Obama and the neocons

War has its own particular sort of hindsight.  Our views and beliefs about war are created largely by the outcome of that war rather than the reasons for its inception.  John, at Powerline, points out that Obama, in his Nobel speech, called the first Gulf War a “just” war, but that at the time the Democrats were largely opposed – the resolution passing with a 52-47 vote (and apparently no filibuster).

Of course, John’s point is not that Americans place their belief in the justice of war based on its outcome, even though this is exactly what we do and exactly why we have this seemingly paradoxical statement from Obama.  (Though in fairness Obama was not a Senator in 1991 and so John’s point is entirely speculative.)

Regardless, John wants to illustrate how the Democrats “voted with Saddam Hussein” and thus further demonize a president whose foreign policy he actually supports.  He writes:

What is interesting about all of this is the Democrats’ need to rewrite history. Can anyone doubt that if Barack Obama had been in the Senate in 1991, he would have joined 45 of his Democratic colleagues in voting for Saddam Hussein’s control over the Middle East? Of course not. Yet today, Obama is forced to pretend that ousting Saddam was a “consensus” decision taken by “the world.” Thus does truth force itself on even the most unwilling auditors.

I’m not sure what John is trying to point out here – after all, Obama did recently decide to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan.  He hasn’t withdrawn troops from Iraq.  If anything, Obama is stepping comfortably into the role of war-president, John’s truth-auditors be damned.  I’m not sure what the purpose of further demonizing him as some soft-on-war liberal is given that Obama has stepped up to the plate.  I think Daniel Larison is right on this front as well.  He writes that neoconservatives

are forced to caricature liberal internationalist positions because the latter are not all that different from their own as far as policy objectives are concerned, so they are forced to exaggerate or invent differences to make neoconservatism seem to be the only ideology around acceptable to the political class. Every liberal has to be portrayed as a McGovernite (and a caricature of a McGovernite at that!) to cover up the reality that liberal internationalists have largely occupied the policy and political ground on which Nixon and Republican realists once stood. In the meantime, neoconservatives have been dragging the GOP down a dead-end alley of increasingly aggressive confrontational policies. This has made the misrepresentation of rather boring, conventional center-left establishmentarians such as Obama crucial to maintaining the fiction that the GOP and the neoconservatives in it are the “serious” party on foreign policy.

This is why you have such silly and seemingly contradictory arguments bubbling up out of places like Powerline or Commentary these days about Obama’s foreign policy, even though the president is doing exactly what the neocons hoped he would do, and pretty much exactly what John McCain would be doing if he’d been elected.  Of course, Obama is too busy “apologizing” for most neoconservatives.  They prefer their war presidents with a little swagger.  But Obama is maintaining or increasing American troop levels abroad, and so the hawks on the right have to continue churning out whatever little manufactured differences they can while at the same time supporting the president’s policies.  It really is amusing to watch.