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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