... you're playing at semantics, being way too delicate - Obama owned this war the moment he decided to run for president - hell, the moment he decided to juice up his political ambitions by opposing the Iraq war he owned it because at that moment he was letting it be known that he understood 'the big questions' and was willing and able to make the big decisions thereof - he compounded this avowal and commitment and responsibility by embracing the war in Afghanistan during the election - if he didn't understand the nature of that responsibility or didn't care to examine it too closely for fear such an examination might undermine the political utility of looking like a guy who could make 'the big decisions', well, who's to blame for that?
The great unknown about Obama [although personally I thought the answer quite obvious] was what would happen when he had to make a difficult decision that fell outside of his ideological comfort zone. Pass a leviathan of a stimulus package, easy! Pursue massive health care reform - can make that choice over breakfast - those things all nicely comply with his ideological imperatives. But war? The cold hard realities of foreign policy? The brutal, visceral cunning of power, of force against force?
Obama's apologists would have that this endless debate is a good thing but I say it's a manifestation of fear - there's no safe refuge of ideological purity here, no quick satisfaction of acting in accordance with a naive world view that has served him well til now but is a template that no longer fits the harsh realities on the ground. He's afraid and wants to believe that an endless appeal to reason or the vanities of an intellectual inertia will subdue the demons waiting in the shadows, will free him from the curse of action.
Obama can deal with health care reform not going as he may have planned because the ideological satisfaction will still be there to sustain him. But a war decision that doesn't go as he would hope? Or a complication or confrontation on the global stage that resists his charms and insists in acting against his wishes? We've seen his response: every foreign policy gesture he has made since taking office has telegraphed a preference for compromise and accommodation - has telegraphed weakness. He did try to play tough with Israel but even backed down from that - wisely, as far as I'm concerned, but still.
His apologists will loudly declaim against such a portrayal, and obviously the man could still prove me wrong - but until facts emerge that suggest otherwise I'll maintain that America has not elected another Jimmy Carter, they've elected someone worse.
