Cheney Accepts the Nobel Prize for Natural Selection (But Obama Should Have Won It)

Two of the most powerful Americans in recent history just delivered pronouncements on war and peace that not only addressed the topic at hand, but revealed a lot about their outlooks on life, religion, and survival of the fittest.

Dick Cheney and Barack Obama are popularly portrayed by the liberals as embodying the choice between fear and hope, and by conservatives as embodying the choice between strength and weakness.

Personally, I think the conservative juxtaposition is a lot more skewed than the liberal, but both oversimplify the differences between the two men’s positions. If you can read Obama’s acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize as simply his latest elaboration on the theme of “Yes, we can,” then I suspect you haven’t yet come down from the high of November 2008.

If you read Cheney’s latest blasting of Obama’s response to Muslim extremism as nothing but the crazed, discredited bleatings of a foreign-policy dinosaur, I think you underestimate the degree to which his viewpoint can be supported by rational calculation.

Sure, Cheney is a wacko coot, but the method behind his madness was summed up in the 17^th century by the rationalist French philosopher Blaise Pascal. “Pascal’s wager,” as it’s called, famously decreed that given that we can’t be sure about the existence of God, the rational bet is to believe. If He doesn’t exist and we believe, then we’ve just wasted a lifetime of boring Sunday mornings in church; if He does exist and we bet he doesn’t, we burn for eternity in hell.

Cheney believes in the hell to pay at the hands of terrorists not taken seriously. If, in the process of avoiding that hell, we end up torturing a few innocent people or attacking countries that don’t harbor terrorists after all, then so be it. Better to be paranoid with blood on our hands than to be toast.

Cheney stands foursquare with our ancestor cavemen who judged that unexplained rustling in the bushes at midnight to be a wolf, rather than the ones who dismissed it as the wind. In those instances in which it really was a wolf, the paranoid cavemen survived to pass on their genes to millions of God-fearing, wolf-fearing, gay-fearing, French-fearing red-state voters.

Obama’s rather chilly defense of war in his acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize was hardly the testament to wishful thinking that Cheney sees in the administration’s foreign policy, but it was genuinely hopeful in its insistence that mankind possesses the rationality required to figure out the difference between the wind in the bushes and the wolves, and devise rational, practical responses to the wolves.

Obama said in that speech, “I face the world as it is, and I cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism—it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of men and the limits of reason . . . So yes, the instruments of war do have a role to play in preserving the peace. And yet this truth must coexist with another—that no matter how justified, war promises human tragedy.”

Given the coexistence of these truths, Obama laid out “practical steps”—fostering agreements among nations, supporting human rights, promoting international economic development—he said could lead to an “evolution” of human institutions toward peace. He borrowed the idea and the word from John F. Kennedy, but, as he used it, it could have come directly from the mouth of Darwin.

The idea was that rational, step-by-step improvements in the exercise of international relations could be successful, and by succeeding could be replicated, replacing the paranoid lashing out at every stirring in the bushes that Cheney champions and that failed so miserably in the Awful Aughties.

Because, despite the urge toward global paranoia that persists in the American populace, it really did fail us badly under Bush and Cheney. People around the world came to hate Americans. We were behaving like the Germans in World War II, killing indiscriminately in the hopes of shocking and awing our enemies into submission. It didn’t work. It bred disgust among our friends and increased resistance among our enemies. It lost Republicans the last election.

Obama doesn’t say we have no enemies. He doesn’t tell us to surrender to them. He advocates the use of force against them. But he suggests that it is possible not only to do so in a measured, controlled, discriminating way, but to simultaneously work effectively to promote peaceful solutions to conflict and problems that can eventually become part of an evolution toward peace.

And in doing so, he advocates the replacement of fear with hope.

Peace Prize

The Peace Prize established by Alfred Nobel (who also invented dynamite) will be picked up this week by Barack Obama (who is also running two wars in the Near East). Altogether a thing that makes you go “Hmmm” about guys who make things go “Booom!”

Want Change in Afghanistan? Wait 18 Months

When it comes to Afghanistan, President Obama delivers on his promises. In the 2008 campaign, he vowed to undo what he considered the Bush administration’s neglect of the Afghan war and take the fight to the Taliban, calling it “a war we have to win.”

In February of this year he sent 17,000 additional American troops to Afghanistan. This month he upped the ante again, committing another 30,000 troops to the conflict, which will bring the total number of troops in Afghanistan to more than 100,000.

Newspaper accounts indicate he believes the surge of troops in Iraq begun in 2006 by the Bush administration worked, and he wants to apply the same strategy in Iraq.

Many people who believe, as I do, that this country has essentially become addicted to war—if not against the Russians then against the Vietnamese, if not against the Vietnamese then against the Iraqis, if not against the Iraqis then against the Iranians, if not against the Iranians then against the Afghans—are despondent at this turn of events.

As Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank and others pointed out this week, a lot of liberals bet the emotional farm on Obama and, regardless of his consistency of opinion and action on Afghanistan, feel betrayed and angry at his failure to pull out now.

Me, I’m taking the longer view, if for no other reason than that politically there’s no other option available. The country is effectively split down the middle on Afghanistan, and because of the weight of opinion, history, and money backing war in this country, the tie goes to the warmakers.

This country doesn’t pull out of wars easily. Put the troops in action overseas, and any movement to bring them home becomes a failure to support the troops, with heavy suggestions of weakness and even treason. We’re a country born of war, with a long history of fighting and winning wars, and have been since World War II the number one military power in the world.

Perhaps more importantly, military contractors, the industries that build the weapons systems used by our armies, have learned how to make sure the maximum number of jobs are dependent on continued military appropriations. When these companies learn how to parcel work on particular weapons systems out to a variety of key congressional districts spread across the country, ensuring the widest political backing for the programs possible, then you have weapons makers running the government. Once you’ve built the biggest war machine on earth, it’s hard not to use it.

So why is there any hope at all, long-term or short-term, for a change in Afghan policy?

Even if Obama is deluded now in relying on a surge in Afghanistan, the fact remains that his latest moves do represent change from the positions and policies he laid out in the past. In March of this year Obama backed outright defeat of the Taliban and creation of a stable democratic government in Kabul.

Obama is now telling journalists that he regrets that decision because it led his commanders to view the mission more “expansively” than he intended. Now he says all he is after is ensuring enough stability to keep pressure on Al Qaeda.

Where before he signaled a readiness to do what it took to build a democratic Afghan central government, now he’s talking about giving up on the corrupt Kabul government altogether if necessary and dealing mainly with more reliable local governments.

Where before he seemed ready to stay in Afghanistan as long as needed to beat the Taliban and set up democracy, now he is pushing his commanders to surge up as fast as possible in order to be able to get out as fast as possible.

It took George W. Bush six years to decide that Rumsfeld’s war on the cheap in Iraq was a failure and adopt the surge there, and even then it seemed as if he preferred to pretend that there was no change in policy. To admit there was a change would have meant that there was something wrong with what he’d been doing in the first place. Being George W. Bush, as we know, means never wanting to say you’re sorry.

If you choose to argue that Obama isn’t changing enough, OK. If you think Obama is trying to have it both ways at once, simultaneously advocating advance and retreat, fine. But you can’t say the guy has barricaded himself in the Alamo here. Next to Bush he looks as bendable as a reed, slippery as an eel, similes critics on the right have been using since he was inaugurated.

This guy will change if he sees a reason to do so. Whether we surge for 18 months or not, I believe Afghanistan is going to look pretty much as hopeless then as it looks right now. I believe it will be apparent at that point to everybody but the nutcase right that something’s got to give.

Precedent indicates that this guy is willing and able to recognize when change needs to happen and do it. I’m not relying on Obama to do the right thing now. But I’m not willing to bet against him doing the right thing in 18 months.