Joshua Foust writes, “What Obama Didn’t Say” in the American Prospect
Source: The American Prospect, 6/22/2011
ASP Fellow Joshua Foust is a featured writer.
By Joshua Foust
“President Barack Obama marked a dramatic change in the war in Afghanistan in a major speech Wednesday night. In broad strokes, he laid out the framework for how to wind down the war: by declaring victory and transitioning control to the Afghans in the context of an Afghan-led political reconciliation with the insurgency. “We are meeting our goals,” he declared, and — in a surprising twist — endorsed a political reconciliation with the Taliban for the first time.
However, what President Obama did not say in his speech is almost as significant as what he did say.
For example, Obama did not once mention General David Petraeus, the current commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan. The current buzz about his nomination to be the new Director of Central Intelligence is that he will leave his post commanding the troops in Afghanistan early to set up shop at the CIA. For Obama, who seemed cowed by the combined personalities of his top generals in 2009, this is a major reversal of fortunes, and while unspoken was nevertheless an important context in his speech tonight.
Obama’s speech was truly grand in scope–he endorsed a sort of “pragmatism with an idealist streak,” a concept I’ve explored before for the Prospect. But he didn’t mention guiding principles: Americans value democracy and freedom, he insisted, like every other President before him, but left it up in the air how those values would be secured. In endorsing the war in Libya as a good model for low-impact intervention-on-the-cheap, Obama had to gloss over the substantial questions of strategy and operations that plague that still conflict four months after it began…”
