Dear Mr. Moore:One of my aides was putting together our daily roundup of political news and blog posts from across the spectrum, and noticed your latest on Daily Kos. I've been told that in the past your open letters to me have been a mixture of praise and criticism, hope for the success of my presidency leavened by concern that I've failed to deliver on my promises, whether for ill-guided political reasons or for badly thought-out practical ones. I'm told that like your movies, your critiques on Daily Kos have been tough but fair. I wouldn't have it any other way.
But when I was told about today's letter, I had to read it myself. After all, you accuse me of breaking my campaign promises about my most important duty, my role as commander in chief of our all-volunteer military. You state very confidently that I am throwing our brave men and women into a hopeless, pointless, and ultimately unimportant bloodbath, and you suggest pretty strongly that I am doing it to appease my political enemies. In substance, you are calling me a thoughtless murderer. And so you leave me no choice but to respond.
You begin by asking me:
Do you really want to be the new "war president"?
Of course, I would prefer not to be.
I would rather not have to be dealing with winding down the Iraq war, a war I opposed from the start.
I would rather that the Bush administration have used the unprecedented seven years of control and influence it had over Afghanistan to stabilize that country and cripple Al Queda.
I would rather that it have withdrawn support from Mussharaf in Pakistan and flooded that country with humanitarian and civil-society support to help prevent the current cross-border Taliban statelets from evolving and growing more powerful, threatening to destabilize both countries.
But that's not what actually happened. There were actually two badly-mismanaged wars underway when I took office. So I didn't ask to be a war president - I became president during wartime. It's a distinction with a difference.
Then you state that when I announce the new Afghanistan policy I have agonized over, after repeatedly rejecting my generals' advice and resisting efforts to box me into a particular decision:
And with that you will do the worst possible thing you could do -- destroy the hopes and dreams so many millions have placed in you. With just one speech tomorrow night you will turn a multitude of young people who were the backbone of your campaign into disillusioned cynics. You will teach them what they've always heard is true -- that all politicians are alike.
I will truly be disappointed if my actions destroy the hopes and dreams of a multitude of young people, or if they become cynics as a result of my policies. But anyone who was part of my campaign, or who followed it, should have known very clearly what my intentions were when it came to Afghanistan. I promised that I would increase troop levels, and that I would pursue Al Queda and the Taliban until they were crushed. So we can disagree as to whether I was right to make that promise, or as to whether I am right to follow through on it. But it was my promise, and so I'm not inclined to hear much criticism from those who would pretend that I hid my intentions and, basically, lied about the most important and serious part of my role as President.
You go on to discuss my control of the military as a civilian:
It is not your job to do what the generals tell you to do. We are a civilian-run government. WE tell the Joint Chiefs what to do, not the other way around. That's the way General Washington insisted it must be. That's what President Truman told General MacArthur when MacArthur wanted to invade China. "You're fired!," said Truman, and that was that. And you should have fired Gen. McChrystal when he went to the press to preempt you, telling the press what YOU had to do.
You are definitely right that we are a civilian-run government, and that unelected military officers must be made and kept subordinate to elected officials. It is the bedrock of our system.
And in deciding on my Afghanistan policy, I have had to exercise my power to check military commanders' decision-making and strategy-building over and over again. Perhaps you forget that even after months of discussions, when the military came to me with four possible options, I rejected them all and demanded new and better-refined plans, ones that I felt offered the possibility for success and provided for an exit-strategy regardless of whether success could be accomplished.
As for General McChrystal, I could have fired him, if I thought it were necessary. Unlike MacArthur, though, Gen. McChrystal was not actually threatening or questioning my power to direct the military, and was not making the kind of public borderline-lunatic demands, such as the deployment of nuclear weapons against China, that you mention.
Moreover, there is a reason I've kept Gen. McChrystal on, one you don't discuss and which I do not know if you are aware. He was brought in to revamp Afganistan strategy in an effort to deal with the obvious failure of the Predator-drone-strike, opium-field-destruction policy that you denounce so vigorously. Since the implementation of his new counter-insurgency strategy, which is based on those few such strategies as have been historically successful, the deaths of innocent civilians to drone and artillery strikes have fallen dramatically. Instead of attempting to eradicate poppy fields or convert them to less-lucrative crops, we have shifted focus to interdicting drug lords' shipment routes and storage facilities, which gives us a level of flexible leverage with warlords on the ground. In short, McChrystal is the man with my plan, my tactics, and I'm not cutting him loose just because he sometimes speaks his mind too freely as to how that plan should be implemented.
You mention the historical problem of occupying Afganistan:
There's a reason they don't call Afghanistan the "Garden State" (though they probably should, seeing how the corrupt President Karzai, whom we back, has his brother in the heroin trade raising poppies). Afghanistan's nickname is the "Graveyard of Empires." If you don't believe it, give the British a call. I'd have you call Genghis Khan but I lost his number. I do have Gorbachev's number though. It's + 41 22 789 1662. I'm sure he could give you an earful about the historic blunder you're about to commit.
Ah, President Karzai. It's hard to disagree with you there. I'm trying to achieve some kind of countervailing power structure through other warlords and tribal chieftans, but I'll admit its not a hopeful situation. If we're going to fail, he may be the biggest reason why. I'll have to accept responsibility for it if it happens. If.
But your examples do not turn if into when. The British and the Soviets both wanted to conquer and hold Afghanistan as puppet states. I have no such ambitions. I want Aghanistan to be harmless, and if possible stable. But I will gladly settle for harmless.
Then you indulge in hyperbole:
With our economic collapse still in full swing and our precious young men and women being sacrificed on the altar of arrogance and greed, the breakdown of this great civilization we call America will head, full throttle, into oblivion if you become the "war president." Empires never think the end is near, until the end is here. Empires think that more evil will force the heathens to toe the line -- and yet it never works. The heathens usually tear them to shreds.
Well the economy's not great, that's for sure. But you better be careful with that "sacrificed on the altar of arrogance and greed" stuff. It's me making the decisions to sacrifice here. And if you want to say I'm arrogant, well fine, I'm not going to argue for my own humility. But you really think I'm doing this out of greed, or to serve the greed of others? You must think you are a really bad judge of character if you think I could make that U-turn within a year.
Is America a tottering empire on the brink of collapse, Roman style, about to be occupied by virtual Visigoths and Vandals? Am I hoping to crush heathens with evil, before they tear our country to shreds? If you believe these things, then there's little I could do to make a difference. But these kinds of things have been said before, and I'm sure they'll be said in the future, and as the President of our flawed democracy, I can only hope they're wrong. In the meantime I'll go on trying to keep from hitting the rocks, while the doomsayers wring their hands and proclaim that the ship is already wrecked.
From hyperbole to, I'm afraid, ignorance:
I know you know that there are LESS than a hundred al-Qaeda left in Afghanistan! A hundred thousand troops trying to crush a hundred guys living in caves? Are you serious? Have you drunk Bush's Kool-Aid? I refuse to believe it.
You know that I know? How do you know - have you been sitting in the back of the situation room without me noticing somehow? And lets say you're right, that there are less than a "hundred guys living in caves" who actually have Al-Queda membership cards. First, those hundred guys are the richest, most powerful extremests in the Muslim world, caves or not. They blew up a Navy Destroyer from those caves. Not to mention some other things. Second, they have friends, you know. Friends called the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban. There's a few tens of thousands of them. In counter-insurgency terms, you're supposed to have a 10-1 ratio of troops to insurgents. Between us and the Pakistani military, we're actually spreading it really thin. But you're not responsible for civilian control over the military, you're just responsible for implying that I'm not exercising it. So I don't really expect you to understand, or to restrain yourself from comparing me to President Bush.
But this may be the most troubling part of your letter:
Your potential decision to expand the war (while saying that you're doing it so you can "end the war") will do more to set your legacy in stone than any of the great things you've said and done in your first year. One more throwing a bone from you to the Republicans and the coalition of the hopeful and the hopeless may be gone -- and this nation will be back in the hands of the haters quicker than you can shout "tea bag!"
Choose carefully, Mr. President. Your corporate backers are going to abandon you as soon as it is clear you are a one-term president and that the nation will be safely back in the hands of the usual idiots who do their bidding. That could be Wednesday morning.
We the people still love you. We the people still have a sliver of hope. But we the people can't take it anymore. We can't take your caving in, over and over, when we elected you by a big, wide margin of millions to get in there and get the job done. What part of "landslide victory" don't you understand?
Don't be deceived into thinking that sending a few more troops into Afghanistan will make a difference, or earn you the respect of the haters. They will not stop until this country is torn asunder and every last dollar is extracted from the poor and soon-to-be poor. You could send a million troops over there and the crazy Right still wouldn't be happy. You would still be the victim of their incessant venom on hate radio and television because no matter what you do, you can't change the one thing about yourself that sends them over the edge.
The haters were not the ones who elected you, and they can't be won over by abandoning the rest of us.
Really. You think I am committing these brave men and women to combat to "throw a bone" to Republicans? You think I include in my calculations in risking their lives the effects on "corporate backers"? You think I'm doing this to "win the respect" of haters? I don't know what to say. I know what I want to say. But this is a public letter, and so I'll leave it to your imagination.
Finally:
Tomorrow, we shall see. The ball is in your court. You DON'T have to do this. You can be a profile in courage. You can be your mother's son.
I don't have to do anything. I will do what I think is right. Whether you or anyone else thinks it is courageous, I will do my best, and that will have to be enough, because it is, in the end, my job, and I will bear the burden of being right or wrong in making these decisions, which will end in pain and bloodshed no matter what I do.
And finally, Mr. Moore, I will always be my mother's son.
Sincerely,
Barack Obama
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