The successful raid on Osama bin Laden has handed President Obama a major opportunity to advance his foreign and domestic policy goals, please his liberal base, and make a major dent in the budget deficit.
The only question is whether he will have the political wisdom to build on this latest success.
Talking Points Memo reports this week that our congressman, Peter Welch, is one of the leaders of a bipartisan group calling on Obama to use the death of bin Laden as an opportunity to redirect the effort in Afghanistan from nation-building, and the quagmire of fighting a war against an indigenous force on behalf of a corrupt government (gee, sound familiar?) to what the war was intended to do: roll up and destroy the remaining al Qaeda forces in the country.
Whether Obama will capitalize on his success in Abbottabad remains to be seen, and in part it depends on secret developments based on the intelligence collected in the raid. Nevertheless, for someone who seemed like a smart political operative,, Obama has seemed strangely unable to develop and follow through on strategies, building on success in ways that not only advance his strategic goals but also enhance his political support.
This month Obama is riding a wave of increased support based on the bin Laden raid, but polling still suggests severe weaknesses. Redirecting the Afghanistan effort can address these weaknesses in a number of ways:
==>It can stop an unwinnable effort, the aforementioned quagmire, and redirect those energies to something that makes sense to people.
==>It will cost less than the war in Afghanistan. To a degree, Obama is a victim of his own honesty, because unlike Bush he has actually put the wars in the budget. A smaller, more targeted Afghanistan mission will be less costly than the current open-ended and inconclusive mission.
==>It can energize his base. Almost every day we hear from young or progressive activists, the people who walked the streets and worked the phone banks and the interwebs for Obama, saying that they will not lift a finger for him next year. A concrete move away from the failed Bush policy in Afghanistan can help get back those activists whose work will be needed to win in 2012.
As I said at the beginning, President Obama deserves the credit for getting bin Laden. Peter Welch has shown him the way to use that success to extract the United States from our Twenty-First Century Vietnamand keep his presidency moving forward.
Let's hope he has the wisdom to follow that lead.
Barbara Tuchman wrote a book about wars from the Trojan War to Vietnam that were not in ‘the national interest’ of the nation’s waging them. Of course, she was viewing these wars as National Policy as opposed to today’s ‘International Corporate Policy” wars.
But, if you look at us in Afghanistan & Iraq today in the old fashioned way, that is, wars not in our National Interest policy-wise and wars being fought ‘stupidly’ military-wise, you have to say, like the Brits should have said 1n 1778 and we should have said in 1968, we are in the march of folly.
These are wars that can never be won. If we were still in Nam today, the VC and NVA would still be fighting us.
Iraq and Afghanistan are not Germany and Japan in WWII. And you know, our generals and admirals fucked-up quite a bit on the road to victory then. A lot more people got killed in WWII (military and civilians) than should have been, but if those same generals and admirals were around today, I’m sure they’d see our policy and tactics as totally absurd, and not capable of producing any strategic victory, while at the same time weakening the nation’s overall economic, diplomatic, and military strength.
In other words, purely in the ‘battlefield’ sense, we are DUMBER THAN A BOX OF ROCKS! We are not going to ‘win’ anything in Iraq or Afghanistan (or anywhere else) because you don’t win battles or wars by being stupid. Duh…