Obama's weird pragmatism

Jonah Goldberg:

‘When John McCain said we could just ‘muddle through' in Afghanistan, I argued for more resources and more troops to finish the fight against the terrorists who actually attacked us on 9/11, and made clear that we must take out Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants if we have them in our sights," Barack Obama thundered as he accepted the Democratic nomination for president in Denver last year. "John McCain likes to say that he'll follow bin Laden to the gates of Hell. But he won't even go to the cave where he lives."

It was a shabby bit of rhetoric, even for a campaign. Insinuating that McCain, of all people, didn't have the intestinal fortitude to take the fight to bin Laden was not only absurd on its face, it smacked of overcompensation coming from the former community organizer whose greatest foreign-policy passion prior to his presidential bid had been nuclear disarmament.

But the line did what it needed to do: communicate that Obama had the sort of true grit required to fight the good, i.e. popular, war in Afghanistan. That war may or may not be good anymore, but it is most certainly not popular. And so what was for Obama a "war of necessity" has become a de facto war of choice. At least that's the sense one gets as the president is suddenly searching for a politically palatable strategy other than the one he announced months ago.

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After ending the war in Iraq and taking the fight to bin Laden's cave, direct engagement with the Iranian regime was candidate Obama's greatest foreign-policy priority. Partly this stemmed from the fact that he accidentally suggested in a debate that he would meet with Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad without preconditions. Rather than admit he was wrong, Obama stuck to his idée fixe throughout the campaign.

Since being elected, it seems that his off-the-cuff slipup wasn't that off the cuff. Despite an ever-increasing number of lies, subterfuges, and outrages on the part of the Iranians, the Obama administration has seemed convinced that they can be talked into compliance with the so-called international community.

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... Critics always claimed that Obama was a very left-wing fellow who was never the centrist he claimed to be. The pessimist might suspect that Obama's newfound pragmatism only manifests itself when it permits him to abandon the centrist positions that may have helped him get elected but are of no use to him politically anymore. What seemed like principled centrism in 2008 might simply be exposed as left-wing expediency in 2009.

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Obama's pragmatism only extends to what he has to say to get elected and not what he will do after elected. He is desperate to cut deals with people who word is no good in order to avoid the reality of what needs to be done to stop their objectives. In that regard he is like a truther willing to believe lies.