David Brooks probably didn't mean to be funny, but here's one reader who was genuinely amused by his column today. This, for a start.
I’ve called around to several of the smartest military experts I know to get their views on these controversies. I called retired officers, analysts who have written books about counterinsurgency warfare, people who have spent years in Afghanistan. I tried to get them to talk about the strategic choices facing the president. To my surprise, I found them largely uninterested.
This could be interpreted several ways, but just the image of David Brooks (a likeable but pretty lightweight New York Times columnist) phone in hand, trying to get (unnamed, retired) military experts to come up with some interesting criticism of Obama's decision-making process about war, strikes me as laughable. "Uninterested" in the strategic choices ... Hmm.
They do not know if he possesses tenacity, the ability to fixate on a simple conviction and grip it, viscerally and unflinchingly, through complexity and confusion.
The point, of course, is that it's not a president's duty to fixate, viscerally and unflinchingly, on war. That's the job of the military. It's the job of the president to decide whether the war is justified and, if so, how many resources to devote to it. If his decision is to not pursue war, it's not because he lacks tenacity but because his job is to make the right choice.
Dithering? The word comes from a man who is certainly tenacious. But Dick Cheney's is the tenacity of the criminally insane, a blindered man who commits atrocities and then goes home to a .... nice Merlot. At no point did Mr. Dithers actually risk his own life for his country.
David Brooks likes war too -- another guy who likes war though he's never been in one himself. He liked invading Iraq but (not being tenacious, I guess) started to dislike it a couple of years later when Bush/Cheney's tenacity began to reveal itself as psychotic.
Brooks will probably come to another realization about the American presence in Afghanistan a couple of years from now and look back at today's column with a civilized self-disparaging comment in another New York Times column, right-hand side of the back page.
