In that 2007 speech, Obama explicitly repudiated the use of torture, saying that "the days of compromising our values are over." And he has, in fact, ended the practices he considers torture. But he has not convinced the public. At the height of Obama's popularity, in April 2009, a significant plurality of Americans asserted in a CBS News poll that waterboarding was justified -- even though an overwhelming majority agreed with the president that the practice constituted torture. Even Cheney never made so bald a claim. Between half and two-thirds of respondents consistently oppose closing the Guantanamo Bay facility. Americans actually have a more negative view of Islam today than they did five years ago; perhaps the reason why a rising fraction of the public believes that Obama is a Muslim is that they can think of no worse an epithet.
On the other hand, the appetite for transformative adventures has evaporated. The public views the war in Iraq as a failure. A full 43 percent now say that even the war in Afghanistan was a "mistake" from the outset. And large majorities take a dim view of democracy promotion in general. This, then, is the national mood nine years after the terrorist attacks: sullen, suspicious, defensive, borderline isolationist. (For more on this, see Scott Malcomson's fine new memoir on the subject, Generation's End: A Personal Memoir of American Power After 9/11.) I'm beginning to wonder if, back in 2007, I should have paid less attention to Obama's sweeping new formulation and more to his hyperbolic attempt to prove to a wary public that he wasn't going to be soft on terrorism.
Obama has trod carefully -- perhaps too carefully -- on issues like the closing of Guantánamo or the detention of alleged terrorists without trial; but these are intrinsically hard questions, and in neither case would be it fair to say that he has trafficked in the color-coded politics of fear. Nevertheless, the administration's policies have had the inadvertent effect of enhancing the national preoccupation with the threat from the Islamic world. From the very outset of his tenure, Obama has seen his great mission to be undoing the harm that his predecessor did in the Middle East. He gave his first interview as president to news channel Al Arabiya; he made his first phone calls to Middle Eastern leaders. By far, the most important speech of his first year in office was the Cairo address in which he promised a "new beginning" in the Middle East. And the consuming foreign-policy issues of his tenure have been the nuclear standoff in Iran and the war in Afghanistan -- a war, Obama has consistently argued, that America cannot afford to lose.
Unfortunately, the Middle East is the world's most intransigent region, a place where U.S. efforts of any kind produce the most modest outcomes. Obama has "succeeded" in Iraq by redefining success as getting out. Meanwhile in Afghanistan, the United States is spending $100 billion a year, and of course precious lives, while the effort to persuade the Afghan people that their government is worth defending is, if anything, going backward. Obama continues to insist that Afghanistan is the central front in the real war on terror, but the recent report of the Afghanistan Study Group concludes flatly that "the U.S. interests at stake in Afghanistan do not warrant this level of sacrifice."
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