Dreams of My President

"War is the Health of the State"
- Randolph Bourne

"Even big politicians don't know what to do
Gracie doesn't know either, but neither do you,
So vote for Gracie!"
- "Vote for Gracie" sung by Gracie Allen

Tonight our president gave his long awaited speech on the Afghan war. In the next six months, 30,000 additional American troops will be sent to Afghanistan. Peace activists such as Michael Moore, Cindy Sheehan, and Tom Hayden have expresses their deep disapproval of this Afghan surge. After all, they supported Obama to end the wars. Wasn't Obama elected on a peace platform?

Well, not quite. During the 2008 campaign, Barack Obama actually supported the Afghan war. He fervently opposed the war in Iraq, and he may well have won based on his opposition to that conflict. But one of the Barack's most frequent arguments against the Iraq war was that it was diverting our efforts from the conflict we should be concentrating on, the Afghan war. He made his feelings on this issue quite explicit: this point was brought up in his televised debates with both Hillary Clinton and John McCain.

So how could these peace activists not remember the positions president Obama took just last year? It might be that Obama's rise was so fast that he was elected before having much of a track record. In the absence of said record, he became a political Rorschach test: people saw in him what they wanted to see. The peace activists dreamed of a President that opposed both wars, and Obama's anti-Iraq war rhetoric convinced them that Obama was the candidate of their dreams.

My sympathy for these peace activists is rather limited. Obama stated his hawkish position on Afghanistan rather clearly, and everything he said tonight is consistent with his 2008 campaign stand. They ignored what Barack said at their own peril; it is time for these dreamers to wake up.