It’s remarkable how Obama’s speeches are still Rorschach blots one year after he’s been elected president. Everyone sees what they’d like to see, projecting their hopes onto a president who seems to encourage just that. Judging by the commentary flying about this morning, last night’s speech was no exception. The neocons are elated that Obama has embraced a Bush-like military surge, liberal hawks are heartened that Obama is still committed to a muscular support of American values abroad, and the domestic-focused Left are despairing of their president’s inability to stop a war they feel is sapping their ability to achieve anything at home.

Mindful of the projection problem, I came away from watching the speech with an impression that runs counter to most of the conventional wisdom I’m reading today. I watched the speech with my parents who are visiting from Croatia, and all three of us were pleased by it, even moved in parts. Maybe their presence had some skewing effect on my perception, I don’t know. In any case, some thoughts:

1) This surge is not Bush-like. For one thing, there was no wrong-headed talk of victory. Even more so than in Iraq, the term is meaningless in Afghanistan. What would victory even look like? Obama’s no fool, and he doesn’t think we are either.

Along those lines, state-building as an objective was largely sidelined. The Afghans and their neighbors will have to figure out the contours of the future Afghan state for themselves, and their final arrangement is none of our concern. We’ll try to give them a strong military, which we’ll support for our counter-terrorism purposes, but we won’t get more involved than that. The one time corruption was mentioned, Obama suggested that he would bypass the feckless Karzai government and “support Afghan ministries, governors, and local leaders that combat corruption and deliver for the people.” (Sounds like the McChrystal “Tribes” initiative to me.)

Yes, there’s going to be some applied counterinsurgency going on: cities will be protected from the bearded barbarians, and small-bore agricultural development projects will be shielded from Taliban depredations. But the goal is not to win hearts and minds for a friendly government we’re working to establish, but rather to buy time for the training of the Afghan military. This shift in emphasis is no small matter.

2) The promotion of Western values takes a shellacking. Sorry, liberal hawks, but women will continue to have a vile time in Afghanistan, existing as they do somewhere in between slaves and cattle in the rural hierarchy. Michael Crowley noted the absence of any language pertaining to human rights in the speech, and wondered if we’d be hearing a different speech if we had Hillary Clinton as president right now. I couldn’t think of a better reason to thank our lucky stars that she’s not.

It’s important not to slide into cynicism here, or to lazily elide just how bad the human rights situation is in Afghanistan. The problem is that we’re not doing anyone any good by insisting that the Afghans adopt our modern, emancipated approach. Walter Russell Mead wrote a penetrating post on this conundrum as it pertains to Pakistan a few weeks back on his blog at The American Interest (full disclosure: I work there). It applies double to Afghanistan. As I wrote in the comments:

Throughout the 20th century, Afghanistan’s history has been one of fitful modernizations and liberalizations spearheaded by Westernized elites which have met with varying degrees of pushback, often quite violent, from the rural conservative population.

The situation in Afghanistan is difficult and complex enough without adding these seemingly intractable human rights issues into the mix. The 20% or so of the Afghan population, the very people that reporters and aid workers encounter in Kabul, the people who are broadly most supportive of our efforts to date, will surely feel betrayed by us now. It’s a shame, but it’s unavoidable given the circumstances. Good work on making this hard decision, Mr. President.

3) The retrenching of America. I’m surprised so few people are talking about this, but for me it was probably the most heartening aspect of the whole speech. For the last third or so, Obama explicitly recognized that America’s ability to order the world is finite and limited, and that its still-vast resources are better invested at home than in fools’ errands abroad. “That’s why our troop commitment in Afghanistan cannot be open-ended—because the nation that I’m most interested in building is our own,” he said. Nicely put.

The threat from Afghanistan is real enough, but the right approach is not to treat it as a problem to be solved, but rather as a crisis to be managed. The goal of the escalation in Afghanistan is to disrupt Al Qaeda enough to set up a manageable situation going forward, not to completely eliminate the conditions under which terrorists breed. This strict problem-solving mentality has bedeviled American foreign policy since George W. Bush came swaggering to power, and I’m glad to see it go.

* * *

None of these points actually address whether the plan is a good or workable one. The speech was quite short on operational details, perhaps because revealing some of these details might be disastrous to achieving our objectives. And though Obama committed to a fairly strict withdrawal deadline, a Catholic female friend of mine reminded me that “a commitment to withdrawal should not be trusted; in the heat of the moment he will want to stay until finished.” So we’ll see on the specifics.

Overall, however, this was a substantively new direction for American foreign policy that Obama has articulated. And it’s quite welcome.

Dov Zakheim repeats Bob Kagan’s incorrect assertion that Obama is about to cut the DoD budget. As I pointed out yesterday, Congressional Quarterly is claiming (via Wired, I don’t have a CQ subscription) that the Obama administration is in fact increasing the Pentagon’s budget by 8%, just not by as much as the Pentagon requested.

I’m not reposting this just to give my correction more prominent placement—outside of the comments of another post—but rather to criticize another position of Mr. Zakheim:

Will our adversaries be emboldened? They will certainly recognize that we are stretched thin militarily. And they may well recall that the Carter budget cuts of the late 1970s correlated with some of our most difficult challenges in post-war foreign relations, as we stood by helplessly while Iran took American hostages and the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan.

Color me unconvinced that meeting the Pentagon’s budgetary requests would do much to disabuse the rest of the world as to our overstretch. We’re badly floundering in Afghanistan, and we can’t even project a credible threat of force in the Caucasus—all due to our massive commitment in Iraq. $40 billion here or there won’t change that optic, because that optic has nothing to do with our actual military might as measured in planes and bombs and tanks.

We’re not fighting the Cold War any more. There are no Soviet bean-counters carefully analyzing our expenditures to figure out what the true balance of power is. In conventional terms, we can overpower pretty much any comers, again with ±$40 billion not making an appreciable difference. The nasty crux of the matter is that conventional power dominance matters a whole lot less than it used to, and that two low-intensity conflicts have effectively stretched us thin for everyone with eyes to see.

This is not to say that I’m on board with Obama’s decision. As I mentioned before, I think Martin Feldstein’s proposal to spend more on the military as stimulus is in many ways sound. I just wish we could have these discussions without recourse to misleading rhetoric.

This screencap from the WSJ has been circulating around the blogosphere:

Yeah, definitely not OK.

But what about this from TPM?

Cuz, you know, he’s BLACK! Like Dre and Ice Cube!

I’m not really sure I have a point with this post except to say that I really am looking forward to our post-racial future. This gotcha nonsense just wears me out.

Since I’m on a Will Wilkinson kick, here’s a post of his (via Andrew) that I’m more dyspeptic about. A taste of what bugs me:

Indeed, over the past half-century, progress has been so rapid that perhaps with distance we might come to think of it as the Great Era of Moral Progress.

I get what he’s saying: Obama’s ascent to the presidency represents an important event in the civil rights struggle in this country. But am I being willfully difficult if I insist that I don’t count that as any kind of consolidated progress towards a better social arrangement, but rather a brief blip in the long and miserable history of humanity from which we will descend back to our natural barbaric state?

By all means, people, celebrate this day. Feel happy that we live in a relatively more just society than our parents did. But let’s not congratulate ourselves too much. We’re still all a bunch of venal, rutting animals who fight wars of conquest and domination out of hurt pride or fear or ignorance. We may occasionally reason our way out of repressing others, but we have short memories and base instincts. After all, the barbarisms of Auschwitz, the Killing Fields, Srebrenica—all events during Wilkinson’s Great Era of Moral Progress—were perpetrated by people just like us, not some exotic “other” we must struggle to comprehend. We are irredeemable, never beyond our worst potential.

No, you’re right, I am hopelessly cynical and contrarian. So much so that not only did I not take a few hours off of work to go hang out on the mall even though it’s a couple blocks from my house, I didn’t even attempt to watch the inauguration on TV—all out of some peevish desire to not be part of any “big moment”.

And though I’m generally more predisposed to like Obama than most of my more conservative friends, the national service theme which has gradually taken center stage in our new president’s rhetoric leaves my mouth tasting like I’ve been licking batteries. Will Wilkinson’s liveblogging (which I read after the fact, again to avoid being part of some moment) captures that taste just right:

12:22: The troops are awesome, because they “find meaning in something larger than themselves.” So we all need to be like troops in the war on badness. Was that a cellphone? 12:23: Here’s our theme, kids. New Era of Responsibility. Your empty meaningless life can be made whole by your obeisance to collective duty. That was a cellphone.

Not that Obama’s rhetoric is going to generate any new enthusiasm for libertarian ideas. People want to believe in things bigger than themselves, be it God or The Nation. Atheism and libertarianism—it’s the stuff for cranks like me.

Greg Pollowitz at the Corner:

Bill Clinton Helps Out… By letting America know that Senator Obama had no clue what to do when the financial crisis hit. At 3AM, how many people will a President Obama have time to chat with?

“You know what he did?” Clinton said, heralding Obama’s reaction to the financial crisis. “First he took a little heat for not saying much. I knew what he was doing. He talked to his advisers – he talked to my economic advisers, he called Hillary. He called me. He called Warren Buffet. He called all those people, you know why? Because he knew it was complicated and before he said anything he wanted to understand.”

I have to say I’m with Bill on this one. I’m really sick of hip-shooting yahoos “making decisions” in places of power at times of crisis. Judging by how well John McCain’s campaign suspension stunt went over, I’d say that many people would agree with me.

A co-worker said to me a few weeks back, “If it’s close, it’ll be McCain. If it’s not, it’ll be Obama.” It’s sure starting to look like he was very right.

Here’s an astounded letter from a long-time Republican consultant, published by Ben Smith over at Politico. He’d just shown an independent focus group a tailored not-yet-aired ad which went after Obama very hard. Here’s the reaction:

Reagan Dems and Independents. Call them blue-collar plus. Slightly more Target than Walmart. Yes, the spot worked. Yes, they believed the charges against Obama. Yes, they actually think he’s too liberal, consorts with bad people and WON’T BE A GOOD PRESIDENT…but they STILL don’t give a f***. They said right out, “He won’t do anything better than McCain” but they’re STILL voting for Obama. The two most unreal moments of my professional life of watching focus groups: 54 year-old white male, voted Kerry ‘04, Bush ‘00, Dole ‘96, hunter, NASCAR fan…hard for Obama said: “I’m gonna hate him the minute I vote for him. He’s gonna be a bad president. But I won’t ever vote for another god-damn Republican. I want the government to take over all of Wall Street and bankers and the car companies and Wal-Mart run this county like we used to when Reagan was President.” The next was a woman, late 50s, Democrat but strongly pro-life. Loved B. and H. Clinton, loved Bush in 2000. “Well, I don’t know much about this terrorist group Barack used to be in with that Weather guy but I’m sick of paying for health insurance at work and that’s why I’m supporting Barack.” I felt like I was taking crazy pills. I sat on the other side of the glass and realized…this really is the Apocalypse. The Seventh Seal is broken and its time for eight years of pure, delicious crazy….

The populace sounds pissed off. If Obama wins, I collect $100 and a steak dinner from various bets I’ve placed with friends. Maybe it’s time to start betting on margins of victory…

Good on McCain, tamping down the misinformed excesses of the base base.

I don’t chime in too much when it comes to domestic politics and policy because I’m largely out of my depth. I’m a foreign policy guy by inclination, and I don’t have the iron constitution required to wade through the slimy panderings of political candidates in order to arrive at their ‘true’ position on taxation, health care, entitlement reform, etc. I also maintain that the president has maximum leeway to do as he pleases in foreign policy, so that’s the main criterion he should be judged on.

That said, with what has been happening during the last three weeks on Wall Street, I don’t think I’ve ever cared less whether Obama or McCain would commit troops to solve a humanitarian crisis in Congo. Or whether the candidates think Russia is an Evil Empire. Or whether they’d send troops to the Middle East to fight Iran if Israel was attacked. Since neither candidate was able to go beyond the standard populist bromides when talking about the financial crisis, hearing them talk about what they would do internationally sounded incredibly silly and irrelevant.

EDIT: I should note that I’m coming down with a cold and am in a foul mood. Reading around the web, it doesn’t seem that people were as down on the debate as I was.

Is Charles Krauthammer calling it for Obama? Sure sounds like it:

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. famously said of Franklin Roosevelt that he had a “second-class intellect, but a first-class temperament.” Obama has shown that he is a man of limited experience, questionable convictions, deeply troubling associations (Jeremiah Wright, William Ayers, Tony Rezko) and an alarming lack of self-definition — do you really know who he is and what he believes? Nonetheless, he’s got both a first-class intellect and a first-class temperament. That will likely be enough to make him president.

Emphasis mine. Call me an elitist all you want, but that’s always been Obama’s appeal to me, especially when contrasted with the folksy “average Joe” demeanor of George W. Bush. I don’t ever want to feel like I can drink a beer with the President of the United States. Ever.