Obama's Decision on More Troops to "Someone Else's Civil War"

On October 27, the Washington Post reported the resignation of Matthew Hoh, a top U.S. civilian official in Afghanistan, in protest of the U.S. war in Afghanistan. Hoh charged that "the United States is asking its troops to die in Afghanistan for what is essentially a far-off civil war," the Post reported. The appearance in mainstream U.S. media of the credible assertion that the United States is intervening militarily on one side in another country's civil war, especially a conflict with an ethnic character, might be expected to have a significant impact on public perceptions of whether continuation of U.S. military involvement was justified. One of the great political and media debates of 2006-7 was whether the United States was involved in a civil war in Iraq. In November 2006, the New York Times reported that President Bush "dismissed suggestions that Iraq had descended into civil war," noting that while officials in other countries were "warning that Iraq is verging on civil war," Bush was "well aware that a label of civil war would make the Iraq mission even more difficult to justify." Not long after that, an influential American gave a speech in which he asserted: 'It's time to admit that no amount of American lives can resolve the political disagreement that lies at the heart of someone else's civil war." That, of course, was Senator Barack Obama, announcing his candidacy for President of the United States, in Springfield, Illinois, on February 10, 2007.