Obama is in hock to the hawks

3 July 2010

Andrew J. Bacevich says that, despite his bold move in sacking General McChrystal, the President remains impossibly mired in a war he has no wish to fight

Then McChrystal himself committed hara-kiri, with a journalist for Rolling Stone holding the knife. Given Team McChrystal’s contempt for senior civilian officials up to and including the president, the general had to go. By appointing Petraeus in his place, however, Obama becomes beholden to the most celebrated soldier of his generation. Petraeus wields more clout in Washington than any general in recent memory and knows how to use it. In essence, Obama fired ‘MacArthur’, but to minimise any backlash on the home front replaced him with ‘Eisenhower’. The question of who really is in charge remains murky.

Petraeus’s fans — who are mostly Obama’s political enemies — fully expect their hero to pull a rabbit out of his hat, and were delighted by his tough talk at his confirmation hearing on Tuesday. Afghanistan will become Iraq all over again. Yet conditions differ and time is limited. Three deadlines loom. First, there is the interim strategic review that the White House has promised in December. Then comes the troop withdrawal date in July — a deadline that Obama himself has repeatedly reaffirmed. (What exactly it means to ‘begin’ withdrawing remains hotly contested, however.) The big one is the presidential election of 2012. One thing is clear: Obama is just about out of running room. Regardless of how events on the battlefield may unfold, he cannot afford to fire Petraeus, at least not without touching off a political firestorm. Besides, playing another round of musical chairs at Nato headquarters in Kabul would sow confusion and consternation in the ranks. Yet the President cannot afford to run for re-election wearing a still-ongoing conflict — nine years old and counting — as a badge of honour. If Americans had wanted a ‘war president’, they would have chosen McCain.

So for Obama himself, the stakes could hardly be higher. If he fails to make substantial progress toward extricating the United States from Afghanistan during his first term, there won’t be a second. Once viewed as akin to a messiah, Obama will find himself ranked alongside the likes of Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter as a well-intentioned, even admirable, failure. His big decision will be to choose a retirement home.

Andrew J. Bacevich’s new book is Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War.

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Paul T Horgan

July 2nd, 2010 9:32pm Report this comment

Is anyone giving odds that General McChrystal will be the GOP candidate in 2012?

The whole Obama-McChrystal confrontation had echoes of 'Seven days in May'.

As a country that used guerilla tactics to defend its independence, the USA should appreciate what it is like being the Redcoats.

They should be fighting a war, not a counter-insurgency action.

We know the US Army can win wars just as much as we know it loses Police actions.

There is a memorial with 50000 names on it in Washington that commemorates that fact.

Yam Yam

July 9th, 2010 1:55pm Report this comment

I truer comparison would be to say that Obama is a latter-day Lyndon Johnson: merrily sinking tax dollars into welfare schemes the nation can't afford at the same time as escalating a ruinously expensive war that the nation can't win.

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