David Bromwich.Professor of Literature at Yale Posted: December 2,
2009 01:23 PM An unusually reflective lawyer once advised a
purchaser of a house that a contract should not be signed or money
paid before the seller made all the final repairs and improvements.
"Do it straight and plain -- you don't want the tail in
the door." Something about President Obama's West Point
Speech on Afghanistan brought to mind that suspicious proverb. To
take a country farther into a questionable war ought to be harder
than opening a parenthesis and saying you know where you will close
it. Yet Obama's decision to send 30,000 more troops to
Afghanistan had all the composed clarity of a logical proposition.
Throughout the speech -- which sought to justify the most important
act of his presidency -- Obama was poised and moderate-sounding.
His idea of what his escalation would do seemed moderate, too, and
definite: self-contained and self-terminating. The 30,000 troops
will go into Afghanistan quickly, he said, so that the last arrive
within six months. They will commence their departure a year later,
in July 2011. It was a gratifying picture and an orderly one; and
yet it raised a question. Can you turn up the violence of a war and
then turn it down? Will it stop, like that, when you tell it to?
President Obama justified the intensification of his commitment in
Afghanistan by the fact that we are still fighting Al Qaeda. It was
Al Qaeda that attacked the United States on September 11, 2001, he
said, and the organization now operates in the border-region of
Afghanistan and Pakistan. We therefore have a double reason for
scouring the country of the remnants of the fanatical sect. For
Pakistan has nuclear weapons, Al Qaeda wants to obtain such a
weapon, and if it had one it would use it against the United
States. Yet here occurred the first of several noticeable
omissions. According to the president's national security
adviser, James Jones, Al Qaeda's members now number as few as
100. The president also asserted -- on what evidence he did not say
-- that Al Qaeda is locked in a stable alliance with the Taliban
forces. Yet James Jones in the same remarks concluded that he does
not "foresee the return of the Taliban" to power. Obama,
then, was playing up the links between Al Qaeda and the Taliban in
much the way his predecessor played up the supposed links between
Al Qaeda and the Baath Party of Iraq; but, with Afghanistan today,
as with Iraq in 2004, it is easy to put oneself in possession of
facts that refute the claim. We know now that the effect of the
American bombings and invasion was initially to put to rout and
scatter the group and then, with the stimulant of the Iraq war, to
multiply it into a score of sects and cells in whose names we
barely know -- in North Africa, Indonesia, and elsewhere. Yet the
president spoke as if Al Qaeda were the name of a distinct, finite,
searchable entity that can be subdued by an intensification
(lasting exactly 18 months) of American fighting in the country
that was once its camp. As for the Taliban, whatever else they may
be, they are native to Afghanistan. This cannot be said of Al
Qaeda, but it cannot be said, either, of the soldiers, trainers,
advisers, and contractors sent by the United States. There is a
curious air of exactness in the idea of a renewed and extended war
that closes at 18 months because that "benchmark" was
settled in advance. How can anyone be sure that the scale of so
entangling a mission, with so many pitfalls, will fit neatly into
the shape of a year and a half? From another point of view, the
case for the urgency of the mission -- that the protection of
American lives in the U.S. depends on it -- really proves too much.
If the enemy is so potent and has so long and sure a reach -- if
the surviving 100 members of Al Qaeda are among the greatest
dangers the U.S. faces in the world -- we should be willing to stay
and fight for fifty years or a hundred, and to colonize the country
if need be, with a million settlers acting as our sentinels. The
truth is that half of the president's logic believes in the
urgency of this mission and half perceives no urgency at all. Since
people who fear for their lives tend to err on the side of
self-protection, we may infer that something other than the
imperative of national self-preservation drove the West Point
speech and is driving the new policy. Several possibilities are
obvious and have been much discussed: President Obama's
cautious relationship to the military; his wariness of the
ambitious general, David Petraeus, and the commander of forces in
Afghanistan, Stanley McChrystal, who is an emanation of Petraeus.
By leaking the high-end figure for the numbers of troops he would
have liked, McChrystal threatened to outflank the president, and
that threat has been quelled only for the moment. Meanwhile,
Obama's fear of being called weak on defense by Republicans,
and thus seeing his stature in foreign affairs diminished for the
rest of his term, was doubtless a motive as well. A president needs
a war, or so they say. Having a war did not protect Lyndon Johnson
from an insurgent movement in his own party's primaries that
denied him a second term, nor did it save Richard Nixon from being
driven out of office in disgrace, but the superstition remains: it
never harms a president to have a war in his pocket. President
Obama's assurance about the neatness of the solution extends
beyond the violence of the war to the resolution of Afghanistan
into a better political society under American guidance. He told
his West Point audience that the Karzai government may have proved
itself corrupt, but we expect the new money being sent to be placed
in the hands of the uncorrupt, and we will expect all the corrupt
to be "held accountable." But how? By what species of
oversight, given the scarcity of competent civilians and Americans
on the ground who even speak the language? At this point, one is
struck, not for the first time, by a psychological oddity in
Obama's makeup. He is almost convinced of the omnipotence of
words. When once he has persuaded himself of a thing -- that it is
true, or that it is plausible and might become true -- the words
that embody his conviction have for him the quality of deeds
already done. It did not work so happily with his spoken wish for a
freeze of Israeli settlements; and he has seen the word falter on
the brink of the deed, once more, in the wish for a comprehensive
health care bill before the summer or before Thanksgiving. Still,
his sense of the omnipotence of words was at work in his declared
belief regarding the utility of an 18-month extension of the war.
Obama dealt with the Vietnam analogy in passing, in an attempt to
dispel the fears that a similar entanglement is on the brink of
recurring. Yet he argued the point in a way that could only remind
his older listeners that the president was very young during the
Vietnam War. His study of it has been abstract and conventional. He
said the analogy did not hold because in Vietnam we had no allies.
In fact, Australia and Canada both gave limited but real assistance
in the form of ground forces, and other allies of the time gave
less direct assistance. The number of troops supplied by our
European allies in Afghanistan has been similarly small thus far,
despite the ostensibly greater danger to them by the proximity of
Al Qaeda to Europe. The president also noted that Vietnam had never
attacked the United States, whereas Al Qaeda did attack us. But
that contrast loses its force under two legitimate questions: who
exactly are Al Qaeda now, and where are they located? In many ways
the Vietnam War, though of an atrociousness that Afghanistan War
has not yet approached, was pursued by the U.S. obedient to a much
sounder theory than any offered for the present war. The theory was
that World Communism was all one thing and its spread to a single
country would lead inevitably to its spread to a continent. The
theory turned out to be false; and its falseness was perceived as
early as 1964 by critics of the war such as Hans J. Morgenthau. But
what are we doing in Afghanistan but following an inferior and less
persuasive version of a similar theory: namely that World Terrorism
is all one thing, that its heart is in Afghanistan (because that is
where we found it), and that if we don't "defeat" it
soon by "completing the mission," the terror will stay
and spread. Omitted is the fact that Afghanistan is not our
country. Admittedly, this is a truth that comes hard to Americans.
"The very idea of the fabrication of a new government,"
wrote Edmund Burke, "is enough to fill us with disgust and
horror." But David Brooks disagrees: "aside from killing
bad guys," he wrote in the spring, American troops are
"also trying to figure out how to reweave Afghan
society." By what right do we engage in the reweaving and
refabrication of a society that has thrown out conquerors for
thousands of years? The effect of the self-conceit can only be to
unite the society in hostility against us. For America to look on
the native resistance to an occupying army as proof of terrorism
will surely increase the obduracy of the resistance itself, and
serve to recruit more terrorists. Our war in the border regions is
being fought by drone assassinations. A man at the control sits in
front of a screen in Las Vegas, and fires when he has a certain
shot. To a primitive mind (but not only to a primitive mind), this
experiment on a country not our own has the trappings a video game
played in hell. But the procedure was here embraced by the
president in the antiseptic idiom of a practiced technocrat. He
gave no sign of the effects of such killings by a foreign power out
of reach in the sky. To assassinate one major operative, Baitullah
Mehsud, as Jane Mayer showed in a recent article in the New Yorker,
16 strikes were necessary, over 14 months, killing a total of as
many as 538 persons, of whom 200-300 were bystanders. What comes of
the reputation of policemen in a crime-ridden neighborhood when
they conduct themselves like that? And what makes anyone suppose
the reaction will be less extreme when the policeman comes from
another country? And yet, from the president's West Point
speech, one would not guess that he has reflected what our mere
presence in West Asia does to increase the enchantment of violent
resistance and to heat the anger that turns into terrorists people
who have lost parents, children, cousins, clansmen, and friends to
the Americans. The total number of Muslims killed by Americans in
revenge for the attacks of September 11th now numbers in the
hundreds of thousands. Of those, few were members of Al Qaeda, and
few harbored any intention, for good or ill, toward the United
States before we crossed the ocean as an occupying power. President
Obama closed his speech by offering his large American audience a
warm bath of self-love about the American way of life. The rest of
the world will want to "access opportunity" and resemble
us as soon as they learn what we are really like, he said. This
long peroration was ordinary and at the same time reminiscent of
the war speeches of George W. Bush. By contrast Obama did not talk
about the abstract issue that would have taken some courage to
broach: the danger that war is becoming an integrated part of the
American way of life. George W. Casey, Chief of Staff of the U.S.
Army, has spoken in several recent speeches about the present as
"an era of persistent conflict." So deeply has the Cheney
Axiom of Endless War has taken hold of the minds of officials and
policy-makers. Yet nowhere in his speech did the president address
the risk of this view for democracy, or separate himself from the
doctrine itself. Indeed, he has gone some way to embrace it and
join the pattern of "persistence" -- with the reservation
that he thinks by setting limits he can remove its sting. Hans
Morgenthau, in one of the articles he published against the
escalation in Vietnam, paraphrased the lines of Goethe's Faust
on the fatality of every choice: take a first step and you are a
free man, take the second and you become the slave of your choice.
For Obama, giving the command of Afghanistan to General McChrystal
was the first step, and a step he must have taken knowingly. Then
came the leaked memo from the ambassador in Afghanistan, Karl
Eikenberry, urging Obama to send no more troops -- and with that
letter, an almost miraculous chance of a reprieve. Nobody could
have said those words with more effect, since Eikenberry is a
military man, and one whom both Petraeus and McChrystal had looked
up to. He was throwing Obama a lifeline; but the miracle was
unorthodox, and Obama has the caution of the orthodox. He acted as
if the memo had never been received. The new shipment of troops to
Afghanistan is his second step. Barack Obama is the most convincing
person he knows. He can convince himself of a proposition,
"A," and a second proposition, "Not A," and
come to believe that the two may be combined. At West Point, he
seemed to want to declare a policy and take it back in a single
breath. But there are circles that can't be squared; and it is
with war as with other fatal commitments: the way in is not the way
out.
