Lionel Beehner: So, Did You Find Any Facts, Obama?

by Lionel Beehner [courtesy of Politics on HuffingtonPost.com]

Barack Obama is on a fact-finding mission to Afghanistan and Iraq. He is not alone. UN diplomats, as I write this, are on a fact-finding mission to Djibouti to investigate its border scuffle with Eritrea. A South African delegation of human rights workers are on a fact-finding mission to the West Bank. And IAEA investigators just got back from a fact-finding mission to Syria to see just what was going on in that building that Israel blew up.

This whole business of fact-finding missions sounds kind of phony. First, Obama is going to these war zones not to get facts (i.e. casualty statistics, number of Iraqi forces, etc.)--that he get on Google. He is going to interview commanders on the ground and get their impression and opinion of the situation. Were he to interview David Petraeus and the general were to just say, "We have lost X soldiers over the past Y days," that would be a factual statement, yes, but not exactly worth flying halfway across the world to hear. It's probably somewhere in Obama's notes anyway. The presidential nominee wants opinions, not facts. He is no more looking for facts in Iraq than weapons inspectors are looking for WMD in Iraq.

Tired of being painted as a never-been-to-Afghanistan neophyte when it comes to foreign policy, he is also making his own impressions from the tours he takes of the war zones. But these orchestrated trips are terrible ways of gathering impressions, much less facts, based on any kind of reality. Remember McCain's Truman Show-style walk through a Baghdad market last spring? Also, if facts are stubborn things, as John Adams noted, impressions may be even more stubborn. Obama is unlikely to walk down Haifa Street, slap his forehead and declare, "Ya know, John was right. Let's stick around for a few more decades!" He is unlikely to budge on his timetable for withdrawal, especially seeing how the Iraqi prime minister blurted to a German magazine that he is a closet Obamaniac when it comes to the senator's yes-we-can-leave-Iraq plan.

Let's call these missions for what they are: photo ops and fuel-inefficient ways of gathering impressions, opinions, assumptions and the like from various sources on the ground (couldn't Obama have just beamed in Petraeus by teleconference?). Let's leave the fact-finding missions to the candidate's Googling minions.