I’ve been thinking some more about the president’s speech since I wrote about it last night, and about how I feel about an American commitment to that fractured, fractious country that will extend in one fashion or another until the 2020′s, and I’ve listened to the reactions of other people who supposedly know more than the rest of us, and I have to say I don’t feel a lot better about it than I did last night. One of the best parts of kindly Doc Maddow’s book Drift (which I’ve only just started because I was finishing Oklahoma City, the fascinating account by Andrew Gumbel and Roger Charles of the bombing of the Murrah Building and the ensuing investigation, the conclusion of which is that there are some other people who probably need to be in the slam behind those events) is her careful explanation of how difficult it becomes politically for American presidents to disengage from wars, even if they’re not the president who started them. Clearly, President Obama is caught in that same political bind. I don’t envy him.
That said, however, I remain unclear on how we influence…
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