Carpetbagger has an interesting post on right-wing outrage over a comment Obama made over the weekend. First, here's how Carpetbagger summarized the comment:
In New Hampshire over the weekend, Barack Obama told an audience that “we ended up launching a war that should have never been authorized and should have never been waged, and to which we now have spent $400 billion and have seen over 3,000 lives of the bravest young Americans wasted.”
The problem, of course, was the choice of the word "wasted." Michelle Malkin, among others, went bonkers, suggesting his remarks were “patronizing, infantilizing, and insulting” to our soldiers.
Obama has already walked back from the comment, and he did so in a fairly deft manner:
As he arrived in New Hampshire, Mr. Obama said he would “absolutely apologize” to military families if they were offended by a remark he made in Iowa while criticizing the Bush administration’s Iraq policy.
“What I would say — and meant to say — is that their service hasn’t been honored,” Mr. Obama told reporters in Nashua, N.H., “because our civilian strategy has not honored their courage and bravery, and we have put them in a situation in which it is hard for them to succeed.”[....]“Even as I said it,” Mr. Obama said Monday, “I realized I had misspoken.”
My guess is that this will most likely put an end to this pseudo-controversy. Even so, I want to take a look at Malkin's words for a moment. Apparently it is somehow "patronizing, infantilizing, and insulting" to suggest that lives can be wasted in war. Her choice of the word "infantilizing" here is interesting, because it seems to me that this is an incredibly childish view of how war actually works.
Two of the most common aphorisms about war have to do with war being "hell" and battles being conducted in a "fog." Implicit in both is the idea that in war, everything that can go wrong will. In WWII, for example, mistakes were so common that our GI's came up with a term for it - snafu: "Situation normal, all fucked up."
In war, mistakes don't just happen, they happen all the time. And by definition, that means that not only are lives often ended in ways that didn't allow them to be put to their best possible use, they at times end without being put to any good use at all.
Unless you are willing to believe it possible to fight a war without ever making any mistakes, it is impossible to believe that war can be fought without wasting human life. And more to the point, unless you are willing to believe that this war has been fought without any mistakes, a claim even Michelle Malkin wouldn't make, it is impossible to claim that no lives have been wasted.
Now add to the the fact that Obama has clearly stated in the past that this entire war was a tragic mistake, and you'll begin to see why he chose the words he chose.
All that said, from a purely pragmatic standpoint, I think Obama was right to walk back his comments. In a purely political context, there are much better ways to say what he said, formulations that will both keep the meaning intact and limit the ability of disingenuous pundits and opponents to launch attacks. In politics, what you say matters as much as how you say it, and its good to see that Obama clearly gets that.
My only question is this: If he realized he had misspoken even as he was finishing his sentence, why didn't he correct himself? And if he had, would that have made things better or worse? I don't have an answer, but it is definitely something to think about as the campaign rolls forward.
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