reflectivepundit

The President’s Disappearing Bully Pulpit and the Watering Down of Obama’s Agenda of Hope

By Brigitte L. Nacos

This long, hot summer in the American Northeast is not unique. There have been long, hot summers before. But the frequency of days with above normal temperatures and the melting ice in the arctic region are far from normal. Europe experiences and suffers through a record hot summer and in countries where few have air conditioned homes or cars. Yet, the persistent drum beat of the unholy alliance between the conservative and corporate interests has once again derailed the president’s and the Democratic majority’s agenda of hope as the energy bill became the latest casualty of the Republican Tea Party’s war against meaningful change. Instead of fighting to take the first big step towards renewable energy and the creation of many jobs in a green energy sector not prone to outsourcing, Senate Democrats abandoned the energy bill that their colleagues in the House had passed.

While I applaud New York Times columnist Tom Friedman’s strong support for green energy and independence from oil-producing foreign countries, I am not putting most of the blame on a by and large disinterested public. Instead, I fault President Obama and his fellow-partisans in Congress who once again abandoned the right policy and surrendered to the attack dogs of the Republican Tea Party and their drill sergeants Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and like-minded talk show ideologues of the far right.

To be sure, in a democracy the support of the public is crucial in policy-making. And here the president comes in: It takes a president who is willing to use the presidential bully pulpit to enlist public support. That’s precisely what the great communicators Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan did repeatedly and successfully: they used the presidential platform to “go public” and to persuade the American public to support their respective policy agendas.

But Barack Obama who was articulate and charismatic and persuasive as presidential candidate—in short a great communicator—is strangely reluctant to use the bully pulpit to further the agenda of hope and change that won him the victory in the fall of 2008. Instead, he, his White House, and his administration lean over backwards to enlist the support of a reactionary Republican Tea Party crowd that says “no” to everything except more shock and awe in the so-called “war against terrorism.”

McChrystal Does Not Survive—Afghanistan War Strategy Does

By Brigitte L. Nacos

By removing General Stanley McChrystal as top commander in the Afghan theater of war and replacing him with General David Petraeus, President Barack Obama missed a golden opportunity to revise the losing Afghanistan strategy that transcends his declared goals of disrupting, dismantling and defeating Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

Instead, the president said, “It is a change in personnel, but it is not a change in policy” as General Petraeus, Defense Secretary Gates, and Vice President Biden stood next to him.

Both Petraeus as commander in Iraq and McChrystal as commander in Afghanistan were eager to translate the so-called insurgency theory into practice—Petraeus once the troop surge was on the way in 2007 and McChrystal once Obama sided last December with his counterinsurgency strategy for Afghanistan combined with a troop surge of 30,000 that came on top of 21,000 additional troops he ordered in March 2009 to Kabul. 

Although the history of counterinsurgency campaigns is littered with failures and although the news from Afghanistan has been grim of late, the counterinsurgency strategy survives McChrystal perhaps in a more intense form under Petraeus.

Admittedly, General Petraeus had success in Iraq within a reasonable time span—but Afghanistan is a far cry from Iraq.

Typically, comprehensive counterinsurgency campaigns in failed states entail not only military and police action but also the building or rebuilding of political, civic, and economic institutions; this requires many years of hard and expensive efforts to have a chance to succeed. In short, this comes down to nation-building.

President Obama has not retreated from his promise begin withdrawing troops from Afghanistan in the middle of 2011. If he sticks with his Afghanistan strategy, he will have to change his time line for withdrawal drastically and budget many more $billions for this war.

By giving the command in Afghanistan to Petraeus, there seems no chance for Vice President Joe Biden to get another hearing for his 2009 recommendation of a limited objective in the region: Deploy a small number of Special Forces to attack and defeat the remnants of Al Qaeda in the mountainous Afghan-Pakistani border region as well as the Taliban leadership and hard-core followers.

On the other hand, the McChrystal scandal has drawn attention to the almost forgotten war and perhaps will now bolster the opposition to the Afghanistan strategy in the congress and the public.

General McChrystal: His Own Exit Strategy?

By Brigitte L. Nacos

If General Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, does not resign before visiting the White House tomorrow, President Obama must fire him right then and there—or even before that. A commanding general who criticizes the president and his top military and civilian national security aides publicly in the midst of a war, can no longer be trusted to carry out the president’s war strategy that, ironically, was mostly designed by McChrystal himself. That’s precisely what McChrystal and his closest aides did as reported in Rolling Stone magazine. 

After they expressed contempt for literally everyone directly involved in national security matters as these relate to the conflict in Afghanistan in the presence of a Rolling Stone reporter, they did not try to retract or soften their remarks during the fact checking process.  Perhaps this indicates that McChrystal and Company have lost their sense of reality in the confines of their military in-circle or, more likely, that the general went rogue because his counterinsurgency strategy and tactics have not worked well at all since he took charge last year.

In an alarming part of the Rolling Stone revelations, McChrystal attacks the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry, a retired three-star general and fellow West Pointer, by remarking, "Here's one that covers his flank for the history books. Now if we fail, they can say, 'I told you so.' "

So, the general who wrote the script for succeeding in Afghanistan at last, ponders who will be blamed and who not “if we fail.” Does this point to McChrystal’s doubts about the outcome of the war? One wonders how the insurgents, most of all the Taliban, and the Afghan population react to this sort of talk—not to mention the impact of the revelation that deep divisions exist within America’s top military and civilian leadership.

Knowing full well the content of the article (headline “Runaway General”), McChrystal must have known its explosive impact. Which leads to my guess that going rogue was his exit strategy and a pass to blame others for the problems he leaves behind.

Whatever his motives, just as insubordination cost General Douglas MacArthur his job in 1951, when he was fired by President Truman, it must send McChrystal into retirement.

When the certified war hero MacArthur returned from the Far East, he received an enthusiastic homecoming with parades and other celebrations. However a retired McChrystal will be received in some quarters, he isn’t and will not be a MacArthur.

Notes on the Oil Spill Disaster, Leadership, Politics, and a New Energy Policy

By Brigitte L. Nacos

When it comes to responding to the catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, there is much blame to go around. While BP was and remains the villain-in-chief, the president’s handling of this crisis has not been impressive either. It might well be that behind the scenes the White House was engaged from the outset, but in the face of an unprecedented ecological disaster the president himself should have addressed the nation early on and shown his hands-on role in managing the crisis. While a far cry from his predecessor’s handling of the Hurricane Katrina disaster, the images of Obama’s holiday activities during the Memorial Day weekend in Chicago were unsettling. To be sure, a president does not have to be in the Oval Office to communicate with people anywhere. But perceptions are more important than reality. And playing in a pick-up basketball game in Chicago sent the wrong signals in the face of a major disaster.

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The spill has blurred party ideologies and lines along the most affected coastal states. Louisiana is but one example. Not only because of Mary Matelin and James Carville, the odd political couple’s united front. Take Governor Bobby Jindal, a Republican, and U.S. Senator Mary Landrieu, a Democrat: both demand that the Obama administration lifts its temporary moratorium on deepwater drilling while they lament the disastrous effects of the BP spill that has yet to be plugged. It may well be that deepwater rigs in the Gulf "employ, directly, hundreds of people and indirectly thousands,” as Landrieu argues. But such harm pales in comparison to the greatest ecological disaster in America’s history. How in heaven can a guy like Jindal attack Washington for not doing enough to clean up the terrible consequences of the spill and in the same breath join into the drill-baby-drill scream of Big Oil’s beneficiaries of generous campaign donations in Congress and elsewhere? 

Afghanistan and Iraq: The Cost of the Forgotten Wars and Al Qaeda

By Brigitte L. Nacos

In a 2004 videotape message, Osama bin Laden boasted that it was easy to provoke the U.S., “lure it into perdition,” and inflict “human, financial, and political losses on America.” More importantly, he threatened that “[w]e are continuing to make America bleed to the point of bankruptcy, by God’s will.”

Certainly, the endless fight against bin Laden’s Al Qaeda, the terrorist group’s Taliban allies, and a host of other warlords of old and new jihadi cells has weakened America’s financial muscles. The fiscal situation of the United States has deteriorated in the years after the 9/11 attacks—in large part because of the horrendous costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. While news of those two wars have all but disappeared from the front pages and seem of little interest to the American public, the total cost of the Iraq and Afghan wars have surpassed the $1 trillion mark and are rising steadily. According to a recent count by the National Priorities Project, “[t]o date, the total cost of war that has been allocated by Congress is $1.05 trillion, with $747to Iraq and $299 to Afghanistan.” But there is is now a reversal in the spending for the two wars in that more is spent for the Afghan war than for the Iraq deployment. As USA TODAY reported, “Pentagon spending in February [2010], the most recent month available, was $6.7 billion in Afghanistan compared with $5.5 billion in Iraq.” In other words, the two wars combined cost the American taxpayers $12.2 billion in one single month! 

The question is: for what?

Iraq, at least, seems to be at a stage that allows further troop withdrawal and disengagement—although there is hardly a day without lethal political violence somewhere in the country.

Afghanistan looks like a bottomless hole that swallows $billions and $billions without changes for the better. It was telling that U.S. Army Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the commander of U.S.-led international forces in Afghanistan, characterized the situation in the Afghan war as a draw between coalition forces and insurgents during an interview with Jeffrey Brown of PBS the other day. This is an excerpt from the transcript of that conversation on the PBS NewsHour: