The Destiny of Barack Obama William Pfaff

The Destiny of Barack Obama
William Pfaff
Paris, December 3, 2009 – There was much disappointment on Tuesday night about Barack Obama’s decision to widen the war in Afghanistan, but there can have been no real surprise. This was not a decision on foreign or military policy. It was a matter of domestic politics.

Mr. Obama was elected to the presidency after making a promise that he would fight the “right war” in Afghanistan while shutting down the “wrong” war in Iraq. Once elected, he could scarcely have said that he had a made a mistake and discovered that they were both the wrong wars, and he was shutting them both down. There is in any case no reason to think that he had reached such a conclusion.

No doubt it was on the recommendations of Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Central Command commandant General David Petraeus that he named General Stanley McChrystal to the Afghanistan command and sent him to Kabul to assess the situation. Immediately on the general’s return his report was leaked, quoting him as saying that he required another 40,000 troops “or else he could not guarantee victory.” (He said the day after the president’s speech this week, that the promised reinforcement would be “sufficient.”)

The newly elected president, wholly lacking military experience, preoccupied by world economic crisis and his plans for health reform, found himself exactly where the currently dominant faction in the Pentagon, which enjoys the support of a Neo-Conservatism risen from its tomb, has wanted to have him.

For it, Afghanistan is not only the war at hand, but offers an opportunity for retroactive vindication with respect to the Vietnam war. Many believe that the Vietnam defeat was caused by a collective stab in the back by the press and television, Congress, and the Nixon administration, which negotiated the agreement with Hanoi by which the United States abandoned that war at the moment when, in these military critics’ view, victory had become possible.



Generals Petraeus and McChrystal are the military men of the hour, buoyed by the thus-far successful “surge” in Iraq and the apparent gain for America of a permanent strategic base in Iraq. They are now ready to deliver the success of a pacified and reconstructed Afghanistan and – why not? – Pakistan.

That they will do so, is open to the most serious doubt. But they have their chance.

What they perhaps do not fully appreciate is that by giving them all that they have wanted, the president has caused them to deliver themselves into his own hands. They have to succeed. But suppose that the troops do not start coming home from Afghanistan in 2011? Suppose the campaign has not gone well? Suppose that General McChrystal finds it necessary to ask for still more reinforcements?

Suppose – and this is the most ominous possibility – the war has caused crisis or political collapse in Pakistan? Suppose that India has become involved, as quite possibly could happen?

During the last ten months Barack Obama has been in roughly the position Lyndon Johnson found himself in following the assassination of John Kennedy in 1963. Johnson had a huge agenda of social reforms, including his civil rights legislation, with which he intended to assure himself a place in history alongside that of Franklin Roosevelt.

He feared that if he refused combat intervention in Vietnam, as a country politician from Texas, vulgar and populist in instincts, he would be savaged for his foreign policy “cowardice” and lack of sophistication by the “Harvard crowd” who dominated the foreign policy establishment. This fear was justified.

He was told that he had to save the nation’s honor. The staff he had inherited from Kennedy finally convinced him that he had to send new troops to Vietnam and escalate the war. The outcome is known.

Johnson, disheartened, in 1968 declined to run for reelection. He died of a heart attack in 1973. Richard Nixon was elected president in 1968, and further escalated the war, invading Cambodia. The outcome of that is well known too.

© Copyright 2009 by Tribune Media Services International. All Rights Reserved.


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