Obama seeks to dodge another Vietnam in Afghanistan
Photo credit: Getty Images File / March 2002 | Tuesday night, President Barack Obama announced a 30,000 troop surge in Afghanistan.
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President Barack Obama
War in Afghanistan
Wars can make or break presidencies, and Barack Obama knows it.
Think of Truman in Korea, LBJ and Nixon in Vietnam, George W. Bush in Iraq, and how a brief but failed Iran rescue mission became one of the most remembered fiascos of the Carter years.
The enduring political calculus is: Americans will rally behind leadership when the nation is attacked but will not sign up - in advance - for an open-ended foreign involvement based on an abstraction.
So it was unsurprising that Obama put a lot of his effort Tuesday night into trying to convince the public that this further escalation would last a reasonably short time and justify itself with specific results.
Speaking to sober-faced cadets seated stiffly in uniform, he said he hopes for the start of a gradual withdrawal within 18 months - after sending in 30,000 more troops.
Obama launched a sort of verbal pre-emptive strike on some of his critics. He accused those who'd call this "another Vietnam" of "a false reading of history." He recalled the 9/11 attacks. He said the U.S. and allies in Afghanistan are "not facing a broad-based popular insurgency" and that we have 43 nations backing us.
Obama must have been aware that in a broad way, he was making some of the same basic arguments the White House deployed during Vietnam: The enemy represents a cancer that can spread to neighboring states, the other nation's forces must be prepared to take over the task, and we would not be doing this if our own security were not ultimately at stake.
His portion of the speech dedicated to the people of Afghanistan seemed intended for domestic consumption: "America seeks an end to this era of war and violence."
Obama did a bit of a feint on Iraq. Without mentioning the Bush administration, he mentioned, pointedly, how troop commitments against the Taliban became a fraction of those in Iraq. But he also said the "courage, grit and perseverance" of the military would allow the U.S. to wind down combat operations in Iraq.
On that point, he said an open-ended commitment of up to a decade, as some called for, would set "goals beyond what can be achieved at a reasonable cost."
In other appearances and addresses over his first year in office, Obama has played the role of a doctor telling people to wash their hands in the flu outbreak. He's been a mediator having beers with a Cambridge cop and the presidential friend the officer arrested. He's played the pedagogue, lecturing on the economics of health insurance.
Tuesday night had a distinctive, somber tone, as Obama became the latest president arguing the case for a foreign military escalation.
