Bitten by History: From the Gulf to Gaza and Afghanistan, the Familiar Way Proves the Wrong Way

History, or the future (however
you want
to look at it), has a funny way of rearing up and biting leaders who
think they
know what they're doing. Take Barack Obama. Only weeks before the
Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, he made a
"pragmatic"
decision to give way on the expansion of deep-water drilling off
U.S. shores in return for political support on his energy bill
that might
never have added up to much. In the process, he said on
camera: "It turns out, by the way, that oil rigs today generally don't
cause
spills. They are technologically very advanced." His decision, which
left
the oil industry's key lobbying outfit, the American Petroleum
Institute,
dancing for joy, doesn't look quite so pragmatic or advantageous now.

The president undoubtedly
already rues
the day he ever put those words on the historical record. Imagine,
however, that, in the same situation, he had done the difficult,
unpragmatic
thing and said something like: "It turns out, by the way, that oil rigs
still
cause spills and deep-water drilling is simply too dangerous for our
planet, so
I've decided, despite the obvious political problems involved, not to
open up
new, ever deeper, ever more sensitive or climatically

extreme areas off our
coasts to
the oil industry. And I'm instructing my secretary of the interior to
make
sure that whatever drilling is already underway is safe." He'd be in a
lot
better shape right now, though the Gulf of
Mexico wouldn't.

Similarly, Israeli Prime
Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu and his true-believer government thought that a
flotilla of
peace activists determined to break the blockade of Gaza by steaming
towards
it with humanitarian relief supplies would be easy enough to control in
the
usual tough-guy ways. Call in the military, treat the activists goonishly in international waters, and a
lesson would be
learned. And indeed, a lesson has been learned -- by the Palestinians,
the
Turks, and others.

In the process, the Israelis
managed to
turn the Mavi MaMarainto the SS Exodus (the
famed ship of
Jewish refugees assaulted by the British in 1947), the Palestinians into
Jews,
Gaza into Israel before its establishment, and themselves into the
oppressive,
imperial Britons. No small trick in a single night. The Israelis
will surely rue the day they ordered an assault on the six-ship flotilla
in
international waters when, if they had let the ships through, nothing
much would
have happened. In this case, the path of seemingly least resistance --
to
wield force -- may have profoundly changed the international equation to Israel's

disadvantage.

And then, of course, there's
the war in
Afghanistan, which is for the time
being largely out of American consciousness. On that war, Obama made
another assumedly pragmatic decision on entering the Oval Office: it
would be
politically easier to expand the fighting there, blunt the momentum of
the
Taliban, and worry about withdrawal later. This, too, passed for
pragmatism in Washington, especially for a Democratic
president, supposedly vulnerable on national security issues and seeking
a
second term (something all American presidents desperately desire).

So, on December 1, 2009, he
went to
West Point and, with a reluctance you could
feel -- even naming the date in 2011 when his administration would begin
a troop
drawdown -- gave his
"surge"

speech to the nation.
He
could have given quite a different speech. (I even wrote a
withdrawal
speech for him whose
key line
was: "Ours will be an administration that will stand or fall, as of
today, on
this essential position: that we ended, rather than extended, two
wars.")
He would have taken flak. The media would have been an instant echo
chamber of outrage and criticism. But he would have made it through and

ended two wars. No such luck.

As a result, sooner or later
he's likely
to find himself in political hell. Things are already going
poorly in Afghanistan,
not so surprising since the war
there is the foreign-policy equivalent of a poorly drilled, poorly
capped
deep-water well in the Gulf of Mexico.
The only question is when the spill will begin gushing uncontrollably.
Unfortunately, as TomDispatch.com regular William Astore points out, the Obama administration and the U.S.
military high command are now hopelessly
committed to a gambler's mentality in Afghanistan, which means that, as
things get worse, the war will only expand. Escalating in
Pakistan is clearly on the mind of American planners, a
move guaranteed to
be disastrous (which, of course, never stopped anybody). Extending the
timeline for an American stay is another
obvious
option. Hard as it
might
have been to launch a withdrawal in December 2009, imagine just how
politically
difficult it will be, if things get worse, in 2011. Where's the value
of
"pragmatism" now?