As many have noted elsewhere, Barack Obama has ended the civil war in Iraq.
As of June 22, Obama was writing on his website that Iraq was mired in a civil war. These unfortunate and counterfactual statements have conveniently disappeared from the BarackObama.com over the last few days.
But what of Obama's new foreign policy obsession, namely victory in Afghanistan? In spite of Team Obama's much-touted mastery of the internet, BarackObama.com still has yet to deem "Afghanistan" as one of its "issues" that merits its own page. Other "issues" that warrant such attention include "Rural" and "Disabilities."
You know what? I'm beginning to think that stridently anti-war Professor Juan Cole is right and that Obama's heart really isn't into the whole Afghanistan adventure:
I don't know whether Senator Obama really wants to try to militarily occupy Afghanistan even more than is now being attempted. I wish he would talk to some old Russian officers who were there in the 1980s first. Of course, it may be that this announced strategy is political and for the purposes of having something to say when McCain accuses him of surrendering in Iraq.
If the Afghanistan gambit is sincere, I don't think it is good geostrategy. Afghanistan is far more unwinnable even than Iraq. If playing it up is politics, then it is dangerous politics. Presidents can become captive of their own record and end up having to commit to things because they made strong representations about them to the public.
I think Obama has a little bit of a tendency to try to fix his political problems by going overboard.
The professor is an Obama supporter, and if you read his entire post you'll sense he's oddly sanguine about Obama's Afghani ambitions. Why could that be? Perhaps enlightenment can be found in the most recent New York Times poll. 51% of respondents say that Obama says what he thinks people want to hear vs. 43% who say Obama says what he actually thinks.
In January, 65% of voters thought Obama spoke his mind and didn't cater to the clingy, bitter folkways of the electorate. Only 31% of respondents thought back then, back when Obama was still (as Allah puts it) a "Lightworker," that Obama just said whatever he thought people wanted to hear.
Thanks to serial displays of opportunism and ego, Barack Obama is threatening to turn himself into just another politician. That still may be enough in 2008 to get him into the White House, but the race looks a lot different from a few months ago when Obama was raising a gazillion dollars a month and triggering mass swoonings everywhere he spoke.
