AWOL From Obama’s Speech: U.S. Mission After Bin Laden
Perhaps you haven’t been paying too much attention to the news lately. If so, the Democratic Party has a message for you: Barack Obama ordered the hit on Osama bin Laden, and Mitt Romney most definitely did not. What President Obama didn’t say in Charlotte during his renomination speech, however, is where he — and U.S. national security — go from here.
Never mind how Obama escalated the war in Afghanistan, to meager gains at best. Never mind how Obama has expanded the war on terrorism to a proliferating series of undeclared wars, fought in the shadows with flying armed robots and lethal commandos, from east Africa to western Pakistan. And never mind how Obama began a whole other war in Libya, without the consent of Congress — which he tucked into a single sentence about how from “Burma to Libya to South Sudan, we have advanced the rights and dignity of all human beings,” which is an optimistic and self-serving reading of his record.
Beyond those references, it was difficult to identify a theme in Obama’s speech for what the U.S. needs to do abroad over the next four years. Obama said that the Taliban’s momentum “is blunted” in Afghanistan, which is dubious, and looked to 2014, when “our longest war will be over” — which is simply untrue, since his administration plans to keep thousands of troops there beyond the official 2014 end of combat. “Terrorist plots must be disrupted,” Obama said, and al-Qaida is “on the path to defeat,” but he did not explain how the U.S. will go beyond disrupting those plots to strategic victory over al-Qaida. The U.S. will help Europe out of its economic crisis, Obama said, without details. And the U.S. will support the Arab Spring’s revolutionaries — although Obama sidestepped the hard questions of whether to intensify direct U.S. support to those revolutionaries in the face of intractable and ruthless dictators like Syria’s Bashar Assad.