Dan Calabrese

It really doesn’t take 33 minutes to announce that you’re sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, and you don’t need the cadets of West Point sitting in front of you as you do it.

This yet that.

But President Obama’s speech last night on Afghanistan was really not an announcement per se. The actual news had already been leaked quite intentionally by the White House over the course of the previous day or so.

The speech Obama made last night was strictly a political one – and gratingly so.

For starters, he set the stage by recounting the events of September 11, 2001 – invoking 9/11 for political purposes? tsk tsk . . . – and then reminding us of how the UN Security Council and the rest of the world backed our initial invasion of Afghanistan.

This “international legitimacy,” he explained, made all the difference.

But all this was merely setting the stage for the point he really wanted to make, which was that George W. Bush ruined everything by going into Iraq. Obama reminded us that he had opposed the Iraq War, and without mentioning Bush, laid out a narrative clearly intended to blame him for any challenges we face in Afghanistan today:

When I took office, we had just over 32,000 Americans serving in Afghanistan, compared to 160,000 in Iraq at the peak of the war. Commanders in Afghanistan repeatedly asked for support to deal with the reemergence of the Taliban, but these reinforcements did not arrive. That’s why, shortly after taking office, I approved a long-standing request for more troops.

So let me see if I have this straight: Obama is criticizing Bush for taking too long to act on a troop request? All right, then.

The speech was all the more political for Obama’s continued insistence that troops will begin to leave in 2011. That is a promise he cannot possibly know he will be able to keep, and his only purpose in making it – which doesn’t appear to have succeeded based on the early reactions – must have been to throw a bone to his left-wing political base.

If he can persuade his base that he is somehow escalating in order to draw down, he hopes, they will cut him a break for not pulling up stakes and bringing everyone home now.

Another staple of Obama political speech is the use of grandiose language that is eventually contradicted by his actions, if not immediately contradicted by other language. To wit:

As your Commander-in-Chief, I owe you a mission that is clearly defined, and worthy of your service.

So then, what is this clear definition? The closest he gets to it is the following vague boilerplate:

We must deny al Qaeda a safe-haven. We must reverse the Taliban’s momentum and deny it the ability to overthrow the government. And we must strengthen the capacity of Afghanistan’s Security Forces and government, so that they can take lead responsibility for Afghanistan’s future.

There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s hardly a reflection of any brilliant strategizing on Obama’s part. It’s the same thing we’ve been pursuing since 2001. A pronouncement like that is intended to imply that there was never a defined outcome until Obama defined it.

As for the rest, particularly the part about the challenges of the economy and the limited nature of resources, you get the impression that Obama just realized the presidency involves difficult choices with no easy answers – and that he needs to explain this to the rest of us.

The troop surge is the right move, but it’s hard to escape the conclusion that he chose it because he saw no politically palatable alternative. That would be the only way to explain the fast-approaching, arbitrary timetable. And it’s classic Obama this-yet-that difference splitting. We’re going in, yet we won’t stay long. It’s crucial to our security, yet we can’t do it forever. The Afghans can count on us, yet they have to do it themselves.

Many others have commented on the lack of any reference to victory, and it’s easy enough to see why. The speech wasn’t about victory. It was about Obama, and why the reluctant war president isn’t responsible for the challenge to which he intends to rise – only as long as he absolutely has to.

Become Dan’s friend on Facebook.

Become a fan of The North Star National on Facebook.

To book Dan as a speaker, contact Lourdes Swarts at Speakers Access.

7 Responses to “Obama is (mostly) right on troop surge, but this was a political speech”