WASHINGTON — President Obama came into office seven years ago pledging to end the wars of his predecessor, George W. Bush. On May 6, with eight months left in his term, Obama passed a somber, little-noticed milestone: He has now been at war longer than Bush, or any other American president.
If the United States remains in combat in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria until the end of Obama’s term — a near-certainty given the president’s recent announcement that he will send 250 additional Special Operations forces to Syria — he will be the only president in US history to serve two complete terms with the nation at war.
Obama, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 and spent his years in the White House trying to fulfill the promises he made as an antiwar candidate, would have a longer tour of duty as a wartime president than Franklin D. Roosevelt, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard M. Nixon, or his hero Abraham Lincoln.
Obama is leaving far fewer soldiers in harm’s way — at least 4,087 in Iraq and 9,800 in Afghanistan — than the 200,000 troops he inherited from Bush in the two countries.
But he has also approved strikes against terrorist groups in Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen, for a total of seven countries where his administration has taken military action.
“No president wants to be a war president,’’ said Eliot A. Cohen, a military historian at Johns Hopkins University who backed the war in Iraq and whose son served there twice. “Obama thinks of war as an instrument he has to use very reluctantly. But we’re waging these long, rather strange wars. We’re killing lots of people. We’re taking casualties.’’
Obama has wrestled with this immutable reality from his first year in the White House, when he went for a walk among the tombstones at Arlington National Cemetery before giving the order to send 30,000 additional troops into Afghanistan.
His closest advisers say he has relied so heavily on limited covert operations and drone strikes because he is mindful of the dangers of escalation and has long been skeptical that US military interventions work.
Publicly, Obama acknowledged early on the contradiction between his campaign message and the realities of governing.
When he accepted the Nobel in December 2009, he declared that humanity needed to reconcile “two seemingly irreconcilable truths — that war is sometimes necessary, and war at some level is an expression of human folly.’’
The president has tried to reconcile these truths by approaching his wars in narrow terms, as a chronic but manageable security challenge rather than as an all-consuming national campaign, in the tradition of World War II or, to a lesser degree, Vietnam.
The longevity of his war record, military historians say, also reflects the changing definition of war. “It’s the difference between being a war president and a president at war,’’ said Derek Chollet, who served in the State Department and the White House during Obama’s first term and as the assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs from 2012 to 2015.
“Being a war president means that all elements of American power and foreign policy are subservient to fighting the war,’’ Chollet said. “What Obama has tried to do, which is why he’s careful about ratcheting up the number of forces, is not to have it overwhelm other priorities.’’
But Obama has found those wars maddeningly hard to end. On Oct. 21, 2011, he announced that the last combat soldier would leave Iraq by the end of that year, drawing that eight-year war to a close.
Less than three years later, he told a national television audience that he would send 475 military advisers back to Iraq to help in the battle against the Islamic State, the brutal terrorist group that swept into the security vacuum left by the absent Americans. By last month, more than 5,000 US troops were in Iraq.
Afghanistan followed a similar cycle of hope and disappointment. In May 2014, Obama announced that the United States would withdraw the last combat soldier from the country by the end of 2016.
Seventeen months later, Obama halted the withdrawal, telling Americans that he planned to leave more than 5,000 troops in Afghanistan until early 2017, the end of his presidency. By then, the Taliban controlled more territory in the country than at any time since 2001.
