Obama: War is sacrifice

President Obama's salute to those soldiers killed in Afghanistan, as their remains were returned at Dover Air Force base, signaled his emerging understanding of war. This President is a deeply religious man, and a man thoughtful about innate meaning and ultimate purpose. War, in this President's view, is not bloodless (and mindless) triumph, but a bloody and costly sacrifice.

It is not Lyndon Johnson, or even Franklin Roosevelt who provide the presidential precedents for how Barack Obama is coming to understand war. You have to go back to Abraham Lincoln to understand the profound change Obama believes we need to make as a country in how we perceive war, even as we consider practical changes to the conduct of the war in Afghanistan.

Add the midnight trip to Dover to the administration's changed policy on allowing photos of the return of the war dead when families permit it, and you begin to see the change.

At Arlington National Cemetery, President Obama said, "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 they have made." And again yesterday at Elmendorf Air Force Base, on his way to Asia, the President told the assembled troops that they knew "with services comes sacrifice."

At the Fort Hood memorial service, the President made the connection himself--he repudiated the idea of war as divinely authorized triumph, and explicitly invoked Lincoln. "And instead of claiming God for our side, we remember Lincoln's words, and always pray to be on the side of God."

After months of careful deliberation about Afghanistan, and extensive consultation, the President again just asked for better options. The changed plans for Afghanistan may not as yet match the President's view of war.

This is what profound change looks like. Americans' understanding of war has changed many times in our history. World War II was a "good war" against a clearly evil axis that attacked without provocation, committed genocide and made women into sexual slaves. It was also a war of national sacrifice.

Vietnam changed that. War became purposeless and deceptive. These days there are some comparisons to Lyndon Johnson being made about Barack Obama: an ambitious domestic agenda and a costly foreign war. But what sunk Johnson was the lying. As Rick Perlstein argues in Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, "Lying about Vietnam" became "a Washington way of life." This was the perversion of triumph; triumph without the courage to admit the sacrifice and suffer it.

The Gulf War was called a "Nintendo war" where there was technological superiority and supposedly little sacrifice. Ask any veteran with "Gulf War Syndrome" if that was true.

And then came the war of choice, the Iraq War. "Shock and awe," a phrase right out of the New Testament Book of Revelation, signaled not only a theology of war as earthly triumph, but of heavenly triumph as well.

Obama's shift to a Lincoln-type understanding of war is huge--that's why even liberals and progressives are missing it. First, many liberals and progressives simply do not get how deeply religious President Obama is, and they are largely clueless about how African American Christianity is the thread in American religious thought that really does deal with costly sacrifice. White Christianity, especially white liberal Christianity, will almost never touch that idea.

The religious and political Right are still pushing the dream of war as cosmic triumph despite the fact that both wars they launched and pursued, Iraq and Afghanistan, are national nightmares.

No, you have to go back to Abraham Lincoln to understand where President Obama is trying to take the country in relationship to understanding the changes we need to make about the conduct of the war in Afghanistan.

Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address, considered by many to be the greatest speech ever given, calls the nation to account, both North and South, for their cheaply held theologies of war. Both sides in the Civil War "looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding." For each side did not reckon it would have to count the cost, and the cost of war is astounding.

Really look at President Obama, will you? Look at how much thinner he is. Look at his face in the pictures from Dover Air Force base. Look at a President counting the cost of war. Learn something.

By Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite  |  November 13, 2009; 11:20 AM ET Save & Share:                 
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