WASHINGTON--At a White House dinner with a group of historians at the beginning of the summer, Robert Dallek, a shrewd student of both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, offered a chilling comment to President Barack Obama. "In my judgment," he recalled saying, "war kills off great reform movements."
The American record is pretty clear: World War I brought the Progressive Era to a close.
When Franklin D. Roosevelt was waging World War II, he was candid in saying that "Dr. New Deal" had given way to "Dr. Win the War."
The Korean Conflict ended Harry Truman's Fair Deal, and Vietnam brought Lyndon Johnson's Great Society to an abrupt halt.
Mr. Dallek is not a pacifist, and he does not pretend that his observation settles the question against war in every case.
Of the four he mentioned, I think World War II and the Korean Conflict were certainly necessary fights.
But Mr. Dallek's point helps explain why President Obama is right to have grave qualms about an extended commitment of many more American troops to Afghanistan.
President Obama was elected not to escalate a war, but to end one. The change and hope he promised did not involve a vast new campaign to transform Afghanistan.
It's easy to get enraged over the mess in Afghanistan and with the voices insisting that President Obama has no choice but to remedy it by going big and going long.
Too many of those who say that Obama is obligated to step up the pace in Afghanistan spent the Bush presidency neglecting that war because their main interest was in waging a new one in Iraq.
In his recent report to the president, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top American commander in Afghanistan, noted repeatedly that the effort there had been "under-resourced."
It sure would have been nice if we had settled Afghanistan before beating the drums of war in Iraq.
It's also enraging that those who insist on offsetting every penny spent to expand health coverage would never ask the Congressional Budget Office to score the costs of Gen. McChrystal's strategy.
For the uninsured, they propose fiscal prudence. For war, they offer profligacy.
Yet, rage is a poor guide to policy.
The truth is that President Obama has only bad choices in Afghanistan.
President Obama has said over and over that the war in Afghanistan, unlike the war in Iraq, is necessary.
"We are in Afghanistan to confront a common enemy that threatens the United States, our friends and our allies," he declared in March.
He cannot walk away from that.
But, while his March speech was sweeping in certain ways, he defined a limited core objective.
"I want the American people to understand that we have a clear
and focused goal," he said, "to disrupt, dismantle and defeat al-Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future."
These are the words that will give President Obama room to reconsider his policy.
Gen. McChrystal argued that the full counterinsurgency strategy he proposes demands that we "elevate the importance of governance" in Afghanistan, and, to his credit, he is brutally frank about its current dismal state.
He writes of "the crisis of popular confidence that springs from the weakness of [Afghan government] institutions, the unpunished abuse of power by corrupt officials and power brokers, a widespread sense of political disenfranchisement,
and a long-standing lack of economic opportunity."
That doesn't even take into account the fraud involved in President Hamid Karzai's reelection.
Is this a situation in which President Obama should commit tens of thousands more troops for a lengthy war?
Should it surprise us that some administration officials are asking why it is that al-Qaeda has weakened even as the Taliban has grown stronger?
These skeptics now question whether routing the Taliban is actually essential to President Obama's core goal of defeating al-Qaeda.
There's a jelling conventional wisdom that if President Obama doesn't go all in with Gen. McChrystal's strategy, he is admitting defeat and backing away from his earlier pledges.
Those who want him to commit now are impatient for a decision.
President Obama should resist both their impatience and their criticism of his search for an alternative strategy. The last thing he should do is rush into a new set of obligations in Afghanistan that would come to define his presidency more than any victory he wins on health care.
Those most eager for a bigger war have little interest in President Obama's quest for domestic reform.
As he ponders his options, theirs are not the voices he should worry about.
