When U.S. Sen. Barack Obama was in Springfield
last weekend for a town meeting with military veterans about the
sorry state of veterans’ benefits, he missed a good chance to
talk to the vets about the war in Iraq.
He had passed up an earlier chance to address
the issue when Newsweek interviewed him for its Dec. 27 cover story,
“Who’s next 2005.” “The Dems’
freshest face has a new challenge —” declared the
magazine, “to help his party relocate its moral core.”
The article mentioned that Obama was an “early
opponent” of the war, but that was all it said. Obama’s
fresh approach to moral values requires a “new
narrative” that employs “power and mystery” to
restore “timeless values.” But, so far as we can tell
from Newsweek, it doesn’t involve ending a bad war.
With the veterans in Springfield, he stayed on
message and out of trouble. Declaring that the Illinois
disability-compensation system is “broken,” he quoted
George Washington: “The willingness with which our young
people are likely to serve in any war, no matter how justified, shall be directly proportional as to how
they perceive the veterans of earlier wars were treated and appreciated
by their nation.” It would have been easy to go from there to say
that until we can take care of the old disabled veterans, we
shouldn’t be making so many new ones. According to the Pentagon,
about 10,000 U.S. troops have been wounded in Iraq, many with severe
injuries they would have died of in earlier wars. And thousands more
are returning from Iraq mentally crippled from the effects of
posttraumatic stress disorder [see Dan Frosch, “Bringing the war
home,” Dec. 16]. But Obama — like other Democrats in
post-election Washington — hasn’t found his voice yet on
the war itself.
I’m not sure that criticism of the Bush
administration’s Iraq policy would have been all that
controversial with the veterans. The few I interviewed at random at
the town meeting expressed little support for the war. Bill Quick
of Mt. Vernon, state commander of the Amvets, noted a general
feeling among veterans that “it’s better to fight the
enemy over there than over here.” But he said that few
veterans are pleased with the way the Iraq war is going.
“We’ll all be glad when it’s over.” Dennis
Guernsey of Springfield, a Vietnam veteran who is past state
commander of the Disabled American Veterans, was more adamant: “I think going into Iraq
was a big mistake. It’s the first time I know of when we did
preemptive strikes. We had no reason to do it. If I had the power to do
anything, I would be bringing the troops back home.”
William Yokem Jr. of Springfield, who served
with the Marines in Vietnam, said that he’s concerned about
the mental problems American troops are bringing home from Iraq.
“It’s worse than Vietnam,” he said.
“It’s time to wrap it up over there. This war is
getting old.” Anthony Rhone of Springfield, also a
Vietnam-era vet, said, “Every day we’re getting people
killed over there — and we don’t even know who the
enemy is.”
So after the event I asked the freshest face of
the Democratic Party what he’s going to do about the war. He took
the question seriously and replied thoughtfully, as though he knows his
silence is showing. “I’ve said that going into Iraq was a
bad idea in the first place. But I’ve also said we couldn’t
leave without stabilizing the country,” he told me. “The
administration is counting on the elections, but elections aren’t
really going to end the violence. At the confirmation hearings, we
asked Dr. [Condoleezza] Rice for a specific timetable for training
Iraqi troops to take over. She said she would get back to us, but I
don’t want to wait very long.”
What do you mean, you don’t want to wait
very long?
“I want to give the administration the
benefit of the doubt at the beginning of their new term,”
Obama said, “but I don’t want to find out later we
haven’t done enough to secure the peace. If that happens, I
will become much more vocal, and so will many others.”
Well, that’s a promise. We hired this
junior senator and made him a star with the expectation that he
would become much more vocal. We don’t want to wait very
long.
This article appears in Jan 27 – Feb 2, 2005.
