Take a look at the comments thread for this post at OTB on the American people’s dwindling support for the war in Afghanistan. I find the comments genuinely remarkable. This, for example:
Obama is no more eager to continue this war than me but it’s hard (ie. Practically impossible) to go against establishment opinion in the Pentagon and State unless the climate is right.
There are several others in a similar vein.
The problem with taking that position is that Barack Obama ran very consistently on the platform that the war in Afghanistan was good and necessary, since being elected to office he has behaved as though he believed the war in Afghanistan were good and necessary, and he was repeated that frequently over the last two years. Do I need to produce evidence? There’s plenty around.
What’s astonishing to me is that I get the impression that those making these comments are the President’s supporters. Can you make such statements without claiming the President is lying? I would think that claiming that the President has been routinely and systematically lying to the American people and ordering American soldiers to their deaths solely for political gain was a scathing indictment but, apparently, it’s thought of as support.
I, on the other hand, believe that he has been telling the truth as he sees it. I think he’s wrong but I think he’s telling the truth.
Obama’s anti-war speech in 2002, when nobody outside of Chicago had ever heard of him, was striking in it’s reiteration of support for the war in Afghanistan, and even the willingness to take up arms himself. He no doubt was using his support to avoid the label of being a dove, and he also used his support to emphasize that his non-support for the Iraq war had significance.
But while I think he wanted to go to Washington in 2002, I do not believe he had Presidential ambitions, so I don’t think it was merely cynical positioning either.
I split the difference somewhat, thinking Candidate Obama quite likely believed what he was saying but came to realize shortly after taking office that the results sought in Afghanistan were unachievable. But, having talked up the national security interests at stake and facing Republicans likely to call him “weak” and worse — and, frankly, abetted in that task by the leadership of the armed forces — found himself with little political choice.
I’d stop short of calling that mendacious. But it’s well short of leadership, too.
With Obama it is always a choice you make in deciding who he is lying to.
I expected that his base believed that he was lying about his support for the war in Afghanistan. I thought they were wrong. The dithering and the feeble half surge, show that Obama’s Chicago cronies have been working overtime to cripple our efforts in Afghanistan.
And I may have got Obama wrong.