I missed a dilly of a a headline in yesterday's Washington Post:

The War in Afghanistan Follows Obama to His Vacation in Hawaii

What a nervy war!

The story by Greg Jaffe begins:

A deeply conflicted President Obama warned earlier this year when he extended the American troop presence in Afghanistan that he did not support “the idea of endless war.”

For Obama, the deaths Monday of six U.S. soldiers near Bagram air base underscore the perils of his decision to keep as many as 9,800 troops in Afghanistan through much of next year.

This is such a peculiar emphasis: war intrudes on holiday of president.

Mr. Jaffe, these deaths will do far more to interrupt the Christmas holidays of the families of our slain soldiers. For them, I hope and pray that there is the consolation that these deaths underscore, as Mr. Jaffe might term it, honor and service to one's country.  

As for Mr. Obama, these deaths actually understore not so much the peril of keeping a small force in Afghanistan as they remind us of the dismal failure of the entire Obama foreign policy. This policy included announcing a a surge and at the same time withdrawal date for troops in Afghanistan. Yes, that is right, surging soldiers in battle, while revealing further plans to the enemy.

And President Obama doesn't appear to me to be "deeply conflicted" about anything, most especially his foreign policy. He is angry, petulant and disappointed. But he is not conflicted, deeply or otherwise. He was elected partly on the flase notion that the United States overreacted to the attacks of 9/11. And today he thinks the public is overreacting to the Paris and San Bernardino attacks. This is not a man who is conflicted.

Mr. Jaffe continues:

Obama has spoken bluntly of the emotional toll that American military deaths have taken on him as he has dispatched troops to Iraq, Afghanistan and most recently Syria. Last month, he lashed out at critics urging him to do more militarily in Iraq and Syria, saying he wouldn’t send U.S. forces into combat just to look “tough.”

So this in Obama's mind and those who still support him is about image-using American power would be about "looking tough." You know–like a cowboy.

And, by the way, if memory serves George W. Bush didn't talk about the emotional toll the war was taking on him–he talked about the soldiers. That was one of the reasons they loved him.

The war intrudes into President Obama's Hawaiian idyll on the same day Lindsey Graham announces that he is withdrawing from the presidential race. Graham was never going to get the nomination, but he was running to make foreign policy points that are on all scores were different from what President Obama believes.

Graham may be too hawkish for many Americans, but he has had a clear-eyed vision of the threat from radical Islam. Mr. Obama is probably enjoying the beach and shave ice, and he is unlikely to bother to read a Wall Street Journal valedictory to the Graham candidacy:

The great conceit of the moment—shared by President Obama, Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz—is that Islamic State can be defeated from the air and on the cheap. We can let turmoil rage in the Middle East because we don’t have a “dog” in the fight and the Sunnis and Shiites might as well keep killing each other.

Mr. Graham’s contribution—in the campaign and going back several years when isolationism was growing on the right and left—was to tell Americans this was an illusion. Long before the fall of Mosul to ISIS, before President Obama withdrew all U.S. troops from Iraq, and before Mr. Obama let the Syrian civil-war become an incubator of global jihad, Mr. Graham warned that U.S. abdication in the Middle East would have dangerous consequences. He has been proven right.

How I wish the president were "deeply conflicted" about foreign policy.

It would mean there was a chance to make some changes.