Obama says he wants to withdraw from Iraq by 2010 to concentrate on Afghanistan and send more troops there. Juan Cole comments on how awful this policy would be and where it comes from:
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. Thus, he faces skepticism from Jewish American voters. So he made a Zionist speech in Boca. In the context of US politics, that is to be expected; he would not be any sort of politician, much less a phenomenon, if he did not try to reassure Jewish Americans about his commmitment to Israeli security, which is after all a worthy goal. But Obama went on to praise Zionist thinker Theodore Herzl, who started this nonsense about a people without a land for a land without a people. And then he gave away Jerusalem, undivided and permanently, to the Israelis in the middle of ongoing negotiations over its status between Israel and the Palestine Authority in the context of the Quartet, which the US government supports. Neither of those two things was necessary. It was overkill. And Obama now has some bridge building to do with the Arab and Muslim worlds if he becomes president, since Jerusalem is also dear to their hearts.
Search and destroy in Afghanistan is an even worse example of going overboard. My advice to his campaign team is to give more thought to how he can take a strong enough position on an issue to win on it, without giving away the whole store.
A good example of how much domestic concerns are driving US foreign policy, to a much greater extent than in other countries. Leftie bloggers have long noticed how much Democrats are “locked in” to supporting awful foreign policies out of fear for being seen as weak; this does seem to be another, particularly egrigious example of this tendency.
On the other hand, the War of Aghanistan has always been seen as a “good war” even by leftwing Americans and Obama isn’t the first Democratic heavyweight to criticise the War on Iraq because it’s a distraction from Aghanistan. I’m not sure Juan Cole is right in thinking Obama went overboard because he wanted to look more serious or tough, or whether Obama doesn’t genuinely believe in the fight against the Taliban. Neither position is likely to do much good of course.