Obama's speech:
There is, as with the Iraq withdrawal, no triumphalism. But destroying half of al Qaeda's leadership, including Osama bin Laden, as Americans struggle in a stubbornly sluggish economy, is good enough. The longest war in the history of America will come to an end … in three years' time. It will have lasted thirteen years. And Obama's pragmatism – his refusal to embrace either the Full McCain Jacket or the impulse to just get the hell out of there ASAP – has helped him. His moderation on this has allowed the pro-surge forces to have had their moment and their say, has scattered al Qaeda, and has provoked conservative voices of skepticism to emerge in the GOP to reshape the national debate. I see no groundswell against this sentiment:
We must chart a more centered course. Like generations before, we must embrace America's singular role in the course of human events. But we must be as pragmatic as we are passionate; as strategic as we are resolute.
The unknowable question is whether we have so inflamed the enemy that we cannot afford to withdraw without some risk to security. I would support taking that risk. Because the alternative to that risk is the corruption of unending and essentially un-American occupation. And, yes, perspective is necessary. When the nation is in desperate need of investment at home, it simply is not right to focus it, with dubious results, abroad. To continue in that vein would turn legitimate anti-interventionism into a more dangerous isolationism.
For more than 200 years, the United States would not have dreamed of occupying Afghanistan, the graveyard of empires. We intervened in a just cause, and, thanks to Obama's callibrated resilience and new focus on al Qaeda, and the brilliance and bravery of the armed forces, we have done our job. We can never care more about a country's future security than the people of that country care about it themselves. That much we have learned. And the core goals of that original impulse have been achieved. The perpetrator of 9/11 is dead, and, more to the point, discredited. And the neoconservative dream of a democratizing Arab world as the only ultimate solution to the threat of Islamism has come true.
Because the United States did not impose it.
The Dish 