I get emails.
Martin —
Last night, President Obama laid out his plan to defend our national interest by refocusing our efforts on three clear goals: defeating al Qaeda, stabilizing Pakistan, and breaking the Taliban’s momentum in Afghanistan.
To achieve these goals, the President has authorized the rapid deployment of 30,000 more troops in Afghanistan, with a firm commitment to begin bringing our troops home in 2011.
It’s a clean break from the failed Afghanistan policy of the Bush administration, and a new, focused strategy that can succeed…
…Thank you,
Vice President Joe Biden
The fascinating part of this is how boldly the Obama administration is attacking the Bush administration in their sales pitch for this policy. In fact, the president was so harsh in his speech last night that Donald Rumsfeld crawled out of his forced retirement to defend himself (with some success). Here we have the vice-president of the United States sending out a blast email to Obama’s supporters where he calls the policy a clean break with Bush’s failed policies. Most of us are not inclined to see it as anything of the sort. I do recognize that the new policy will be implemented by more competent people and that it involves a shift of approach, including major civilian and agricultural elements, and a more cooperative Pakistan (we hope). But it doesn’t look like a clean break. It looks like not enough change.
I don’t know how well the tactic of blaming the Bush administration for everything is going to work in the future. Even though it is true that Bush has so far screwed up everything he’s touched in his life, people get bored hearing about it.
And we wouldn’t want to bore people.
I was trying to think how to phrase it. People need to hear the truth, even if it is boring. And looking over the astonishing range of disastrous failures, incompetent fuckups, and deliberate malfeasance of the Cheney Administration, people don’t need to be bored they need to be outraged. If the
journalistsstenographers of the corporate media had done their damn jobs, they would be and would have been and maybe Cheney &co wouldn’t have gotten away with so much for so long. Maybe a Kerry administration could have cleaned up some of the mess before it got so bad.Imagine a Democratic administration with even a fraction of the Cheneyco record. The mighty Wurlitzer would have had lynch mobs in the streets by now. Instead they joined the parade with their best marching off to war music.
It would ring better to me if Obama had jettisoned the Bush crew from so many positions. But he didn’t. Bushies are everywhere in this Administration. Also, had he cracked on Bush to start with at the beginning, it would sound better. Now, 10 months in, not so much.
Separately, using Bush terminology and policy doesn’t help much, either. I would have chosen anything else but “surge”.
Still, telling the truth is a nice start.
But if they say that’s it’s change, doesn’t that make it so?
I think a lot of that language was as much for Pakistani and Afghani consumption as for his US audience:
“Those Bush guys totally sucked and both neglected and abused you! You are right to be mad, but we totally love you and would never hit you again..”
I think Bush himself has always understood that this would be his role (‘Wildman President’), so the dirty work could get done and allow a new President to change the relationship with occupied nations’ people just by being someone else… Rummy and the Dick The Bridge Troll keep popping up to remind us all how ‘sensible’ Obama is (when he continues the same policy).
I think it’s extremely important to constantly remind people that these were Bush’s problems. He hasn’t done it enough. Like robertdsc had said, I wish he did it a hell of a lot more in the beginning.
Yes, people might tire of it, but they can’t forget who put us here. Ronald Reagan continuously blasted Jimmy Carter for his entire 4 year term, even though most of the mess Carter left him was not his fault and out of his control.
I think it’s a good strategy. People probably forgot we were even in Afghanistan by like 2006…
I think the administration has no choice but to implicitly attack the previous administration’s handling of he conflict. At a minimum, the President has to tell us why we’re there, and what we hope to accomplish. You can’t talk about that without explaining how the situation has deteriorated so badly, which no matter how you try to be nice about it is going to come out as saying the previous administration left us with a mess. And if you’re going to ask for more troops, you owe it to the public to explain how what you’re doing is going to be different than what we’ve been doing for the last seven years, otherwise why should we continue a failed policy? And you can’t do that without implicitly saying that what you’re doing is better than what the previous administration did.
Besides, be careful when you say “people get bored about hearing about it.” Which people? You and I are very familiar with how badly Bush screwed everything up, but we’re not the ones that need to be reached. Bear in mind that the previous vice president, who ought to be embarrassed to show his face, is baldly and publicly attacking Obama for doing badly in Afghanistan, when the Bush administration bequeathed us a clusterfuck after having six years to deal with it. And he’s not laughed at when he does this, he’s given a public forum to air his views. So the picture may be crystal clear to you and me, but I don’t think it’s a part of the general accepted world view, and I think it could do with more repeating.
Finally, debating whether Obama’s policies are a “clean break” is playing with words; it all depends on what you mean by “clean break.” On one level, of course it isn’t. Obama accepts the view that America needs a huge military to protect our interests. So did every candidate in the last election who had a chance of winning. I’d love to have a President who was really radical, who’d make a real clean break, who’d question why are we spending hundreds of billions of dollars every year for such a huge military when the true monumental dangers we face are not from invading armies. But that person could not have been elected in this country. If Obama had announced we were immediately drawing down our troops in Afghanistan, despite the commitment of Nato, he’d have been just as unilateral (albeit in a good direction) as Bush was in invading Iraq.
On the other hand, Obama sure seems like a clean break to me given the extremity of the previous administration. The funny thing is that foreign policy realism, stating and pursuing our self interest as a country, used to be associated with Republicans. But now they’ve gone of the deep end; in Iraq they had mad visions of creating a revolution in the middle east by overthrowing Saddam and instituting what would be a shining example of democracy in that part of the world. It is bizarre how things have evolved.
The more the policy remains the same, the more you need to emphasize what little differences might be there – like the “civilian” as opposed to military surge, the emphasis on working with Allies and Pakistan, like the supposed/proposed exit date and clearer enunciation of limited goals.
A lot of this may be little more than better PR to provide cover for his left flank, but Obama knows he now has only 18 months to deliver, and his fate is now in the hands of the Military, a corrupt Afghan regime, and a Pakistani regime which may have other priorities than propping up a US President.
This is the moment the President’s attempted bipartisanship ended up compromising him to the extent that he may have irreparably damaged his own base whilst achieving only hostages to fortune in return.
When historians come to document the decline of the Obama era, this is the moment they will take as their starting point.
Yes, a clean break. Like Lyndon Johnson made with John Kennedy in Vietnam.