Killing Machine (4 page)

The president, meanwhile, gave a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars in an attempt to shore up public opinion by urging the nation not to lose its will to win the fight, as had happened in Vietnam. Essential to the rationale for the surge, of course, was this rewriting of the narrative of the Vietnam War, with its new emphasis on how successful the military counterinsurgency strategy had been after General William Westmoreland had been removed from Saigon and sent back to the Pentagon. To make his point, Bush did something unusual, including in the speech a long section on the disastrous impact of British novelist Graham Greene’s
The Quiet American
, recently remade as a movie, on opinions about the American effort in Vietnam.

At key moments since World War II, the president began, critics and doubters had dismissed American policy in Asia as “hopeless and naive.” These feelings surfaced most dramatically during the Vietnam War, leading to a tragedy for the Vietnamese people when Saigon fell to the Communists. “In 1955, long before the United States entered the war, Graham Greene wrote a novel called, ‘The Quiet American.’ It was set in Saigon, and the main character was a young government agent named Alden Pyle. He was a symbol of American purpose and patriotism—and dangerous naivete. Another character describes Alden this way: ‘I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused.’ ”
⁸

As American involvement deepened with no resolution in sight, Bush went on, “the Graham Greene argument gathered some steam.” War critics insisted there would be no consequences for the Vietnamese if we pulled out. They were wrong. “Three decades later, there is a legitimate debate about how we got into the Vietnam War and how we left.” But the price of America’s withdrawal could not be ignored: it “was paid by millions of innocent citizens
whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like ‘boat people,’ ‘re-education camps,’ and ‘killing fields.’”

In other words, maybe there weren’t any WMDs in Iraq after all, but the Iraq War was still justified given Saddam Hussein’s loathsome regime, which had inflicted such terrible suffering on the Iraqi people. If America bailed out, Iraq could face even worse troubles, chaos being only one possibility—al Qaeda would still have a platform from which to both pursue its political goals and launch terrorist attacks on the West, or the Iranians might come in to take control. There had been only two democracies in the Far East before World War II, he said, Australia and New Zealand. “Today most of the nations in Asia are free, and its democracies reflect the diversity of the region.” The lesson for America in Iraq was obvious.

Obama, on the other hand, had yet to convince party leaders and the rank and file he could go beyond opposition to the Iraq War with a counternarrative to the Bush arguments, however skeptical Americans were about the current president’s message. Campaigning in New Hampshire in July 2007, Obama assailed Bush’s new surge strategy. It would only make things worse, he insisted. “Here’s what we know. The surge has not worked. And they [the Bush administration] said today, ‘Well, even in September, we’re going to need more time.’ So we’re going to kick this can all the way down to the next president, under the president’s plan.”
⁹
The only way to protect national security, said Obama, was to “hunt down and take out” terrorists worldwide. He even pegged their number at twenty thousand worldwide.

Ten days after his attack on the surge in New Hampshire, Obama delivered a long speech on foreign policy at the Wilson Center in Washington, D.C., designed to show he was a creative thinker on national security issues. He began by invoking his personal memory of 9/11. “It seemed all of the misery and all of the evil in the world were in that rolling black cloud, blocking out the September sun.” That morning of the black cloud we saw we were “no longer protected by our own power.” In years past, America had always turned tragedy into triumph. “An attack on Pearl Harbor led to a wave of freedom rolling across the Atlantic and Pacific.” And so it would have been
this time, too, but instead of finishing the job against al Qaeda in Afghanistan or launching “a comprehensive strategy to dry up the terrorists’ base of support,” the Bush administration insisted “the 21st century’s stateless terrorism could be defeated through the invasion and occupation of a state.” The White House had pursued a “deliberate strategy to misrepresent 9/11 to sell a war against a country that had nothing to do with 9/11.”
¹⁰

The problem, therefore, was not a lack of will to finish the job, but the need to pick the right enemy and the right way to go after them. So Obama felt he had to explain once more what he had meant at the 2002 Chicago rally in opposing the administration’s determination to go to war against Saddam Hussein. “I did not oppose all wars, I said. I was a strong supporter of the war in Afghanistan.” The war against Iraq should never have been waged; it only added to anti-Americanism throughout the Muslim world. “We are now less safe than we were before 9/11.” However well he succeeded in dispelling lingering notions that he was a “peacenik,” he still had to go beyond critiques of a failed strategy. In doing so, however, Obama’s argument foreshortened history to the post–9/11 years, so that everything turned on how mishandling the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon had brought about such a sorry state of affairs. In effect, he was playing on Bush’s home ground, quarreling only about the play calling for the American team. Pakistan’s ambiguous role in Afghanistan, the supposed Iranian quest for atomic weapons, the threats to Israel’s existence—all these and more, he argued, were the result of a misguided decision to invade Iraq.

Bush had actually created new threats to the United States by invading Iraq, Obama asserted, yet he all but adopted the White House view that terrorists were at war with the United States—and everyone else—because they hated American freedoms. “They kill man, woman and child; Christian and Hindu; Jew and Muslim. They seek to create a repressive caliphate.” The Bush administration had used similar language to explain what Saddam Hussein intended to do with the phantom WMDs. “This caliphate,” Bush had averred, “would be a totalitarian Islamic empire encompassing
all current and former Muslim lands, stretching from Europe to North Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia.”
¹¹
Apparently there was there nothing wrong with Bush’s assessment of the threat, then, only that he had gone to war against the wrong country. Beyond that difference, however, Obama had accepted the basic Cold War formulation that America faced an implacable ideological threat. Instead of international Communism, however, now it emanated from extremist elements led by al Qaeda and the Taliban.

They operated out of “tribal regions” in northwest Pakistan, the place where the 9/11 attacks had been imagined and ordered. It was difficult terrain for Westerners seeking to find and defeat an enemy.

This is the wild frontier of our globalized world. There are wind swept deserts, and cave-dotted mountains. There are tribes that see borders as nothing more than lines on a map, and governments as forces that come and go. There are blood ties deeper than alliances of convenience, and pockets of extremism that follow religion to violence. It’s a tough place.
¹²

How did this description of the problem confronting the United States differ from neoconservative theories? One might say it updated them by positing an even more encompassing global ambition to meet the challenge of places left behind in the West’s attempts at a postimperial organization of the world political economy. Obama’s speech showed familiarity with the basics of the new counterinsurgency strategy and implied that he knew how to do it. Force, Obama argued, was only part of the solution. Success would require extending economic aid to “fund projects at the local level to impact ordinary Afghans,” and “better performance from the Afghan government” on all levels. Defeating extremism required “increased international support to develop the rule of law across the country.” Listed here were almost all elements of nation building, precisely the sort of open-ended commitment that he had criticized the Bush administration for undertaking in Iraq—by all accounts a much more modernizedn ationt hanA fghanistan.
¹³

He promised to send a clear message the United States would not turn its back on Afghanistan a third time, as it had twice before—first when it abandoned the country after the Soviet Union withdrew, and then again when it drove the Taliban from Kabul, leaving the country to civil war and anarchy. Those accusations were true enough, of course: in both cases Washington had lost interest in Afghanistan when the immediate objective had been achieved. “It is time to turn the page,” said Obama. “When I am President, we will wage the war that has to be won with a comprehensive strategy with five elements: getting out of Iraq and on to the right battlefield in Afghanistan and Pakistan; developing the capabilities and partnerships we need to take out the terrorists and the world’s most deadly weapons; engaging the world to dry up support for terror and extremism; restoring our values; and securing a more resilient homeland.”
¹⁴

It was a far more ambitious—and specific—foreign policy agenda than any candidate had put forth in the recent past. George W. Bush in 2000 had eschewed any desire for “nation building,” it should be remembered, and backed into it out of desperation in Iraq when the supposed weapons of mass destruction never turned up in order to justify his war. Obama here embraced nation building with enthusiasm as the right way to eliminate terrorism, while passing over the objection that neither Afghanistan nor Pakistan had ever had control in those regions he identified as the source of the threat, the area the British once called the Northwest Frontier.

While the first step had to be getting out of Iraq, he said, referring to a resolution submitted to the Senate calling for withdrawal of “all combat brigades by March 31, 2008,” as president he would deploy “at least” two additional brigades to reinforce counterterror ism operations and support NATO’s efforts against the Taliban in Afghanistan.

I will not hesitate to use military force to take out terrorists who pose a direct threat to America. This requires a broader set of capabilities, as outlined in the Army and Marine Corps’s new counter-insurgency manual. I will ensure that our military becomes
more stealth[y], agile, and lethal in its ability to capture or kill terrorists. We need to recruit, train, and equip our armed forces to better target terrorists, and to help foreign militaries to do the same. This must include a program to bolster our ability to speak different languages, understand different cultures, and coordinate complex missions with our civilian agencies.
¹⁵

Lest there be any doubt he had become familiar with the recommendations of the counterinsurgency manual he referred to (Field Manual 3-24), Obama added: “I will increase both the numbers and capabilities of our diplomats, development experts, and other civilians who can work alongside our military. We can’t just say there is no military solution to these problems. We need to integrate all aspects of American might.”

Obama and the Surge

On September 10, 2007, a day before congressional testimony on the effects of the surge was to begin, the progressive lobbying organization MoveOn ran a full-page ad in the
New York Times
accusing Petraeus of “cooking the books for the White House” in his report to Congress on the progress made since the troop increase began. The ad asked: “General Petraeus or General Betray Us?”

Republican presidential candidates jumped all over the ad. Arizona senator John McCain called it a “McCarthyite attack on an American patriot. . . . No matter where you stand on the war, we should all agree on the character and decency of this exceptional American.” Former senator Fred Thompson, a long shot for the nomination, called the ad “outrageous” and said, “
MoveOn.org
has today, in effect, said that the General leading our brave troops in Iraq is betraying his country. This is the group that funds the Democratic Party. I call upon the Democratic Party and all of the Democratic candidates for President to repudiate the libel of this patriotic American.”
¹⁶

Democrats protested the characterization and criticized Republicans for trying to divert attention from the substance of Petraeus’s
testimony, legitimate matters for debate. “Sen. Obama’s question is not about General Petraeus’s patriotism,” said a spokesman for the putative candidate. “It’s about his logic. There’s no evidence that this surge is producing the political progress needed to resolve the civil war in Iraq, or that it will be accomplished through more of the same.”
¹⁷

The next day Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, with the nation watching how Senator Obama would deal with the situation. Instead of asking brief questions to allow the two witnesses to expand on their written statements, Obama used his time to stake out a position that praised the general and American soldiers for their performance in Iraq, while still raising his main complaint that the mission could not be accomplished. He began, however, with a comment about the timing of the hearing. Holding it on the sixth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks confused the issues, he argued, and symbolically tied the war in Iraq to a response to the attacks. Beyond the argument over whether regime change had been a good idea—the case Condoleezza Rice, now secretary of state, was making in the court of elite opinion—stirring up emotions through such symbols served no good purpose in gauging what the next steps should be. Interestingly, Obama argued that the surge confused tactics with strategy. Yes, violence had been reduced some, but where was it all going? Obama cited the written statements offered by the witnesses to make a point about the improving situation in Anbar, where a shift had already begun by the time Petraeus arrived in Iraq (ultimately Petraeus wound up paying Sunni sheikhs and their followers millions of dollars to serve as neighborhood guards; the cash surge proved to be more useful there than the increased number of troops). Toward the end of his allotted time, Obama did ask a direct question: were there no criteria at all for deciding that it was time to leave Iraq?
¹⁸