CT Blue

Atrios suggests, in this tweet, that the ultimate reaction to the documents released by Wikileaks, about which Der Spiegel, The Guardian and the New York Times reported today, may be primarily about the propriety of the leak rather than the contents of the papers and what they say about our involvement in Afghanistan.

That may, in fact, seem to be the case in the short term, but long term these documents can only have a corrosive effect on this already justifiably unpopular war. The Obama administration will make a mistake, win or lose, if it attempts to either stop publication of the papers or prosecute the leakers, if it can find them. That’s the tack that Nixon took with the Pentagon Papers, which might have worked during WW II, but didn’t during the unpopular Vietnam War. They certainly tried to make it a fight about the leak and the publication. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, which back then was a court of substance. It’s quite possible that today’s court would back even an effort to quash publication, though the fact that it would be Obama that was asking them to do it might be enough to stay their hand. They would certainly have no problems with criminal sanctions against the leakers, but convictions would be a Pyrrhic victory. The war is asymmetric in the extreme. We are spending ourselves into bankruptcy in pursuit of a victory we can’t even define. The American people can sense that. Obama will find himself on the wrong side of history if he continues to pursue this war. Truly time to declare victory and get out.

I might add that the only thing that might diminish the inevitable repercussions against Obama, for what is now truly his war, is the fact that for many Americans the war is an afterthought, with an acceptable level of casualties, particularly considering that the dying are not the sons and daughters of the middle class, but increasingly the cast-offs of our society, who “volunteer” for service because they have no hope of finding work anywhere else. This is not universally so, but it is increasingly the case.

But even the fact that the war is no direct threat to the average American young person, like it so directly was during Vietnam, will be enough to save it and its defenders from its eventual fate. Besides costing those expendable lives it is costing a lot of money; it is dragging on and it is becoming increasingly clear that it will drag forever unless we manage to disengage ourselves. Americans are rightfully tired of being mired down in un-winnable wars. I am 60 years old, and this country has been bogged down in unwinnable wars for half my life and counting. Obama has promised to disengage, but he’s promised a lot of things. He’ll be doing himself a favor if he keeps this promise, but those are the type of promises he seems to have the hardest time fulfilling.