Obama’s Dithering Puts Troops (and Nation) at Risk
By Larry Johnson on October 27, 2009 at 8:30 AM in Current Affairs
(Bumped up from Monday afternoon.)
Running a kick ass presidential campaign is not the same as being President, especially when it comes to being Commander-in-Chief. The inexperienced clown now installed in the White House would be a legitimate butt of jokes were it not for the fact that our soldiers are dying in part because he cannot make a decision. The laughable notion that Barack is being “wise and deliberate” in trying to decide what to do next in Afghanistan might make sense were it not for his March announcement of a “new” strategy in Afghanistan. In what bizarre universe does the leader of a superpower announce to great fanfare a “NEW STRATEGY” and then, six months later, go into hiding to decide what the strategy should be?
It is this simple–Obama is pandering to domestic political concerns rather than deal with the substance of the challenge Afghanistan presents to the security of the United States and the World. And many in the press (shocking surprise) are giving him a free pass. But not all.
Clive Cook of the Financial Times has a terrific piece:
After eight years of government by gut instinct, most Americans welcomed the arrival of a deliberative president. Yes, get the experts in. Reflect, weigh their advice. What a good idea.
And so it is if you are attempting, say, to reform the healthcare system. (A shame it was not tried.) There is even more to be said for taking your time if you are contemplating going to war. But when you are already fighting one, it has drawbacks. The US has been at war in Afghanistan for eight years – and it is losing. On this issue, Barack Obama is giving deliberation a bad name. He needs to make his mind up.
The White House is touchy about this and is deflecting critics by blaming the previous administration. Mr Obama is asking hard questions his predecessor ignored, goes the line. True enough, Mr Obama inherited a wretched situation – but the recent dithering is all his own.
The new president declared the fight a “war of necessity” and ordered an extra 20,000 soldiers to Afghanistan in March. That was the outcome of his own, supposedly fundamental, review of strategy. Since then Mr Obama’s chosen commander, Stanley McChrystal, has said that the Taliban is winning and is rumoured to have asked for as many as 80,000 extra troops, with 40,000 as a compromise. Suddenly the White House is rethinking “necessity”. The strategy adopted just six months ago – an adequately resourced counter-insurgency – is again under review.
The situation has worsened lately. There are new facts to consider. But notice that one of the biggest setbacks – the shambles of the recent Afghan election – is itself partly the administration’s fault.
The newest excuse for delay, advanced last week by Rahm Emanuel, White House chief of staff, is that deciding anything would be improper until the US has a legitimate partner in Kabul. This is puzzling. If the US commitment to Afghanistan was conditional on the outcome of a fair election, why did the US and its allies not ensure the vote was clean? The scale of fraud was staggering. The US saw it happening and did nothing.
In any event, Mr Emanuel’s view on the need for delay was instantly contradicted by Robert Gates, defence secretary. The administration’s new strategy cannot wait for a fully legitimate government, he said. Whatever the outcome of the run-off election on November 7, it is not going to persuade Afghans to trust their government. If it goes well, he said, it is just one small step in the right direction. The US has to choose a strategy “in the context of that evolutionary process”.
The New York Times’ Elisabeth Bumiller also provided a nifty piece outlining the growing rancor in the ranks of the military over Obama’s fiddling:
Only nine months ago, the Pentagon pronounced itself reassured by the early steps of a new commander in chief. President Obama was moving slowly on an American withdrawal from Iraq, had retained former President George W. Bush’s defense secretary and, in a gesture much noticed, had executed his first military salute with crisp precision.
But now, after nearly a month of deliberations by Mr. Obama over whether to send more American troops to Afghanistan, frustrations and anxiety are on the rise within the military.
A number of active duty and retired senior officers say there is concern that the president is moving too slowly, is revisiting a war strategy he announced in March and is unduly influenced by political advisers in the Situation Room.
“The thunderstorm is there and it’s kind of brewing and it’s unstable and the lightning hasn’t struck, and hopefully it won’t,” said Nathaniel C. Fick, a former Marine Corps infantry officer who briefed Mr. Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign and is now the chief executive of the Center for a New American Security, a military research institution in Washington. “I think it can probably be contained and avoided, but people are aware of the volatile brew.”
Last week the national commander of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, Thomas J. Tradewell Sr., gave voice to the concerns of those in the military when he issued a terse statement criticizing Mr. Obama’s review of Afghan war strategy.
“The extremists are sensing weakness and indecision within the U.S. government, which plays into their hands,” said Mr. Tradewell’s statement on behalf of his group, which represents 1.5 million former soldiers.
Last August, in a speech to the V.F.W., Mr. Obama defended his strategy, saying, “This is not only a war worth fighting; this is fundamental to the defense of our people.”
A retired general who served in Iraq said that the military had listened, “perhaps naïvely,” to Mr. Obama’s campaign promises that the Afghan war was critical. “What’s changed, and are we having the rug pulled out from under us?” he asked. Like many of those interviewed for this article, he spoke on the condition of anonymity because of fear of reprisals from the military’s civilian leadership and the White House. . . .
Two weeks ago, after Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top NATO commander in Afghanistan, rejected calls for the Afghan war to be scaled back during a question-and-answer session in a speech in London, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates warned not only General McChrystal, but also the military as a whole, to keep quiet in public as the debate progressed.
“It is imperative that all of us taking part in these deliberations — civilian and military alike — provide our best advice to the president candidly but privately,” Mr. Gates told the annual meeting of the Association of the United States Army, a private support group, in Washington.
Andrew M. Exum, a former Army officer in Afghanistan, an adviser to General McChrystal and a fellow at the Center for a New American Security, said that the change in style from one administration to the next had led to some of the military’s discontent. “The Bush administration would settle on a strategy and stick to it, and you could argue often to ill effect,” he said, referring to the president’s decision not to send more troops to Iraq until 2007, after years of rising violence.
The Obama administration, he said, is not afraid to go back and question assumptions. “There’s a value in that,” Mr. Exum said, “but that can be incredibly frustrating for those trying to operationalize the strategy.”
Part of the strain comes from lessons learned from the generals who acquiesced to former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld’s demands for a small invasion force in Iraq, then faced criticism that they had not spoken up for more troops to secure the country during the occupation.The retired general who served in Iraq said that today’s senior officers had decided, “I won’t be so quiet, I won’t be a lap dog.”
Another source of tension within the military is the view that a delay is endangering the 68,000 American troops now in Afghanistan. “McChrystal has troops out there who are risking their lives more than they need to, partly because we have not filled in the gaps and we have not created a safe zone in southern and eastern Afghanistan,” said Michael O’Hanlon, a national security expert at the Brookings Institution.
A military policy analyst, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid antagonizing senior Pentagon leaders, said that “the military lives in a very rarefied environment,” and that “they are not out there every day having to meet citizens who say, ‘What the hell are we doing?’ ”
Senior military officers, the analyst said, “are smart guys, but they do not have the daily pulse of the American public in their face. They tend to interpret politicians who give voice to it as being weak, but none of this works if the public gives up on it.”
Barack Obama is not the first leader to play politics with the lives of our soldiers. George Bush, Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld did it too. Remember when General Sinseki warned that several hundred thousand troops would be needed to subdue Iraq and was repeatedly and viciously smeared by the Bush crowd. Remember when some officers tried to warn about the exploding insurgency in Iraq and were savaged by Rumsfeld as out of touch? So this is not a partisan attack on Obama. He is failing his duty as the Commander-in-Chief and, as a consequence of his inaction, putting the lives of our soldiers at risk as well as jeopardizing our nation’s security.
I have some unsolicited advice for Obama–Get off the damn golf course, put down the fucking basketball and do your job, you jerk off!!
, the basis for the Best Motion Picture Nominee (Golden Globes) starring Brad Pitt.
, the novel by John Le Carre, a new motion picture starring Gary Oldman and Colin Firth.
by 
* (Included in the 
* 
.by David Fredosso who wrote 2008's 
- You'll have access to 18 million movies, TV shows, songs, magazines, and books, as well as ultra-fast Web browsing with Amazon Silk -- faster than iPad. Full e-mail and document access and a keyboard. Fire can transmit what is on your screen onto a connected TV or monitor without an accessory. It runs Flash (iPad doesn't). 
