{"id":7566,"date":"2014-06-16T07:33:55","date_gmt":"2014-06-16T14:33:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/?p=7566"},"modified":"2014-06-16T07:33:55","modified_gmt":"2014-06-16T14:33:55","slug":"war-was-interested-in-obama","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/war-was-interested-in-obama\/","title":{"rendered":"War Was Interested in Obama"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ PJMedia\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n

\n
\"obama_trotsky_6-15-14-1\"
Photo by EdDriscoll.com via PJMedia<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Leon Trotsky probably did not quite write the legendary aphorism that \u201cyou may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.\u201d But whoever did, you get the point that no nation can always pick and choose when it wishes to be left alone.<\/p>\n

Barack Obama, however, never quite realized that truth, and so\u00a0just declared<\/a>\u00a0[1]<\/sup>\u00a0that \u201cthe world is less violent than it has ever been.\u201d He must have meant less violent in the sense that the bad guys are winning and as they do, the violence wanes \u2014 sort of like Europe around March 1941, when all was relatively quiet under the new continental Reich.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

One of Obama\u2019s talking points in the 2012 campaign included a boast that he had \u201cended\u201d the war in Iraq by bringing home every U.S. soldier that had been left to ensure the relative quiet and stability after the successful Petraeus surge. In the world of Obama, a war can be declared ended because he said so, given that no Americans were any longer directly involved. (Remind the ghosts of the recently beheaded in now al Qaeda-held Mosul that the war ended there in 2011.)<\/p>\n

Iraq is in flames, as is \u201clead from behind\u201d Libya, as is \u201cred line\u201d Syria, and as are those places where an al Qaeda \u201con the run\u201d has migrated. Had Obama been commander in chief in 1940, he would have assured us that the wars in Czechoslovakia, Poland, and France were \u201cover\u201d \u2014 as they were in a sense for those who lost them, but as they were not for those next in line.<\/p>\n

Of course, the Maliki government\u00a0owns most of the blame<\/a>\u00a0[2]<\/sup>\u00a0for the spreading destruction of Iraq. Its retrograde exclusion of Sunnis from meaningful government helped to offer a fertile landscape to a resurgent al Qaeda. Now in extremis he seeks U.S. help. But Maliki\u2019s pathetic past chauvinistic posturing over the status of forces agreement made it easy for Obama to pull out. (Hint to former U.S. clients: never horse-trade with Barack Obama over a needed U.S. military presence by threatening to eject all Americans; he will gladly call your bluff and leave every time.)<\/p>\n

What, then, happened to\u00a0Joe Biden\u2019s boast<\/a>\u00a0[3]<\/sup>\u00a0that Iraq \u201ccould be one of the great achievements of this administration\u201d? Biden said this after the successful Bush-Petraeus surge (that he had opposed and\u00a0declared a failure<\/a>\u00a0[4]<\/sup>) had ensured a relatively quiet country when Obama assumed office.<\/p>\n

We know the predictable Obama script for Afghanistan. He \u201cended\u201d that conflict too, or at least he will have by 2016. His habit in that accordion war was to contextualize every surge, escalation, or new operation in Afghanistan by promising a date when we would leave or deescalate. Behind the recent quietude in drone missions and the Bergdahl swap, we see Obama at work \u201cending\u201d the war in the following actions: We talk with the Taliban; we deliver to them their bloodiest cutthroats (captured at a cost in American blood and treasure); and we wink that we will not be so offensive-minded as in the past.<\/p>\n

In exchange, the Taliban promise to behave and dial down their barbarism until we \u201cend\u201d the war and are gone. Then, like Saigon in 1975, all hell breaks lose and the executions begin. How odd: we went into a chaotic Libya to stop the killing and were about to go into bloody Syria to stop the killing \u2014 and left a quiet Iraq to ensure it.<\/p>\n

So older Americans who remember 1975 will recognize the outlines of the looming Afghan tragedy. Hundreds of thousands of refugees will head out of the country. Millions camped on hillsides will want to reach the U.S. Afghanistan has no seacoast, so we will not be able to call the escapees \u201cboat people.\u201d Ending two wars will mean that our allies would lose both and eventual enemy satiation with defeat and mass-scale murdering would ensure closure.<\/p>\n

Remember Libya? War was interested in Obama as well in Libya.\u00a0\u201cLeading from behind\u201d<\/a>\u00a0[5]<\/sup>\u00a0did not mean that we were not at war or that we did not in the off hours bomb the Gaddafites or violate the UN resolutions by going well beyond \u201chumanitarian aid\u201d and a \u201cno-fly zone.\u201d Islamic chaos followed and continues. Whatever we were doing in Benghazi, it was supposedly not war. Yet al Qaeda not only butchered our diplomatic personnel, but also used their cell phones to boast of the fact. \u00a0So we jailed a video maker and thus that war too was brought to a close.<\/p>\n

War was\u00a0sort of interested in Obama<\/a>\u00a0[6]<\/sup>\u00a0in Syria. But he ended that conflict when he promised to bomb Bashar Assad\u2019s gassers, and then not so much.<\/p>\n

The looming crisis with a soon-to-be-nuclear Iran is over too. We dropped tough sanctions, agreed to talk while centrifuges spun, and more or less took off the table any thought of military preemption. The result was Obama ended the tensions, and will leave it to others to deal with a theocratic bomb.<\/p>\n

Perhaps war in the South China Sea is interested in Obama, given that he most certainly is not interested in it. But trying to negotiate down U.S. nuclear strategic strength with Vladimir Putin (who does not, as we do, have clients who could easily become nuclear but choose not to because of U.S. strategic guarantees) and lecturing China enough to antagonize it without much else have all our friends worried. Either we redouble our efforts to assure Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, and Australia of our unshakeable resolve to protect them, or they will either eventually go nuclear or make the necessary arrangements with an ascendant China.<\/p>\n

Resetting Russia was a euphemism for dismantling what meager punishments we had imposed on Putin for invading Georgia. Consequently, reset ended whatever conflict we had with Vladimir Putin. And because the Crimea and Ukraine are \u201cfar off distant places\u201d \u2014 as are the Baltic states \u2014 Obama has assured us that those conflicts are now over as well.<\/p>\n

The war on terror?<\/p>\n

Obama ended that as well. He fought the first battles with the powerful weapon of euphemism. Terror ended when we simply renamed it \u201cworkplace violence\u201d or \u201cman caused disasters\u201d involving \u201coverseas contingency operations.\u201d The Islamic component vanished as well, when NASA announced a new effort\u00a0to reassure Muslims<\/a>\u00a0[7]<\/sup>\u00a0that we recognized their illustrious scientific past, when James Clapper rebranded the Muslim Brotherhood as largely secular, and when John Brennan assured us that jihad was almost anything other than the use of violence to further the spread of Islamic fundamentalism.<\/p>\n

Obama won the second phase of the war on terror by shrugging that stuff happens in the Middle East. It sure does. And now that war is winding down there too, as al Qaeda annexes petro-cities, loots banks, and dismantles nation states. (Obama made health care work when he pronounced the Affordable Care Act successful, solved the IRS scandal when he declared it without a \u201csmidgeon\u201d of scandal, fixed the VA mess by expressing his outrage, and ended the problem with the Bergdahl swap by characterizing it as another Washington drama of much to do about nothing.)<\/p>\n

As far as war and peace go, closure for Obama is when the United States is surrounded by war and confronted with looming conflicts, and yet has ended them all by declaring that we choose not to be interested in any of them. Obama is right about one thing: losing\u00a0is certainly a way<\/a>\u00a0[8]<\/sup>\u00a0of reducing the violence.<\/p>\n

Copyright \u00a9 2008 Works and Days. All rights reserved.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ PJMedia\u00a0 Leon Trotsky probably did not quite write the legendary aphorism that \u201cyou may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.\u201d But whoever did, you get the point that no nation can always pick and choose when it wishes to be left alone. Barack Obama, however, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[848,28,247,145,11,46,196,136,102,524],"tags":[161,12,1055,1080,88,197],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-1Y2","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":6411,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/obama-indicts-obama\/","url_meta":{"origin":7566,"position":0},"title":"Obama Indicts Obama","author":"victorhanson","date":"September 3, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/\u00a0PJ Media One of the problems that Barack Obama has in mounting an attack against the Assad regime is that the gambit violates every argument Barack Obama used against the Bush administration to establish his own anti-war candidacy. The hypocrisy is so stunning that it infuriates\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Commentary"","block_context":{"text":"Commentary","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/obama-administration\/commentary-obama-administration\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":7776,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/our-face-in-the-crowd\/","url_meta":{"origin":7566,"position":1},"title":"Our \u2018Face in the Crowd\u2019","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 18, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ PJMedia Elia Kazan\u2019s classic\u00a0A Face in the Crowd\u00a0[2]\u00a0is a good primer on Barack Obama\u2019s rise and fall. Lonesome Rhodes arises out of nowhere in the 1957 film, romancing the nation\u00a0as a phony populist\u00a0[3]\u00a0who serially spins yarns in the most folksy ways \u2014 confident that he\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "America's Future"","block_context":{"text":"America's Future","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/americas-future\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/obama_face_in_the_crowd_on_brick_wall_8-17-14-1.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":2454,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/time-for-a-foreign-policy-paradigm-shift\/","url_meta":{"origin":7566,"position":2},"title":"Time for a Foreign Policy Paradigm Shift","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 12, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton FrontPage Magazine The greatest danger in foreign policy is a reliance on worn out paradigms and unexamined assumptions. This received wisdom acts as a mental filter that ignores new developments and lets through only that information which fits the preordained narrative. For nearly forty years American\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3119,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-first-person-presidency\/","url_meta":{"origin":7566,"position":3},"title":"The First-Person Presidency","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 11, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online Here are a few excerpts from President Obama\u2019s speech on Sunday night about the killing of Osama bin Laden. \u201cTonight, I can report . . . And so shortly after taking office, I directed Leon Panetta . . . I was briefed on\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Foreign Policy"","block_context":{"text":"Foreign Policy","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/obama-administration\/foreign-policy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1720,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-war-on-terror-bush-without-the-stetson\/","url_meta":{"origin":7566,"position":4},"title":"The War on Terror–Bush Without the Stetson","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 13, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson NRO's\u00a0The Corner There is much to criticize about President Obama on foreign policy, but increasingly, despite all the \u201creset button\u201d rhetoric and the obligatory nods to the Left, his anti-terrorism policies are becoming near identical extensions (if in cynical fashion) of George Bush\u2019s.\u00a0 I can\u2019t think\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "April 2010"","block_context":{"text":"April 2010","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2010\/april-2010\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":7761,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-un-midas-touch\/","url_meta":{"origin":7566,"position":5},"title":"The Un-Midas Touch","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 11, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ PJMedia Everything that Barack Obama touches seems to turn to dross. Think of it for a minute.\u00a0He inherited a quiet Iraq\u00a0[1]\u00a0(no American combat deaths at all\u00a0in December 2009\u00a0[2]). Joe Biden bragged of the calm that it would be the administration\u2019s\u201cgreatest achievement.\u201d\u00a0[3]\u00a0But by pulling out all\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "The Middle East"","block_context":{"text":"The Middle East","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/obama_analyst_1-6-14-1.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7566"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7566"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7566\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7567,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7566\/revisions\/7567"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7566"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7566"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7566"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}