Two Ironic Readings of Lincoln

Barack Obama's title of his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, "A Just and Lasting Peace," comes from Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address. I know this.

I was assigned to read from it at last summer's NEA Representative Assembly. We were celebrating the 200th anniversary of Lincoln's birth with a collective group of readings, linked through history. I accepted my assignment as a privilege.

And I'm not sure how many others have read it publicly, nor could practice it as I did--by taking a cab to the Lincoln Memorial, sitting against one of the enormous pillars there, and reading it to myself as it is carved into the north wall. My best and first memory of Washington, D.C. is of visiting the Memorial for the first time as a child; it will be, probably, one of my best and last memories of the city to have applied my last visit to the Memorial for a larger purpose.

President Obama's larger purpose, though, is something of an ironic one: accepting the greatest tribute to peacemaking, when just nine days ago, he committed the United States to, possibly, a much longer war in Afghanistan by sending an additional 30,000 troops there. He says no: if all goes for the best, we'll be out of there in another year and a half.

But he would do well to re-read Lincoln's ironic statement about the Civil War--about how neither side anticipated that that war would last anywhere nearly the length it had lasted to the point at which he could comment, in March 1865, nearly four years later. He could read, too, how neither side wished "a result less fundamental and astounding."

War does that. It always has. Wars have always created results far more astounding than was anticipated at their outset. Too much becomes disrupted; too much damage must be repaired; too much change takes place.

Clearly, this will happen again in Afghanistan. Clearly, its present government has too shaky a foundation to endure this still greater incursion of foreign troops. Its attempt at democracy and modernization may still find its route to the trash can, as it did in South Vietnam, and may still do so in Iraq, for all we know.

Or it may not. Obama has put an 18-month limit on this commitment, hoping that this will do the trick and turn back Taliban expansion. In doing so, he's hoping that what the Bush Administration did in its final attempt to improve the situation in Iraq--the "surge"--will cause the same stabilization and create the same relative sense of quiesance for us to begin withdrawal without humiliation.

But now to call this "Obama's War" dances right past recent history, and irresponsibly so. Eight years ago, the Bush Administration sent troops to Afghanistan, hoping to capture Osama bin Laden. It had an excellent chance to do so, but blew it; Barack Obama holds the residue.

The Bush Administration confused two cornerstones of its philosophy: Toughness abroad with spending paucity at home. You can't do both and win wars. You can brag--oh, were they good at that!--but in the end, you have to deliver what the troops really need. Bush didn't, and it's an embarrassment to the troops there that the best of what they got was lip service.

President Obama believes he will do what's truly needed now. I'm still not sure he should even have accepted the Peace Prize, knowing in his heart that expansion in Afghanistan was necessary, both in a military sense and in a fulfillment of a campaign pledge.

It feels, too, as if the Peace Prize committee, in a fit of relief, awarded Obama simply as a statement that finally, the United States has a leader who doesn't rely on terse, blunt, undiplomatic rhetoric in dealing with other nations; but someone who understands the meaning of words and the damage to a country's image they can cause. In the final analysis, in terms of the direction our nation's taking, though, I'm not sure what the difference will be.

When a nation fights wars, it is inevitably left with the way of Gandhi or the way of Patton. If it chooses Gandhi, it believes that the way to end war is to simply go home and be peaceful. If it chooses Patton, it believes that once committed, it must pursue war to its terrible finality, to stop the killing by engaging in immediate, devastating killing and destruction, getting the damn thing over with.

Barack Obama, after having accepted the greatest peacemaking award on this planet, has also accepted the Patton philosophy in Afghanistan. In its own finality, Lincoln had to accept what Ulysses S. Grant did to end the Civil War: attacking Robert E. Lee's forces with horrible persistence, losing 2000 troops per day at its height, killing at an unprecedented rate so the killing might finally, exhaustively stop.

That's one irony. The other will take place if, at the conclusion of his Presidency, Obama will be considered with the same label with which he is at this moment: Peacemaker.

Mister Mark