David Rieff: At Least President Bush Was Sincere About Afghanistan
[David Rieff is the author of eight books, including A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis.]
When President Obama named his cabinet, people harkened back to Lincoln and said that he had assembled a team of rivals. To put it charitably, this is an exaggeration. Lincoln brought not just his principal rival, William Seward, into his cabinet as secretary of state, he also brought in his two other main contenders for the Republican nomination for president in 1860. Salmon Chase, the party’s greatest and most uncompromising foe of slavery and an unjustly neglected American hero, was made secretary of the treasury, while Edward Bates became attorney general. In contrast, President Obama named only one rival to his cabinet, Hillary Clinton, and the ideological differences between them were far narrower than the ones that separated Lincoln from his rivals.
A more accurate account would describe the foreign policy of this administration as the work not of a team of rivals but of a coalition government, with, in effect, the president having subcontracted foreign policy to Mrs. Clinton and to Secretary of Defense Gates. An intermittent passivity has been a hallmark of this president from the moment the he stopped campaigning and started to try to govern. Nowhere is it more evident than in the conduct of foreign policy generally, and especially in the conduct of the wars in which the United States is now engaged. But the president is, as the cliché goes, the commander-in-chief. He cannot subcontract; when he tries to do so, the proper expression for what he is doing is abdicating his duty.
There is an old Washington adage that every administration will sooner or later make you nostalgic for its predecessor. I am not yet willing to go that far, if only because of Guantanamo and Katrina, which I do not believe it is hyperbole to say were crimes, not simply policy mistakes or errors in judgment. But the Obama administration’s simultaneous commitment to prosecuting the war in Afghanistan and its inability to define the end state that it is hoping to achieve there in any way that makes strategic let alone moral sense, does make one think of frying pans and fires. I feared George Bush’s strategic vision, and believed that it would lead the United States to disaster. But at least he had one. And there was nothing cynical about President Bush’s moral ambitions. However wrongheaded, at least he was sincere.
Obviously, sincerity is not everything. But insincerity is less than nothing...
Read entire article at New Republic
When President Obama named his cabinet, people harkened back to Lincoln and said that he had assembled a team of rivals. To put it charitably, this is an exaggeration. Lincoln brought not just his principal rival, William Seward, into his cabinet as secretary of state, he also brought in his two other main contenders for the Republican nomination for president in 1860. Salmon Chase, the party’s greatest and most uncompromising foe of slavery and an unjustly neglected American hero, was made secretary of the treasury, while Edward Bates became attorney general. In contrast, President Obama named only one rival to his cabinet, Hillary Clinton, and the ideological differences between them were far narrower than the ones that separated Lincoln from his rivals.
A more accurate account would describe the foreign policy of this administration as the work not of a team of rivals but of a coalition government, with, in effect, the president having subcontracted foreign policy to Mrs. Clinton and to Secretary of Defense Gates. An intermittent passivity has been a hallmark of this president from the moment the he stopped campaigning and started to try to govern. Nowhere is it more evident than in the conduct of foreign policy generally, and especially in the conduct of the wars in which the United States is now engaged. But the president is, as the cliché goes, the commander-in-chief. He cannot subcontract; when he tries to do so, the proper expression for what he is doing is abdicating his duty.
There is an old Washington adage that every administration will sooner or later make you nostalgic for its predecessor. I am not yet willing to go that far, if only because of Guantanamo and Katrina, which I do not believe it is hyperbole to say were crimes, not simply policy mistakes or errors in judgment. But the Obama administration’s simultaneous commitment to prosecuting the war in Afghanistan and its inability to define the end state that it is hoping to achieve there in any way that makes strategic let alone moral sense, does make one think of frying pans and fires. I feared George Bush’s strategic vision, and believed that it would lead the United States to disaster. But at least he had one. And there was nothing cynical about President Bush’s moral ambitions. However wrongheaded, at least he was sincere.
Obviously, sincerity is not everything. But insincerity is less than nothing...