Dear Diary:
Home of the Brave
This is just to thank Hendrik Hertzberg for the Comment piece that opens this week’s Talk of the Town in The New Yorker.
A dismal process of elimination has left the President to design a strategy that he believes is the only one that offers a chance, in his words, “to bring this war to a successful conclusion.” Or, at least, a bearable one. Deliver a hard punch to the Taliban, break its momentum, and welcome its defectors; throw a bucket of cold water on the hapless and corrupt central government; carve out space and time for projects of civilian betterment and the development of Afghan forces that are capable of maintaining some semblance of security; forge “an effective partnership with Pakistan”—to list the elements of Obama’s strategy is to recognize its difficulty. It is full of internal tensions, most prominently between the buildup of troops and the eighteen-month timeline for beginning their withdrawal. (To the extent that the troop surge weakens the enemy while the timeline focusses minds in Kabul and Islamabad, however, that tension could be a creative one.) The plan does not, of course, guarantee success. The best that can be claimed for it is that it does not guarantee failure, as, in one form or another, the alternatives almost certainly do.
Sorry for the long passage; the entire essay is necessarily dense with the complications of the mess that, as Mr Hertzberg points out, the president has inherited from his predecessor.
Last week, when Mr Obama made his West Point speech, I seemed to hear a lot of liberal folks of my own age complaining that he had let them down. I’m afraid that I wanted to smack each and every one of them for the wilful simplification of their thinking. They seemed — rather smugly, if truth be told — to believe that their rebukes ought to shame the White House into issuing, at the very least, an abject apology.
Tragic simplification may be a disease that the president brought with him to Washington. Last fall, before the election, I was appalled to hear one friend after another talk of the Rapture. It wasn’t that Rapture, for, when it happened, my friends would still be here, and they’d still be wearing their clothes. But their Rapture did happen — or did it? That’s the problem. “I feel that we’re on the cusp of a new era,” they’d said. If they weren’t right, though, who’s fault would that be? I felt sorry for Barack Obama while he was still a candidate. It was clear that, within the year, he’d be up against some awful coalition of Lysistratas and Bacchantes. Thank heaven for Tiger Woods!
Does this sound misogynistic? I don’t mean it to be. It’s possible that women voice their political opinions in my hearing more willingly than men do. (Size matters.) At the same time, I observe that women make up their minds much more quickly than men do, probably because life obliges them to cope more pragmatically. The difficulty is that pragmatism is not expected of anyone here but the president. It’s everyone else’s job to strain, against the full current of stress and everyday confusion, to asppreciate the far greater stress and confusion of the issues that President Obama has to deal with. It is his job to turn these complications (messes) into complexities (necessarily imperfect solutions). Like Mr Hertzberg, I think that he is going about this job in a thoughtful, deliberate manner. He’s not perfect, but that’s not the problem. The problem is the behavior of his erstwhile supporters, who seem to have been partying on some leftover Bush-era Kool-Aid. Maybe they were drinking it then. Maybe they thought that all it would take for a new era to breast its cusp would be the election of a mule.
Well over forty years ago, The New Yorker‘s was the only establishment voice that was systematically committed to opposing the folly of our misadventure in Vietnam. Following the logic of that tradition, Mr Hertzberg might have called for the immediate pull-out from Afghanistan that so many “realist” liberals want. That he didn’t do so is all the proof I need that the most important periodical in the United States is still the home of the brave.