How 9/11 made Barack Obama a war president

When he took office in 2009, Barack Obama immediately became a war president, a two-war president in fact. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 had made that inevitable.

Yet it seemed an unlikely role. He had been a constitutional law professor and community organizer who had never served in the military. During his brief time in the US Senate, he served as a junior member on the Foreign Affairs and Veterans’ Affairs committees, but military issues were not his specialty.

Consider one difference with his immediate predecessor in the White House: Though he’d cut short his time in the Texas Air National Guard and never served overseas, former president George W. Bush had easily transferred his Texas persona to a “mission accomplished” swagger across an aircraft carrier flight deck. Obama would have looked as out of place there as Michael Dukakis did in a US Army tank during his failed 1988 presidential bid.

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Yet in his 32 months as president, Obama – a Nobel Peace Prize winner – has embraced the role of commander in chief of the most powerful military in human history.

While winding down the war in Iraq, he has escalated the war in Afghanistan – extending that into Pakistan (and likely other countries) through a steep increase in Predator drone attacks on Al Qaeda figures. On the ground there, US military casualties per year have more than tripled since he took office. (Yesterday, a massive Taliban truck bomb outside a combat outpost wounded 77 NATO soldiers, most of them Americans.)

When some advisors urged a more cautious approach to confirmed intelligence that Osama bin Laden had been located in Pakistan, Obama chose the riskier option of sending Navy SEALs to do the job – a mission that might have been as disastrous as the attempt to rescue the American hostages in Iran in 1980.

His response to the uprising in Libya was measured – US naval and air forces led the way in pounding Muammar Qaddafi’s military, while American ground forces were ruled out – but in retrospect that seems to have been correct.

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