|
|
|
Jewish World Review Nov. 5, 2009 / 18 Mar-Cheshvan 5770 Waiting for Obama By Robert Tracinski
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
When future books on military history are written, there will no doubt be a chapter, or part of a chapter, on the extraordinary example of military indecision offered by President Obama.
Obama campaigned by declaring that Afghanistan was a war of necessity, and that he would give it more resources, more attention, and a higher priority than the previous administration. Instead, he has been unable to make the most basic decisions about his strategy there and the number of troops he will authorize to implement that strategy. It is now one year from Obama's election, nine months from the beginning of his term, seven months from when he supposedly endorsed a counter-insurgency strategy for Afghanistan, and more than two months since General McChrystal sent the administration his request for more troops. Obama still doesn't know what he wants to do.
And he's no closer to a decision. The latest report in the Washington Post is that President Obama is asking the top military brass—who have already presented him with multiple options for Afghanistan—for yet another set of options about what they would do with a smaller "surge" than General McChrystal has asked for. And the Post reporter notes that the schedule of meetings to assess these new options would push a decision back to the second half of November.
I'm no Shakespeare scholar, but didn't the events in Hamlet move a little more quickly than this?
Future historians will note the milestones in this epic of indecision. They will note how General McChyrstal, a disciplined career military man, was driven by frustration to break with custom and make public comments intended to push the administration toward approval of his troop request—and how someone in his office leaked the troop request to the press in order to draw attention to the administration's dithering.
Historians combing through news reports may notice how Obama and his top aides keep making predictions that a decision will be made "in the coming weeks"—for week, after week, after week. This indicates that the people at the highest levels within the administration, including the president himself, have no idea what's holding up his decision or what information he needs to make it.
They will note that European defense ministers went out of their way to publicly declare their support for McChrystal's recommendations, in a meeting with the general and with our secretary of defense, as their own way of publicly pushing the American president for a decision.
And now European newspaper editorialists are beginning to demand a decision. These are the same people who spent eight years complaining about an American foreign policy that was too decisive and forceful for their tastes—and their tastes are very weak indeed, if George W. Bush was their idea of a reckless, hard-charging "cowboy."
TIA contributing editor Jack Wakeland sent me a roundup of these reactions:
"Where is the President of the United States?
"Two months of no decision after General McChrystal's recommendations for Afghanistan, and European centrists are getting nervous. Fed up.
"On Friday, two of Europe's three top newspapers are wondering what's going on in the Oval Office (and we may have not heard from Le Monde only because the translation isn't in yet).
"At Der Spiegel, a guest editorialist observes, 'The world has been waiting for clear words from the White House for months.... Europeans are...looking for one thing from the White House: leadership.... We're waiting, Mr. President.'
"The editors over at London's Times bluntly demand that the president 'Do Something.' They observe that while the president 'dithers,' 'people will continue to die without knowing why. The president must show at least as much resolve as his British allies. It does not seem a lot to ask.'"
But the explanation for this extraordinary spectacle is not dithering and indecision as such. President Obama clearly has no problem making snap decisions on other issues—whether to give a high-risk speech to a joint session of Congress touting his health-care proposals, for example, or whether to jet off to Copenhagen to make a pitch for the ill-fated Chicago Olympics.
And I don't think this is just a matter of Obama's priorities—the idea that domestic politics, or securing an international perk for his former political patrons back in Chicago takes precedence over national defense. That would explain why he is slower in making this decision than others, but not this slow.
The prolonged delay is a sign not so much of a mental block as of a psychological block. Obama is acting like an unmotivated high-school student procrastinating on a homework assignment for a class he doesn't like. He acts like a man looking for any excuse not to have to think seriously about the topic at hand.
In another note sent to me last week, Jack Wakeland described the overall pattern:
"Preoccupied with the conquest of the American medical system, the president didn't even look at General McChrystal's report for one full month. Only after the conservative press reported that he had spoken to his field general only once since taking office did the president acknowledge the report's existence: he promptly began White House discussions about McChrystal's deployment options.
"In opening the discussions, he allowed the leftist opinion championed by Vice-President Biden into the room—and in the Obama White House, that opinion immediately began to dominate the discussion. Supported by a chief of staff who was reading a bad work of military history, Biden argued that any escalation of the war effort would lead the US more deeply into a replay of the Vietnam quagmire.
"Secretary of State Clinton argued for a second troop surge, and she has since been rewarded by losing half her duties to 'special envoy' John Kerry.
"When the press observed that the discussions and debates were going around in circles, Obama responded by telling the press that the most important thing about the decision—whichever way it went—would be the civilian component of the deployment. And he would see to it that there was a greater buildup of aid workers, development experts, and political advisors than the military had proposed.
"This civilian buildup was a foolproof way to slow deployments because few civil service and contract employees have volunteered to take the positions already offered to them in this mountainous and isolated conflict zone. The country is too dangerous a place for civilians. It is too early to be looking at the economic development of a territory that has not changed much since Alexander's army came through. The lack of government or of security of any kind has kept Afghanistan in a state only a couple of levels above the Bronze Age.
"After one full month of debates and discussions—complete with internal factions leaking differences of opinion that served to encourage the Taliban—Obama's field general felt constrained to publicly say a decision of some kind had to be made. Obama allowed the left-leaning members of the press, acting as an extension of his press office, to complain about General McChrystal's 'activism' and to complain about the potential presidential ambitions of his boss, General Petraeus. This bought the president another week's delay.
"After Secretary of Defense Gates—a particularly non-'activist' leader—reiterated McChrystal's concern and publicly stated that the president needed to make a decision soon, President Obama was forced to come up with another excuse: he needed to wait until the Afghan president agreed to a run-off election against his top opponent. This bought the president another week's delay.
"And, finally, last week [now two weeks ago], after President Hamid Karzai agreed to a runoff election, the president came up with his newest excuse. The military needs to 'model' the response to two different troop deployment levels: 80,000-85,000 men v. 120,000-125,000 men. And this bought the president another week's delay."
As I said at the beginning of this discussion, the latest news is that Obama is asking for yet another study on the effect of different troop levels, which will buy him another week or two. Jack continues:
"If it is humanly possible to evade it for months—we're up to two months of indecision—President Obama will not make the deployment decision until after a congressional vote on health care 'reform.' The vote is too close and he needs every far-left congressman and every far-left senator voting on his side. He can't afford to alienate them by approving a broader war in Afghanistan.
"The delay is not entirely about socialized medicine, however. For Barack Obama, everything in his agenda to reorganize the American economy along more collectivist lines take precedence over a far-away war that smells vaguely like it is the product of American exceptionalism."
In my recommendation for last year's election, I wrote about the issue that provided a crucial differentiation between the two candidates.
To ask that question is to immediately invoke Obama's close, long-time associations with his pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, and with one of his key Chicago political sponsors, the unrepentant former Weathermen terrorist William Ayers. Associations of this kind matter because they reveal who and what a man will tolerate, and more: they reveal what he regards as normal, what he is comfortable with. They reveal, not just Barack Obama's convictions or his calculations, but his sense of life….
A man who is comfortable with hatred of America cannot be allowed to sit in this nation's most powerful office….
Why does this matter? Foreign policy is the one area in which the president acts virtually alone. On domestic issues, the president proposes and Congress disposes. But in foreign policy, the president can and must act on his own initiative. If he wants to do something, it is very difficult for Congress to stop him—and if he refuses to do something, it is very difficult for Congress to make him act. This is why the president's deepest, basic motivations and sense-of-life "gut" reactions matter. Without that kind of psychological support, he could not possibly sustain decisions made under the highest pressure, often in the face of disapproval from the entire world.
Boy, are we now seeing a grand-scale demonstration of this factor. No matter what he says, to the public or to himself, about how committed he is to the war in Afghanistan, Obama's actions show the drag of his leftist sense of life. Under the enormous pressure of the office of "leader of the free world," he finds that his "gut"—his deepest psychological core—won't let him make the decision to order the effective use of American military power.
He could only keep going so long as his main job was to ratify the status quo and allow the war to drift in a direction already set by the previous administration. But the moment he was called upon to make his own first-hand decision, he cracked. So he keeps finding rationalizations for why he needs more information or to study different options and maybe test different theories with war games, and on and on—all in an attempt to delay taking an action that is anathema to his sense of life.
As they say, elections have consequences, and this is the consequence of promoting to commander-in-chief a man who spent his entire youth and all his formative experiences among the hard-core, anti-American left.
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.
© 2009, Robert Tracinski |
Arnold Ahlert | |||||||||||||
