Editor's Letter: Barack Obama, war president?

last updated 8 January 2015

It had been years since I’d seen a bomb-sniffing dog at my commuter train station. But there next to me on the platform last week was a German shepherd, sampling the air, and an imposing cop intently studying the passing backpacks and bags for inexplicable bulk. It felt like an intrusion—not of civil liberties, but of the present by the past. Americans would very much like to be done with the “war on terror” (a term the Obama administration has officially banished), not to mention the economic misery of recent years. But “turning the page” is a lot easier in political rhetoric than it is in reality. Nine months into Barack Obama’s young presidency, the FBI is hunting for Islamic terrorists in New York, the Taliban is rising from the dead in Afghanistan, Iran is playing nuclear cat-and-mouse, and Israel is apparently contemplating an airstrike on Iran that might trigger a horrific regional war, a new surge in terrorism, $8-a-gallon gas, and a return to economic chaos. Wasn’t all that on some previous page?

Doubling down our bet in Afghanistan while trying to stop Israel and Iran from unleashing Armageddon was not, one suspects, what Obama had in mind when he took the oath of office, not so long ago. But presidents usually have but a few months to control their own agendas, before larger forces take over the narrative. As Ross Douthat suggested in The New York Times this week, Obama may find that he’s “as much of a war president as his predecessor.” Barack Obama, war president? It wasn’t the plan, but then, life is what happens when you’re busy