The speech
By Steve Coll
Wednesday, December 2, 2009 - 3:22 PM
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By Steve Coll
My thoughts on President Obama's Afghanistan speech are up over at Think Tank.
The President gave his generals what they asked for, essentially. He
also purchased from his own deeply skeptical party eighteen months of
political forbearance. That is the boiled-down news of the speech last
night.
As policy, the speech seemed hard-headed, realistic, careful, and in my oft-laundered view
it offered the right choice in a difficult situation. As rhetoric and
narrative, however, it disappointed. One problem was that the line of
Obama’s argument suffered from its embedded and deliberately
constructed contradictions. We are going in but we are going out; we
are fighting to defend a vital national interest, but only to the
extent that we can afford to do so. We must prevail in this struggle,
but we must recognize that we have other challenges that are perhaps
more important. All that duality does not lend itself to a smooth
narrative or an emotional crescendo.
The speech’s first section—justifying the length of the President’s
autumn policy review, and blaming his troubles, mutedly but
unmistakably, on his predecessor—seemed, in this setting, and given the
solemn and forward-looking character of the President’s decision,
unnecessarily defensive. At the least, this first passage was out of
rhetorical step with the rousing ending, which was by far the best
formal section of the writing. There the President summoned his gifts
to invoke a vision of national unity and America’s role in the world
that was consonant with his inspiring campaign for office. As uplifting
as they were, however, those passages actually treated a different
subject—they were about the kind of Presidency Obama wished to have,
and not very much about his decision to redouble his commitment to the
war in Afghanistan. The final section felt a little like the speech the
President would have wished to give from start to finish if he had not
inherited a deteriorating Afghan war and boxed himself into fighting
that war during the election campaign.
Steve Coll is the president of the New America Foundation and a staff writer at The New Yorker.
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