David Brooks in the NYT:
Most of them have no doubt that the president is conducting an intelligent policy review. They have no doubt that he will come up with some plausible troop level.
They are not worried about his policy choices. Their concerns are more fundamental. They are worried about his determination.
These people, who follow the war for a living, who spend their days in military circles both here and in Afghanistan, have no idea if President Obama is committed to this effort. They have no idea if he is willing to stick by his decisions, explain the war to the American people and persevere through good times and bad.
Their first concerns are about Obama the man. They know he is intellectually sophisticated. They know he is capable of processing complicated arguments and weighing nuanced evidence.
But they do not know if he possesses the trait that is more important than intellectual sophistication and, in fact, stands in tension with it. They do not know if he possesses tenacity, the ability to fixate on a simple conviction and grip it, viscerally and unflinchingly, through complexity and confusion. They do not know if he possesses the obstinacy that guided Lincoln and Churchill, and which must guide all war presidents to some degree.
Adam Serwer in Tapped:
We’ve been hearing some version of the “is Obama tough enough” argument since he started running for president, and as always, it’s really less about Obama’s individual tenacity than whether or not he possesses the same sterling moral qualities that led the questioner to their principled beliefs about public policy. In other words, it’s not “is Obama tough enough” but “is Obama tough enough to do what I want him to do?” And in this case, Brooks wants Obama to show some Green Lantern-style willpower and let everyone know the U.S. is there to stay indefinitely.
“If the president cannot find that core conviction,” Brooks writes, “we should get out now. It would be shameful to deploy more troops only to withdraw them later.” Obviously that’s not the outcome Brooks wants, but you don’t even get the sense that Brooks thinks we should be leaving Afghanistan, you know, ever, or even under what circumstances he thinks that would be appropriate.
One choice would imply a lack of determination, while the other choice would reflect more Will, Grit, and Determination than Kaiser Soze? The stupidity here is palpable; if Obama were determined right now to withdraw every last soldier from Afghanistan, he’d earn not a whit of credit from the True Grit Brigade. Determination only, ever means one thing; more troops, more commitment, open ended, with no genuine evaluation of goals, means, or metrics.
I know that you can’t expect much from Brooks, or from the rest of the True Grit Brigade, but Jesus; we just had eight years of a President who put grit, determination, and will ahead of any effort to actually evaluate matters of policy, and NO ONE thinks that this brought about good outcomes. Why don’t we all get DETERMINED, and GRITTY, and use our INFLEXIBLE WILL to modulate down the stupid just a bit? Wouldn’t that maybe be helpful?
Obama needs to make a decision not about whether he has the tenacity, but whether the American people and future presidents will be willing to sustain a decades-long occupation of one of the least politically mature cultures in a mountainous and hard-to-reach landscape … with no guarantee of success even with the largest number of troops now envisaged. I think the question answers itself. But the institutional and political interests in sustaining this endeavor are far too great to resist. So a war with weak public support by a state already bankrupt in a country close to ungovernable will continue.
Which is how empires always collapse.
David Brooks today says he wanted to write a column about Obama’s pending decision over Afghanistan, and in order to write this column, this is what he tells us he did: ”For the past few days I have tried to do what journalists are supposed to do.” Sounds intrepid. What, exactly, is it that “journalists are supposed to”?
As he describes it, Brooks “called around to several of the smartest military experts [he] know[s] to get their views on these controversies.” These are people “who follow the war for a living.” He wrote down (at least some of) what they said. He then passed it on without quoting — or even identifying — a single one of these experts. That’s his whole column.
In a shocking coincidence, the views of these unnamed, handpicked, anonymous “experts” all happen to coincide perfectly with Brooks’s own warrior views and, more generally, with clichéd neoconservative pablum: Obama must prove that he’s just like Churchill and Lincoln — that he possesses the toughness and determination that tough guy War Presidents exude: ”tenacity, the ability to fixate on a simple conviction and grip it, viscerally and unflinchingly, through complexity and confusion” — which can only happen if he escalates the war in Afghanistan. If he doesn’t do that, it will that prove Obama is weak and too “intellectually sophisticated” to be a real War President. ”Their first concerns are about Obama the man,” Brooks informs us about his invisible friends. The only thing missing from the trite Kristolian playbook is the accusation that Obama will be just like Neville Chamberlain if he doesn’t send more troops to vanquish the Afghan Hitlers.
Joan Walsh in Salon:
Partly it’s because Brooks likes to pretend to be open-minded and reasonable, while spouting neocon talking points, and occasionally liberals get pulled in by him. But today was trademark lazy ideological Brooks. As Glenn Greenwald notes, unbelievably he bragged about “doing what journalists are supposed to do” — which he defined as talking to a handful of anonymous pro-war sources, who uniformly criticized Obama’s inaction to date on McCrystal’s troop request.
That’s some brave shit. Not quite David Rohde brave, but hey, he made the calls! If it was unanimous, that means he didn’t call retired Marine Matthew Hoh, who resigned from a civilian post in Afghanistan this week because he said we can’t win, and our presense is only fueling the insurgency. Hoh told the Washington Post’s Karen de Young he’s “not some peacenik, pot-smoking hippie who wants everyone to be in love” and that he believes “there are plenty of dudes who need to be killed,” adding: “I was never more happy than when our Iraq team whacked a bunch of guys.”
That question of toughness, macho, manhood, always comes up when we discuss what it would mean for Obama to get realistic about his two wars and get really serious about winding them down. David Brooks’ worst Obama slur in his Friday column was the quietly outrageous, ad hominem, Peggy Noonan-ish revelation that his unanimous pro-war sources don’t question Obama’s smarts or understanding: “Their first concerns are about Obama the man.” Oooooh. And here’s how Brooks defines manhood: “tenacity, the ability to fixate on a simple conviction and grip it, viscerally and unflinchingly, through complexity and confusion.”
Brooks might protest that he meant “man” as a stand-in for “person,” but it’s hard to imagine him writing that sentence about President Hillary Clinton and saying, “Their first concerns are about Clinton the woman.” Man equals warrior, and like Maureen Dowd before him, another Times columnist seems to be questioning Obama’s manhood.
Stephen Walt in Foreign Policy:
Now that Tom Friedman is expressing a few doubts about the Afghan War, David Brooks is ready to take over as cheerleader-in-chief for endless war in Central Asia. In his column today, he claims to have spoken with various “military experts” (without naming any of them, of course), and-surprise, surprise — all of them channel Brooks’ unsupported belief that the only thing that matters in Central Asia is Obama’s “determination.” There’s no analysis, no facts, no weighing of pros and cons, no attempt at cost-benefit analysis, and of course, no sources. Has Brooks bothered to read any of the recent studies of this problem — including Gen. McChrystal’s own assessment — which make it clear that we face a daunting task? Even those that favor continuing the war understand that victory is far from certain even if we do commit more resources and stay a long time.
This is the kind of “journalism” that gave the Times a black eye over Iraq, and you’d think Brooks (and his editors) would have been chastened by that experience. But I forgot: being a neoconservative pundit means never having to admit error, or apologize for the lives you’ve helped squander.
