The “Sunday Talk Shows” were a-buzz yesterday with Obama Administration statements of commitment to the War in Afghanistan, reports the NYT. A couple of samples:

“We have strategic interests in South Asia that should not be measured in terms of finite times,” said Gen. James L. Jones, the president’s national security adviser, speaking on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “We’re going to be in the region for a long time.”

…

Appearing on “Fox News Sunday,” General Petraeus said that the Obama administration was not planning a “rush to the exits” in Afghanistan, and that depending on the security conditions there could be tens of thousands of American troops in Afghanistan for several years.

These coordinated statements are a direct response to those Americans (such as my WFTC colleagues Paul Davis and Ken Watson) who — rightfully, I think — criticized the President for showing his withdrawal hand to “the enemy.” That gaff seemed to render the 30,000 troop upgrade almost completely worthless. Of course, Obama was trying to appease both the foreign policy right and the foreign policy left, to show he has the strength to “do the dirty work” and the compassion to end it before “too much” blood is spilled.

But as others have noted, this was an incoherent and really politically idiotic message. Those of us with anti-war values don’t care about, or even really believe in, the “withdrawal date” of the troops… we are just annoyed that there are 30,000 new impediments to a sane foreign policy, one that brings an end to the historical cycle we’ve been stuck in: foreign meddling begets terrorism/anti-Westernism which begets more foreign meddling. And those with pro-war (or “pro-security”, or “anti-terrorism”) values don’t care about the 30,000 additional troops (partially because they’d prefer more, perhaps 50,000 or 100,000)… they are just annoyed that there’s now a “surrender” date on the calendar.

General Jones’ statement above about how we’re “going to be in the region for a long time” reminds me of an incredibly depressing (but still fascinating) lecture I heard at the University of Pittsburgh last spring given by Raed Jarrar, a Middle East commentator/blogger and Iraq withdrawal activist. He spoke a lot about what he termed, “the part of the United States government that doesn’t change, no matter who gets elected.”

As the first year of Obama’s presidency has reflected, that part is the foreign policy part. I still hear ardent supporters of the President talking about how Obama’s going to “get us out of a useless war in Iraq”, or how he’s “brought back a sane US foreign policy at last.” I (regretfully) cast a vote for Obama almost exclusively because I believed he might do that. I think it’s safe to say that a lot of the votes cast for Obama last year reflected the growing isolationist sentiment in the US (noted last week by Matt Welch), this increasing feeling among Americans that we cannot and should not “solve the world’s problems.”

But with more and more stomach-knotting lurches to the right from this Administration on Afghanistan, it’s easy to see that the major powers in our government are deeply committed to the right-wing “nation-building” project, that it’s unlikely that voting for a Democrat or a Republican, no matter how anti-imperialist they may seem before they are in power, will ever produce anti-imperial policy. Those in power and the interests they serve gain much more from being at war than from not being at war. My audacious hope, though, is that the Obama Administration’s cost-benefit analysis begins to take stock of the substantial number of Americans who now vocally oppose these wars.

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