Enhancing analytical skills and objectivity

Walter Russell Mead reminds us that we should

be very glad we don’t have a Republican president right now. If we did, we would be treated to a merciless media pounding, night-and-day, on the series of strategic failures, mistakes and false starts that have characterized America’s war strategy in Afghanistan since 2009. We’d be getting constant reminders of how the President, who repeatedly said that this was a just war that America had to win, and who told us that we should vote for him because he wouldn’t let anything distract him from the vital task of winning said war, hasn’t managed to win it, or even end it, after six long years.
Fortunately for us, there is a Democrat in the White House who, by and large, the press likes and wants to succeed. Thus our newspapers and television screens are blessedly free from invective, derision and snark when it comes to news from Afghanistan.

...President Obama has been permitted to fail in Afghanistan quietly and off center stage. We hear nothing anymore about the months of agonized reflection before choosing strategies that didn’t accomplish their goals. We never see mentions of his 2008 campaign rhetoric about Afghanistan—”the necessary war”—against which we might be asked to measure what has actually been achieved.

When the press puts Republicans through the wringer while giving Democrats the best deal it can, it’s often a reflection of the groupthink that comes naturally and almost inevitably to those who’ve spent their lives as bubble babies in the ultra-liberal world of the contemporary American campus where intellectual homogeneity is considered a virtue.

The New York Times would almost certainly not cover this story the same way if a GOP president had won an election promising to win the war in Afghanistan, had imposed his personal vision and strategy on the Pentagon’s war plans, and after six years had made announcements that the Times believed to be inaccurate about the end of a combat role for U.S. troops. It would be termed a scandal, a national tragedy, and the brightest spotlights the media owned would be riveted on the sad spectacle of a hapless, flailing, incapacitated White House. We would hear a lot more than we do about career officers who disagree with the administration’s strategies being ruthlessly sidelined, and a hostile press would be scrutinizing the Joint Chiefs for signs of toadyism and opportunism.

This is not to say that the press should treat Obama as if he were some kind of horrible Republican. The reality is that Afghanistan is a tough place. The strikes of 2001—when the Taliban government refused to hand over Osama bin Laden and his henchmen to U.S. justice after allowing Al Qaeda to plan atrocities from its territory—made war inevitable and necessary. But the nature of Afghanistan itself, and the complicated web of interests and influence among the rival states around it, was always going to make stabilization and withdrawal hard.

Obama should have been criticized over his smarmy and vacuous claims to have a solution for the problem back in 2008, but the press was more interested in crucifying Bush and wounding McCain than in offering the public a serious account of a genuine dilemma. What was clearly true back in 2008 was that the U.S. had won a difficult and shaky victory in Iraq after a war that should in hindsight not have been launched, while the smaller and more justifiable war in Afghanistan still offered no serious prospect of a happy ending.

The wisest course for the country would have been to consolidate and build on the victory in Iraq, however dubious the war’s origin had been, and to look for ways to downsize the Afghan conflict while securing the commitments we’d need to be able to withdraw. President Obama did pretty much the opposite, abandoning the effort in Iraq as quickly as possible while agonizing over unrealistic strategic options in Afghanistan that could never produce the results he sought.

Those were poor choices and the consequences dog the United States to this day. Those are not the only unfortunate strategic choices that this White House has made: two ill-conceived Middle East peace efforts, the reset, the muddles with Erdogan and Egypt, the Libya fiasco and the Syria meltdown also come to mind. A serious press would, hopefully without too much vitriol, reflect at this point on the pattern of poor strategic choices—and that record would play a larger role in the discussion over whether the President’s approach to Iran is a good idea.

The United States has a free press; it does not at the moment have a particularly strong or discerning one. That’s too bad; here at The American Interest we’ll continue to do our best to chip away at the problem. The goal isn’t to replace the current liberal twist with a conservative one; it’s to enhance the analytic skills and objectivity of both liberal and conservative (not to mention centrist) journalists in the hope that over time the American conversation about the genuinely difficult and perplexing issues before us can become more grounded, more comprehensive, more balanced, and above all, more useful.

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