commentarymagazine.com <http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/rubin/349226> He Really Doesn't Want to Be Commander In Chief
By Jennifer Rubin, August 29, 2010, Contentions It is not that we didn't know this before, but reading the <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/world/29commander.html?_r=2&pagewanted=1&; hp> New York Times - surely designed to be as favorable toward Obama as the reporter could possibly manage - one is left slack-jawed. Obama doesn't like being commander in chief, isn't good at it, and has relied one tutor, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who is leaving next year. The report should be read in full. But a few low-lights: A year and a half into his presidency, Mr. Obama appears to be a reluctant warrior. Even as he draws down troops in Iraq, he has been abundantly willing to use force to advance national interests, tripling forces in Afghanistan, authorizing secret operations in Yemen and Somalia, and escalating drone strikes in Pakistan. But advisers said he did not see himself as a war president in the way his predecessor did. His speech on Tuesday is notable because he talks in public about the wars only sporadically, determined not to let them define his presidency. A former adviser to the president, who like others insisted on anonymity in order to discuss the situation candidly, said that Mr. Obama's relationship with the military was 'troubled' and that he 'doesn't have a handle on it.' . Reliant on Mr. Gates, Mr. Obama has made limited efforts to know his service chiefs or top commanders, and has visited the Pentagon only once, not counting a Sept. 11 commemoration. He ended Mr. Bush's practice of weekly videoconferences with commanders, preferring to work through the chain of command and wary, aides said, of being drawn into managing the wars. . Last December, the president gave the military 30,000 more troops, but also a ticking clock. . "He didn't understand or grasp the military culture," said Lawrence J. Korb, a former Pentagon official at the liberal Center for American Progress. "He got over that particular quandary and put them back in the box by saying, 'O.K., I'm giving you 18 months.' " As we all suspected, he compromised our Afghanistan war strategy for the sake of domestic politics: One adviser at the time said Mr. Obama calculated that an open-ended commitment would undermine the rest of his agenda. "Our Afghan policy was focused as much as anything on domestic politics," the adviser said. "He would not risk losing the moderate to centrist Democrats in the middle of health insurance reform and he viewed that legislation as the make-or-break legislation for his administration." He simply doesn't want to do the things that are expected of the commander in chief, and the military's ire is profound: The schisms among his team, though, are born in part out of uncertainty about his true commitment. His reticence to talk much publicly about the wars may owe to the political costs of alienating his base as well as the demands of other issues. Senior Pentagon and military officials said they understood that he presided over a troubled economy, but noted that he was not losing 30 American soldiers a month on Wall Street. . "From an image point of view, he doesn't seem to embrace it, almost like you have to drag him into doing it," said Peter D. Feaver, a Bush adviser with military contacts. "There's deep uncertainty and perhaps doubt in the military about his commitment to see the wars through to a successful conclusion." This was a man not only unprepared to be president but disposed to shirk the most important aspect of the job. It is a measure of his hubris and stubbornness that he has refused to, as Feaver succinctly puts it, "embrace" the role, that is, to commit in word and deed his full attention and effort to leading the country in war. He doesn't want to be a wartime president? Well, sorry - he is. The only comfort one can draw from this appalling portrait is that perhaps, just perhaps, after November, when his dream of transforming America is crushed by an electoral blow-back, he will belatedly do his job. ### [Better yet, after November, when his dream of transforming America is crushed by an electoral blow-back, he will do us all a favor and limp off to the sidelines for the next two years. We're old enough to take care of ourselves. df] [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------------------ -------------------------- Want to discuss this topic? Head on over to our discussion list, [email protected]. -------------------------- Brooks Isoldi, editor [email protected] http://www.intellnet.org Post message: [email protected] Subscribe: [email protected] Unsubscribe: [email protected] *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material whose use has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. 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