WHAT WAS in the mind of President Obama last week as he stepped apart from the official Veterans Day obsequies to walk silently amid the grave markers of America’s war dead at Arlington Cemetery? The impression of his deep preoccupation evoked a similar image of the same man on the midnight tarmac at Dover Air Force Base two weeks earlier, a solemn witness to the return of those killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is impossible to read another person’s thoughts, of course, but the president at those moments embodied an introspection that properly belongs to the entire nation as we await the momentous decision about Afghanistan.
Arlington National Cemetery is a beautiful place, as it should be, but its grandeur can deceive. The pristine markers in orderly rows across undulating hillsides of meticulously maintained lawns can disguise the harshness of what is buried there. The remains of those who served the nation are properly honored, but the waste of the wars in which so many of them died is easily averted.
Korea and Vietnam were not the worthy causes they were made out to be at their respective times. Both wars came to resolutions that fell short of stated purposes, and of promises made to those who died. World War II was “the good war,’’ with archenemies decisively defeated, but when seen as the second phase of a Thirty Years War that began in the imperial absurdities of 1914, its losses, too, can be reckoned as more tragic than glorious. Arlington began as the burial place of Civil War dead, and while the cause of slave emancipation was just, the unprecedented carnage of that first industrial war was itself betrayed when blacks were resubjugated in its aftermath.
To walk among the markers of those who died in such wars is to confront the distance between war’s contradictory contingency and the absoluteness of the death of each one killed in war.
The president has already defined Afghanistan as a “war of necessity,’’ but the judiciousness with which he has proceeded over recent weeks suggests that he, too, is asking: Necessary for what? One can almost hear the cacophony of conflicting witnesses echoing in the president’s head - including the just-registered dissent of Ambassador Karl Eikenberry.
Do the voices of senators, generals, diplomats, civilian advisers, Cabinet officers, and cable news geniuses, mostly giving expression to the dubious wisdom that has brought us where we are, add up to more than noise? What was the president telling the nation last week when, as reported, he rejected his war council’s every proffered recommendation? Give me alternatives, he was saying, to unnecessary death.
Meanwhile, the uniformed men and women who must carry the weight of the president’s decision show unprecedented symptoms of distress. Polls indicate that the nation is worried sick about what’s coming. The Afghan people are alienated both from their own leaders and from the American occupation that protects those leaders. The enemy is diffuse. Its greatest strength is our presence. The purpose of the war reduces to: we are in Afghanistan because we are in Afghanistan. And finally, those who support escalation for the sake of showing resolve assert against Obama’s newfound skepticism that Afghanistan is not Vietnam. What the past teaches, they argue, is that the past does not teach.
The president is alone with his thoughts. Would a decision toward American disengagement amount to admitting that he was wrong to call the war necessary? Or do the shifting contradictions of conditions on the ground - the collapse of Hamid Karzai’s moral authority, the transformed risks to Pakistan, the exhaustion of American forces, the near bankruptcy of the US economy - render previous judgments moot?
All such factors are weights in the scale, but none of them tips the balance in the way walking through Arlington must. Obama’s critics have called it dithering, but his slowness to act has itself amounted to a proclamation. As it appears to this observer, the president is turning away from escalation. And for the right reason. There is almost no such thing as a necessary war, which is what one learns from the absolute presence of those who are missing on the hillside above Washington.
James Carroll’s column appears regularly in the Globe. 
