Is it reasonable to assert, as President Obama did the other day, that, the ‘wave of war is receding’? According to this editorial from Brazil’s Estadao, while the last few years have proven the ‘folly’ of Bush’s ‘war against terrorists,’ President Obama’s belief that the ‘tide of war’ is receding may well turn out to be just as far fetched.
The Estadao editorial says in part:
In one of his innumerable spirited phrases, English essayist Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) said that nothing more wonderfully concentrates a man’s mind than the sure knowledge that he is to be hanged in the morning. One might add, to paraphrase, that there is nothing like the risk of electoral defeat to concentrate a political leader’s mind on what bothers his fellow citizens. There is little doubt that it was this that weighed most on the mind of U.S. President Barack Obama when he made his decision to accelerate the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan.
The U.S. is not particularly distinguished by having a pacifist population. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 brought Bush stratospheric levels of popularity. “The greatest lie ever told,” as one American critic called the White House pretext for ousting dictator Saddam Hussein (who was never part of al-Qaeda), was taken as truth for years by an enthusiastic majority of citizens. If the majority now want some distance from Afghanistan, it is because they believe that al-Qaeda is contained and that the Taliban doesn’t represent – as they never have – a threat to U.S. security.
But more than that, they want a withdrawal because they don’t understand how a country already mired in a deep economic crisis without end in sight – and after they’ve contributed an astonishing $1.3 trillion to two wars – can spend $1 billion per month on a commitment, the meaning of which eludes them.
In truth, Obama inherited the extravagant bill attached to the supremacist vision of the Bush years, according to which terror must be fought in a “global war,” part of which was to export American-style institutions – and all this in years, not generations. The Afghan reality shows the folly of such a conception. If, as Saint Augustine said, the object of war is to create the best possible conditions for peace, then the result of the American enterprise in Central Asia is a fiasco. Of the 40,000 Taliban, less than 2,000 have joined the Westerners. And neighboring Pakistan has become an even more doubtful ally after the operation to kill bin Laden on its territory. Even so, Obama made his boldest bet yet, in the hope that, as he said, the “wave of war is receding,” rather than rising higher.
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