You take what you can get I suppose.  But Teh Zilla has a point:

While Obama’s speech last night largely comported to what his aides spent days anonymously previewing, there was one (pleasantly) unexpected aspect:  he commendably dispensed with the propagandistic pretext that we are fighting in Afghanistan in order to deliver freedom and democracy to that country and to improve the plight of Afghan women.  Many Democrats (the self-proclaimed “liberal hawks”) love to support American wars on the self-righteous ground that we’re going to drop enough Freedom Bombs to liberate millions and invade other countries in order to re-make other peoples’ cultures for their own good.  In order to maximize support for his escalation, Obama — like Bush so often did — could easily have relied on that appeal to our national narcissism and exploited justifiable disgust for the Taliban in order to manipulate “liberal hawks” into supporting this war on human rights grounds.  During the build-up to the speech, it was predicted by several influential Obama advisers that he would do exactly that.  Indeed, when announcing his prior Afghanistan escalation in March, Obama played up the humanitarian rationale for this war.

But there was almost none of that in last night’s speech.  As Ben Smith correctly notes, Obama did not even mention — let alone hype — the issue of women’s rights in Afghanistan.  There were no grandiose claims that the justness of the war derives from our desire to defeat evil, tyrannical extremists and replace them with more humane and democratic leaders.  To the contrary, he was commendably blunt that our true goal is not to improve the lives of Afghan citizens but rather:  ”Our overarching goal remains the same:  to disrupt, dismantle and defeat al-Qaeda.”  There were no promises to guarantee freedom and human rights to the Afghan people.  To the contrary, he explicitly rejected a mission of broad nation-building “because it sets goals that are beyond what can be achieved at a reasonable cost and what we need to achieve to secure our interests“; he said he “refuse[d] to set goals that go beyond our responsibility, our means, or our interests”; and even vowed to incorporate the convertible factions of the Taliban into the government. 

Not only did he refrain from those manipulative appeals, he made explicitly clear that we are in Afghanistan to serve our own interests (as he perceives them), not to build a better nation for Afghans.  Nation-building, he said, goes “beyond … what we need to achieve to secure our interests” and “go beyond our responsibility.”  We’re there to serve our interests and do nothing else.  That should throw cold water on all on the preening fantasies of all but the blindest and most naive “liberal war supporters” that we’re there to help the Afghan people. 

Independent of motive, it is also quite unlikely that helping Afghans will be the unintended result of our ongoing war there.  Just as was true in Iraq — where we bribed and befriended religious extremists and others we spent years demonizing as “Terrorists,” and now protect a government that is extremely oppressive to women, Christians and gays, and brutally violative of human rights in general — we will do whatever benefits us and serves our interests in Afghanistan, even if that means empowering brutal, oppressive and misogynistic fanatics as long as they are willing to carry out our geopolitical directives.  Many of the warlords and other local religious extremists on whom we’re already relying and will now use even more are hardly distinguishable from the Taliban on human rights issues.  We’re not there on a charity mission but are there to advance what we think are our interests.  That’s why some of the most oppressive governments in the Middle East will continue to be our most stalwart allies. [...]

But if Obama’s approach — reflective of the Republican “realists” to whom he seems to listen most — slays the pervasive, preening “liberal hawk” fantasy that we invade and bomb other countries in order to help them, that will at least be an important value.  With some extremely rare historical exceptions, governments start and wage wars in order to benefit themselves, not to “help” the people in the countries which are being invaded and bombed.  We’ve proven so many times as to place it beyond dispute that we’re more than willing to support and empower foreign leaders who do our bidding regardless of how they treat their own citizens.  That didn’t change when we had a swaggering, cowboy-hat-wearing, evangelical moralizer in the Oval Office, and it’s not going to change just because he’s been replaced by a charming, nice, eloquent, East-Coast-educated Democrat. 

The claim that we must stay in Afghanistan in order to reduce genuine threats to our security is at least cogent, though ultimately very unpersuasive.  But the claim that we’re fulfilling some sort of moral responsibility to the plight of Afghans by continuing to occupy, bomb and wage war in their country — and by imprisoning them en masse with no charges — is sheer self-glorifying fantasy.  Some credit is due Obama for refusing to promote that fantasy last night when doing so might have helped his case.  Now that the “Commander-in-Chief” who is prosecuting the war has largely dispensed with this fictitious rationale, will other war supporters do so as well?

To be clear, it’s not that improving the lives of the Afghan people is an unworthy goal, it’s just that we were never particularly interested in doing so, war is an extremely bad vehicle for attempting to achieve that aim, and we probably lack the means regardless (in any lasting and significant sense of the word “improve”).

However, to pretend otherwise is to believe our own hype – to confuse  reality and our own exceptionalist fantasy.  That leads to at least two pernicious maladies of thought (though certainly many more that I will fail to discuss):

First, you have the situation where people like Tom Friedman et al scratch their heads and wonder, in a general sense, why there is so much anti-Americanism in the world and, in a more specific sense, why the Muslim world is so angry with our foreign policy choices  (See, also, why are the Iraqi people such “ingrates”?). 

Second, because the liberal hawks buy the theory that war is a many splendored thing – a remarkably versatile panacea for what ails the target (and targeted) population —  they tend to hop on board with any plan to give the gift of shrapnel (sometimes inventing new and creative ways of incorporating a little blood and guts).  The result is almost always not the intended happy ending.

Ultimately, I prefer my foreign policy discussions straight up, with no chaser.  The better to understand the world, and our place in it.  And the better to understand the actual effects of making war.