Is Obama Getting Us Out Of Afghanistan After All-- Or Is This More Multi-Dimensional Chess?

I listened to President Obama's speech from Arlington National Ceremony yesterday and there was something that struck me as odd. This was the paragraph (which I found at whitehouse.gov):

In this time of war, we gather here mindful that the generation serving today already deserves a place alongside previous generations for the courage they have shown and the sacrifices that they have made.  In an era where so many acted only in pursuit of narrow self-interest, they've chosen the opposite.  They chose to serve the cause that is greater than self; many even after they knew they'd be sent into harm's way.  And for the better part of a decade, they have endured tour after tour in distant and difficult places; they have protected us from danger; and they have given others the opportunity for a better life.

Sentence one sounds pretty standard and it's difficult to disagree. Sentence two has the same ring, especially if it conjures up Wall Street brokers, Limbaugh and Cheney. Sentence three is where it broken down for me. "They chose to serve the cause that is greater than self..." Did they? Do they? Forget the ones who are offered a choice between going to jail or volunteering for the marines; that's not my point.

What's the "cause that is greater than self" in our recent forays into foreign countries? Like, say, Iraq... or the continuing occupation of Afghanistan? Bush certainly never articulated it, except in terms of some kind of ugly primal blood lust that didn't work for many people outside the angry white South. But, frankly, I don't find Obama doing much better, which-- since he's a more introspective man than his predecessor-- may well explain the astounding new last night that all bets are off-- or may be.

Last night I was driving out to Santa Monica for a Blue America board meeting and I had NPR on my car. The announcer announced, as they tend to do-- and quite authoritatively-- that the decision had been made: more troops will be shipped off to the pointless hell that is Afghanistan. But how many, was still up in the air. When I got home from the meeting, AP has already run a story claiming that Obama is rejecting all the options his hawkish team had put on the table. I'm skeptical but let's go with it 'til they say they were only kidding.

President Barack Obama does not plan to accept any of the Afghanistan war options presented by his national security team, pushing instead for revisions to clarify how and when U.S. troops would turn over responsibility to the Afghan government, a senior administration official said Wednesday... The president raised questions at a war council meeting on Wednesday, however, that could alter the dynamic of both how many additional troops are sent to Afghanistan and what the timeline would be for their presence in the war zone, according to the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss Obama's thinking.

I guess he's resisting letting the militarists and hawks around him turn him into LBJ. And maybe he's paying more attention to his Ambassador to Kabul, Lt. General (ret.) Karl Eikenberry who is against sending more troops (citing Karzai's unwillingness "to tackle the corruption and mismanagement that has fueled the Taliban's rise"). Who knows, maybe he's even listening to congressional leaders like Murtha and Levin, who are urging him to resist the Pentagon's, the CIA's and the GOP's hysterical-- and suicidal-- demands for escalation. Who knows-- maybe our 32 heroic members of Congress who voted against the June supplemental war budget, and insist they will never vote for any money for Afghanistan war unless its tied to a clear timeline for ending the occupation, got to him.