Over the past five years, President Obama has ended two wars and brokered a deal with the most intransigent of the many oil-rich Muslim nations who regard the U.S. as largely if not entirely a damn infidel pain in the ass. Of course, he’s killed a couple thousand innocent civilians and wasted several hundred billion dollars along the way, but who’s counting?
I suppose that if you waterboarded the president, he might tell you that it was all necessary, and maybe a lot of it was. Democrats have been in a defensive crouch when it comes to defense ever since Ronnie Reagan started snapping off those salutes, and one can say that Obama played the Pentagon like a master. In case after case, he gave them 90%+ of what they asked for—so much that they couldn’t in good conscience complain that they’d been short-changed. And in case after case the military came up short, stumbling out of first Iraq and now Afghanistan as even they realized that no one was going to win any stars fighting those damn wars, because the damn American people just didn’t give a damn.
The president’s one great failure, of course, was Benghazi. It’s a measure of—well, it’s a measure of a lot of things—that the American people don’t care about the thousands of Americans, and the tens of thousands of non-Americans, who have died in Obama’s splendid little wars, but are outraged by the death of four civilians. The Republicans, naturally, don’t want to ask any of the real questions, like why it was considered necessary to topple the existing Libyan government in the first place, or why a “humanitarian” intervention required the establishment of a large CIA installation in Libya, which was quite possibly the proximate cause and target of the assault that led to Ambassador Stevens’ death.
But Stevens’ death, tragic as it was, clearly opened the president’s eyes to the downside of these “heroic” interventions, which still seem to fascinate the “experts,” who were almost unanimous in demanding something similar in Syria. But the president, whether cunning or clumsy, dared to invite the public to weigh in on the matter, by “consulting” with Congress before sending in the Marines. Rarely has “weakness” been so powerful. It quickly appeared that the American people are tired of the Middle East. The president then parleyed his surprise win into an agreement with Iran. Breaking bread with terrorists! Hey, only Ronald Reagan is allowed to do that!
We’re still spending about twice as much on defense as we need to. The president has announced a “pivot” towards Asia, offering the military the mouthwatering prospect of a fifty-year arms race with China. The obstacles to a long-term agreement with Iran are substantial. And the president is happy to cover for all the crimes committed by the Bush Administration. (And why not, since he’s committed plenty of his own?) But, for the time being, we have a president who can say “no” to AIPAC. And that’s something to see.
