI position — to be calling for surrender. The “retreat” that’s been proposed by Will is not the surrendering sort. It’s the kind you undertake after you’ve achieved your major objectives, when you don’t have any desire to be an empire or long-term occupier but stand ready to attack vigorously if a serious threat to your country reemerges.
That strategy could be the wrong one. But I haven’t found the case being made against it very persuasive. Bruce Hoffman — a serious guy, worthy of our attention — argues that “we tried to contain the terrorism problem in Afghanistan from a distance before 9/11. Look how well that worked.” With due respect, that is a meritless claim.
The Clinton administration never took serious action against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. Our intelligence agencies knew bin Laden was operating there, but President Clinton always discovered a reason not to pull the trigger. By contrast, after 9/11 we aggressively attacked Afghanistan’s terrorism problem. Now the Taliban and any other would-be enabler must know that the consequences of allowing al-Qaeda to set up shop are apt to be severe.
That doesn’t ensure that the Taliban wouldn’t do it, anyway. And that is why proponents of a robust military presence in Afghanistan contend that we need reliable intelligence and boots on the ground. You can’t get that, they persuasively argue, hunkered down in remote bases. This argument would be checkmate if we were actually trying to win the war. But
are we actually trying to win the war? I don’t think so.
Are we going full-bore to defeat the Taliban — in Pakistan as well as in Afghanistan? Do we really have the Pakistanis’ support, or are they going to aid the Taliban covertly, as they often have? What are we going to do about Iranian support for insurgents?
Why are we nation-building before the enemy is defeated — which, among other things, converts the non-combat European troops in the region into a liability rather than an asset?
In a war against non-uniformed terrorists, are we going to keep having miniature war-crimes inquiries and condemnations from all the usual suspects every time military strikes result in the killing of “civilians” (some of whom, inevitably, actually will be civilians)? Is the Obama Justice Department going to continue intimidating the intelligence community into paralysis while helping left-wing activists make war-crimes cases against the American officials who’ve prosecuted the war? How are we going to handle enemy combatants who are captured in Afghanistan? Are we going to Mirandize them and give them habeas corpus hearings, or interrogate them and detain them until the end of hostilities? If we are on a war footing and truly committed to defeating the enemy, why are we releasing captured terrorists who can and do rejoin the jihad in Afghanistan and elsewhere?
I’m perfectly prepared to accept that we have to defeat the Taliban as part of a
comprehensive strategy to defeat militant jihadism. But I don’t see anything resembling such a strategy on the table. And I don’t believe this president would insert more troops into Afghanistan to do what my FPI friends want him to do — I see the mission shifting away from war-fighting and toward nation-building. That would mean thousands more troops put at risk with no discernible benefit to our national security. Mock the remote-base strategy if you will, but it is safer and more honest than a strategy that increases our troop commitment in a hellhole under circumstances where “war” and “victory” are words the administration won’t even utter, much less act on.
I’m all for wiping out the Taliban. But what makes us think this president will commit to that goal?
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