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. . . . 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.
You see this argument a lot these days. We have to persevere. We have to follow through on our commitments. We have to show our allies that they can trust us. We can't cut and run.
Well, maybe, but whenever you hear this kind of argument, you have to remember that arguments like this are the reason World War I was fought. There wasn't any particular issue at stake in the Great War, but all sides felt that they had to stick to their agreements and back up their words with deeds and generally show that they were tough and serious and meant what they said. Millions of dead men later, with Europe in ruins, they had proved their point. They were serious, and they followed through.
But for what? Before we get our backs up about toughness and determination and following through, shouldn't we have something worth fighting for? Some goal worth achieving that we can actually achieve? Because if not, determination is just the route to the Somme and Verdun.
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Update: Amy Davidson's comment on Brooks' essay was, "babbling about imposing one’s will, as if war were a matter of Ray Lewis making a goal line stand, does not tell us anything about what, exactly, we’re doing in Afghanistan."
4 comments:
"all sides felt that they had to stick to their agreements and back up their words with deeds and generally show that they were tough and serious and meant what they said"
This is, as I'm sure you were aware when you wrote it, a radically simplifying depiction of the powers' motives in fighting the First World War. It is, I suppose, a reasonable depiction of the powers' motives in 1914, and of the Russians' motives throughout. But after 1914, the major issue was that the German leadership insisted on keeping what they had gained, or a good portion of it, and the French and British leadership insisted on a status quo ante. In all three cases the leaders had support among their masses, though in Germany's case at least this did not necessarily amount to a voting majority.
There is a difference between fighting a war simply to show you're "determined," and fighting a war because you're "determined" on some actual objective. Time was, our objective in Afghanistan was to destroy al-Qaeda and the Taliban. I would say that if anyone showed too little determination in this, it was the Bush administration.
Consider this situation, which I actually faced: what would you say if your 8-year-old son asked you what World War I was about?
I was stumped and for a long time said nothing. I ended up saying, "It was about who would be boss in Europe."
Sure, once the war started there were all sorts of "issues," from the boundaries of Belgium to compensation for submarine warfare. But the war started because no one would back down from fear of seeming weak.
"Who would be boss of Europe" sounds like an admirable description. That is clearly the issue behind the stubborn stances of Britain, France, and Germany.
But I think the formulation "Sure, once the war started there were all sorts of "issues,"" is not so fortunate. Without the substance of those issues, you would not have had the deeper issue of who would be boss of Europe. If the Germans had not made that progress in 1914, they would have clearly settled for a status quo ante peace. The point is I don't think it will do among adults to trivialize issues like Belgium; without such fetishistic, symbolic triggers, "deeper" issues do not come to the fore.
In some cases, those deeper issues would not exist without the superficial, symbolic ones. For example, on a very important level (for real-world policymakers, the only important one), the Israeli-Palestinian quarrel is not about "power" symbolized by, say, Jerusalem. It's about Jerusalem.
I think this is Brooks' real fallacy. He's trying to make the issue to be "determination." But unless you can convince Americans that destroying al-Qaeda and the Taliban is worth it, then there's no point in determination.
I suppose I've come full circle and am agreeing with you. But I still don't think showing determination sums up the three western powers' motives after 1914.
Thinking this over, I seem to remember that when it was suggested to the German leadership that they give back the land they had taken, they said that this would dishonor the sacrifice of the men who had died to take it. That is, the thousands of war dead made it harder for them to compromise. The fact that the war had started made it harder to reach peace. Not that this was the only issue, but I think that the war had built up a momentum that made backing down ever more difficult.
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