krebscycle

Bob Gates appointment as Secretary of Defense is a perfect example of Barack Obama’s deft and cold blooded governing style. The three Democratic Presidents who preceded Obama were defeated by the enormous power of the Pentagon Princes, their Congressional allies, their military industrial corporate sponsors/clients, and the captive media. Clinton inherited Bush Senior’s disastrous Somalia adventure and never recovered as his feckless Secretary of Defense Les Aspin floundered and sank. Carter’s SoD was run over by both the military and the hawkish national security advisor Brezinski. And Lyndon Johnson’s massive failure in Vietnam, that destroyed his Presidency (not to mention millions of lives) was marked by his inability to oppose the demands of the high command for ever more troops, ever more involvement. 

Obama came into office with three major failed wars in progress and military leadership  that Bush Jr. had made even more insulated, ideological, and resistant to reality. Obama’s problem was how to gain successes in the critical  war (the war against AQ) while extricating the US from the utter chaos Bush had made in Iraq and Afghanistan. He faced strong resistance from the Pentagon: on arriving in the WH, Obama was told by Petraeus that he would have to back off from his pledge to withdraw from Iraq.  Shockingly, Michael Moore is realistic about the challenge facing Obama:

 Why, exactly, can’t a president weather ending a war, even if he has to fire all his generals to do it? It’s right there in Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution: The President’s in charge of the military. And so is Congress: the army can’t just march over to the Treasury Department and steal the money for wars. Article I, Section 9 says Congress has to appropriate it.

In the real world, though, the Constitution’s just a piece of paper. In the real world, a President who fired his top military in order to stop a war would be ruined before you could say “bloodless coup.” The Washington Post (filled with ads from Boeing and Northrop Grumman) would scream about how he was the reincarnation of Neville Chamberlain. Fox and CNN (filled with “experts” who work for think tanks funded by Raytheon and General Dynamics) would say he was a girly-man who had to be impeached. And Congress (which experienced its own escalation in lobbying from defense contractors just as the Afghanistan escalation was being decided) might well do it.

The first black President, starting out under bitter attack from both the Republicans and conservative Democrats for being a Muslim, disloyal, a “Manchurian Candidate”, with a weak and fractious Congressional majority, facing an economic emergency that could easily lead to collapse and disorder, and with hundreds of thousands of US troops  in horribly, dangerously exposed positions – Obama had to be especially careful. Furthermore, Obama had to decide how much of his domestic agenda he was willing to sacrifice for foreign policy. Lyndon Johnson seems to have caved to the military brass over Indochina to save his civil rights initiatives – and he had a far larger Congressional majority and a weaker opposition than did Obama.

But Obama is a deft politician who recognized that the opposition itself was divided. Bob Gates was appointed by Bush Jr. as the conservative Republican establishment’s counter-attack on Cheney/Rumsfeld’s neo-con faction. Gates was a core member of the military industrial complex, a conservative Republican, a man with huge credibility in official Washington, and a part of a rebellion within the permanent government against the grand foreign policy ineptitude and ideological idiocy of the first 6 years of Bush Junior’s term of office. Gates was in a position to help Obama control the Pentagon in a way that Kerry or Wesley Clark or some more liberal SoD could not. Gates did not share Obama’s wider political vision, he has shown himself in his memoirs to be full of pettiness, disloyal, and short-sighted. But Gates was the ally Obama needed to impose some discipline on Petraeus, McChrystal, and other Pentagon Princes and to begin the process of reshaping US geopolitical policy. The smarter part of the  Washington Establishment eventually became alarmed about what Rumsfeld’s wild stupidity was doing to US power, about the prospects of another Tet or Dienbienphu or worse, about the results of dividing the US’s friends while uniting our enemies, about the irresponsible unwillingness of the Pentagon to oppose the Iraq fiasco or Doug Feith’s fantasy operations – and Obama used that alarm to his (and our) advantage.

And so the military/FP  policy of Obama’s first term is marked by the absolutely characteristic Obama process: a mix of drawing a hard line (absolutely rebuffing Petraeus’ demand to remain in Iraq), tactical retreats (the surge), strenuous efforts to build coalitions with opponents on even the most minor issues, willingness to take huge chances (e.g. that he’d get a second term) and gradual success. 

The liberals who fail to understand how power operates have been easy marks for the standard Conservative attack on Democratic Presidents as weak and naive.  This President is neither. He did not make Bob Gates SoD out of some naive hopes for good will from Republicans or out of weakness or wishful thinking. Obama did what he thought he had to do – on the basis of a very realistic understanding of the mechanisms of power and a cold blooded willingness to do what was necessary.

Note: I’m hopeful as well as surprised by Michael Moore’s sudden moment of realism. Keep it up Mike, there may be hope for you yet.