More, please!
Oh dear God, the salivating for Iraq War 3 is reaching truly maudlin proportions. The punditry is pretty darn sure that we need a war right
now, damn it: Ron Fournier is even breaking out the "What Obama Must Say Tonight" trope in order to assert that anything short of Obama breaking out into a musical number on what he's going to do to ISIS and when he will show a lack of "leadership." Leadership always means military action, you see. Leadership means writing checks that other people's children
have to cash.
In a few hours, President Obama will stand before a public that, without his leadership, largely determined that the Islamic State must be stopped. What they want to hear from their commander-in-chief is, "I'm ready to fight." With that dynamic in mind, here are five things to watch for tonight.
One of those things might be "Obama should show a clear understanding of why the worst foreign policy disaster in modern history is probably not something we should be eager to repeat no matter how much the Same Goddamn People are pushing it"—but no. In fact, one of the five signs of "leadership" will be to pretend that none of that ever happened, spilled milk, and so on.
Does he blame Bush or Republicans—or anybody other than ISIS? Leave it to historians to second-guess U.S. policies that created a vacuum for ISIS's ideology of hatred, starting with Bush's ill-advised invasion of Iraq in 2003 and including Obama's ill-fated withdrawal. Obama should focus on the future, hopefully one without another 9/11-size attack.
Learning from past mistakes is for chumps and historians. You're not allowed to call anyone out on being Really Damn Catastrophically Wrong during their lifetimes, because if we did those people would have to stop writing opinion columns and they would get all despondent and they would stop watering their lawns, damaging other pundit's property values. Besides, we don't want the smoking gun to come in the form of another mushroom cloud.
Ignatius asks the right questions: "How will the United States and its allies know when they have "won"? Or will this be more like the Cold War, a decades-long ideological battle punctuated by periods of intense local combat? If so, are the American people ready for such a long and patient struggle?"
Again,
the right question is not whether or not we should launch ourselves into a land war in Asia, but how to prepare the American people to have the "patience" to never ask to leave again. I'm getting a bit nostalgic now—I feel like Donald Rumsfeld is going to pop out of a cake.
That last question stuck with me. We're angry and scared now. We want to fight. History suggests that we will rally behind the commander in chief in the immediate aftermath of tonight's address. But it wasn't that long ago—a matter of weeks, really—when "war-weary" was the go-to adjective for "Americans." We will grow weary again, and Obama may need to draw on tonight's speech to remind people, "This is why we must fight."
Or we could, you know, take a step back and contemplate whether the United States of America perhaps has any policy options other than dumping another half-trillion dollars into wars on behalf of regional dictatorships and kleptocracies who could handle it themselves if they did not treat their citizens so abominably that a sweaty band of murder-happy religious zealots seems to some of those citizens like a step up from the status quo. We might want to take a peek at the ol' history books just a bit, or at least thumb through some of the old op-eds from ten years ago to see if there are perhaps some things we ought to learn?
But no, leadership has spoken. Leadership wants some damn war, and all that's left is for the president to properly "remind" people that we "must" do it. Back to the future!