Frank Rich: Obama's Logic Is No Match for Afghanistan

[bigtree]

December 5, 2009

AFTER the dramatic three-month buildup, you’d think that Barack Obama’s speech announcing his policy for Afghanistan would be the most significant news story of the moment. History may take a different view. When we look back at this turning point in America’s longest war, we may discover that a relatively trivial White House incident, the gate-crashing by a couple of fame-seeking bozos, was the more telling omen of what was to come.

Obama’s speech, for all its thoughtfulness and sporadic eloquence, was a failure at its central mission. On its own terms, as both policy and rhetoric, it didn’t make the case for escalating our involvement in Afghanistan. It’s doubtful that the president’s words moved the needle of public opinion wildly in any direction for a country that has tuned out Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq alike while panicking about where the next job is coming from.

You can think the speech failed without questioning Obama’s motives. I don’t buy the criticism that he contrived a cynical political potpourri to pander to every side in the debate over the war. Nor was his decision to escalate mandated by his campaign stand positing Afghanistan as a just war in contrast to the folly of Iraq. Nor was he intimidated by received Beltway opinion, which, echoing Dick Cheney, accused him of dithering. (“The urgent necessity is to make a decision — whether or not it is right,” wrote the Dean of D.C. punditry, David Broder.)

Obama’s speech struck me as the sincere product of serious deliberations, an earnest attempt to apply his formidable intelligence to one of the most daunting Rubik’s Cubes of foreign policy America has ever known. But some circles of hell can’t be squared. What he’s ended up with is a too-clever-by-half pushmi-pullyu holding action that lacks both a credible exit strategy and the commitment of its two most essential partners, a legitimate Afghan government and the American people. Obama’s failure illuminated the limits of even his great powers of reason.


read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/06/opinion/06rich.html?pagewanted=print

[leftstreet]

1. K&invisibleR

[mcablue]

2. My favorite part

"Finally, the notion that we are still fighting in Afghanistan because the 9/11 attacks originated there is based on the fallacy that our terrorist enemies are so stupid they have remained frozen in place since 2001. Most Americans know that they are no more static than we are. Obama acknowledged as much in citing such other Qaeda havens as Somalia (the site of a devastating insurgent suicide bombing on Thursday) and Yemen."

[eleny]

9. I found this quite moving...

"...the only sacrifice he cited in the entire speech was addressed to his audience at West Point, not the general public..."

[bvar22]

3. K&R

Meet Hamid Karzai
or as Obama calls him, "The Government of Afghanistan".

He was appointed by Bush the Lesser to run Afghanistan.
He was one of the most despicable criminals in The World,
But NOW we like him so much
that our children will be dying to keep him in power.

[FrenchieCat]

4. Where do I remember this guy from? hmmmm......

in his March 4 column (subscription required), New York Times op-ed columnist Frank Rich asserted that Giuliani had not been a "cheerleader" for President Bush's decision to invade Iraq. Rich did not define what he meant by "cheerleader," but in 2002, Giuliani repeatedly called for regime change in Iraq "earlier" rather than "later." Rich also suggested that "o voters, war history begins and ends with the war against the enemy that actually attacked America on 9/11," even though Giuliani has, over the last five years, repeatedly tied the Iraq war to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
http://mediamatters.org/mobile/research/200703060004

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Noun + Verb + 9/11 + Iran = Democrats’ Defeat?

By FRANK RICH
Published: November 4, 2007
what happens if President Bush does not bomb Iran? That is good news for the world, but potentially terrible news for the Democrats. If we do go to war in Iran, the election will indeed be a referendum on the results, which the Republican Party will own no matter whom it nominates for president. But if we don’t, the Democratic standard-bearer will have to take a clear stand on the defining issue of the race. As we saw once again at Tuesday night’s debate, the front-runner, Hillary Clinton, does not have one.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/04/opinion/04rich.html?_r=2&ex=1351828800&en=656b9dd498585bad&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&oref=slogin

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October 1, 2001
FRANK RICH: I think that there is a will to believe. I think it's very comparable to the trust that people feel about President Bush. In a time of crisis, we want to believe in these institutions. We love these institutions. We may not love all the agencies and all their vehicles of influence, but we're hoping for the best. We want to believe the FBI and the CIA and public health system and all this are up to the job. I'm not sure it has much of an ideological basis as people's fundamental feelings about government would change that much, say, if it was April 15 and tax time and the rest of it. But I think it's more of a sentimental feeling right now. We want them to succeed.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/terrorism/july-dec01/nyperspectives_10-01.html

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THAT’S RICH! There’s a word for Rich’s column on Gore. Readers know that word. Frank Rich was lying:
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 25, 2002

Normal people have a word for it: Lying. We refer to Frank Rich’s inexcusable column in Saturday’s New York Times. Rich—the self-admiring incompetent who, along with Maureen Dowd, ginned up that fateful Love Story nonsense—doesn’t believe you should vote for Al Gore. But instead of trying to argue his case, he quickly started spinning you blue:

RICH: The books celebrate The Family, the one cause every Democrat feels compelled to embrace after Monicagate. The reviews for the author are thumbs up…
Rich—who, incredibly, can’t stop talking about Monica Lewinsky!—implies that Gore is “embracing” the family due to Lewinsky concerns. But of course, the Gores have staged a Nashville “Family Reunion”—a forum on issues facing the family—every year since the early 90s (see below). Like all pundits, Rich knows this fact; he simply doesn’t want you to know it. So he dumps the fact from his piece. Prepare yourself for a dark, mordant chuckle: In this baldly dissembling way, Rich warns you about Al Gore’s character!
But this was just the great scribe’s warm-up. His nugget deception begins soon after. “The new, spontaneous post-wooden Gore is determined to be spontaneous if it kills him,” Rich says. Then the brilliant, far-seeing scribe presents this rank piece of deception:

RICH (pgh 3): But it took Katie Couric all of three minutes to uncover the old Al Gore lurking inside the latest model. When he protested that he wouldn’t really, really decide whether to run for president until after the holidays, she spoke for many viewers by responding, “Why am I having a hard time believing that wholeheartedly?” Then came the Gore equivocation and hair-splitting that he perfected in the 2000 debates. Ms. Couric had to ask seven questions to pin him down on how he would “handle Saddam” if he were president. The answer? He said that President Bush was taking “the right course of action” by winning a unanimous Security Council vote. And now what? “I don’t know where this goes from here,” said Mr. Gore.
Rich is appalled by Gore’s equivocation. “f Mr. Gore…is going to be taken seriously by voters, ‘I don’t know where this goes from here’ will hardly do,” he thunders.
But did Gore “equivocate” or “split hairs” with Couric? Why don’t we report, letting you decide? Below, we present the official NBC transcript of the exchange Rich describes. For clarity, we have numbered Couric and Gore’s Q-and-A’s. Was Rich right? Did it take seven questions to get Gore to speak? Normal people have a word for such a claim. That word is a simple one: Lying.
http://www.dailyhowler.com/dh112502.shtml

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Personally, I think that Frank Rich is pundit head personified.
As long as you don't go back in time, you can think he always got it right....
or perhaps he's just there to influence those who want to get it wrong.

[mcablue]

5. You have praised Frank Rich's work in the past

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x4624414#4627657

[FrenchieCat]

10. Because he was looking at the truly totally obvious,

not attempting to determine the future,
and making pronouncements in that one.

But, I have read up on him since,
And starting with Gore, I don't think he know shit,
other than what's staring him in the face....
and we all know that.

[bigtree]

6. meh

. . . he's mostly respectful of the president's prerogative while gently criticizing his actual policy. So sensitive . . .

[chill_wind]

7. What's the mission?

If the enemy in Afghanistan today threatens the American homeland as the Viet Cong never did, we should be all in, according to Obama’s logic. So why aren’t we? The answer is not merely that Afghans don’t want us as occupiers. It’s that such a mission would require a commensurate national sacrifice. One big difference between the war in Vietnam and the war in Afghanistan that the president conspicuously left unmentioned on Tuesday is the draft. Given that conscription is not about to be revived, we’d have to spend money, lots more money, to recruit the troops needed for the full effort Obama’s own argument calls for.

Which again leads us back to the ghosts of Vietnam. As L.B.J. learned the hard way, we can’t have both guns and the butter of big domestic projects, from health care to desperately needed jobs programs. We have to make choices. Obama paid lip service to that point, but the only sacrifice he cited in the entire speech was addressed to his audience at West Point, not the general public — the burden borne by the military and military families. While the president didn’t tell American civilians to revel in tax cuts and go shopping, as his predecessor did after 9/11, that may be a distinction without a difference. Obama’s promises to accomplish his ambitious plans for nation building at home while pursuing an expanded war sounded just as empty.

[California Griz]

8. We couldn't stop a rigged election here in the US

Why would anyone think we should have been able to do it there. When 2012 rolls around I'll make an informed decision on the outcome of Obama's tenure. I'd use my crystal ball but I had it too close to the TV when Palin came on and it cracked.

[pscot]

11. Smart people do dumb things

The Afghan escalation is just plain dumb. We don't have the resources. We don't really know what we're trying to accomplish there. And we don't have the will. The Afghanis have been at this since Genghis Khan blew into Kandahar 800 years ago. They'll be at it when the American empire is as dead as the Mongol empire.