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The loneliness of Barack Obama
His domestic team is dispersing. But national security is the area where the
president could use closer friends

Sep 30th 2010

BOB WOODWARD’S latest fly-on-the-wall White House potboiler, “Obama’s Wars”,
is among other things an essay in the loneliness of command. Having
inherited a failing war, a fresh young president is bombarded on all sides
by conflicting advice and has in the end to set the strategy himself,
pleasing nobody. It would be a fascinating tale at any time, but it is
especially poignant in present circumstances. For one reason or another,
many of the advisers who have surrounded Mr Obama since he took office at
the beginning of 2009 are deserting the listing ship. If he were not from
the planet Vulcan (“birthers” take note) and therefore incapable of feeling
emotion, he would have every reason to feel lonely right now.

Two members of his economic team—Christina Romer and Peter Orszag—have
already left the White House and Larry Summers, his chief economic
co-ordinator, will return to Harvard University after November’s mid-term
elections. Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, is expected to
announce his departure at any moment so that he can pursue his longtime
ambition to become mayor of Chicago in place of Richard Daley. David
Axelrod, the president’s political adviser, he of the sad eyebrows, is
meanwhile reported to dislike his bachelor existence in the nation’s capital
and to be keen to return to his life, his family and Manny’s deli in the
Windy City. The need to prepare Mr Obama’s 2012 election campaign gives him
the perfect excuse.

The president has so far taken these impending departures in his stride. He
will be working closely with Mr Axelrod in the presidential election, and Mr
Emanuel was never a close friend anyway. Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser
who is indeed close, appears to be staying, as does his press secretary
Robert Gibbs, one of the original Obama team. There is, however, one
departure in the works that may cause even a Vulcan some worry. The thought
provoked by Mr Woodward’s book is that the loss of Robert Gates, the defence
secretary, may damage Mr Obama most of all.

Mr Gates served as George Bush’s defence secretary but agreed to stay on to
provide continuity in the Iraqi and Afghan wars and the war on terrorism.
Keeping a Republican CIA veteran at the Pentagon was an inspired decision by
a president acutely conscious of his own lack of security experience. But
politics can be cruel. The presence of Mr Gates has not prevented
“ownership” of the failing Afghan war from shifting rapidly to Mr Obama. All
presidents eventually own the wars America fights on their watch, whether
they started them or not. What is special about Afghanistan is that Mr Obama
rejected both of the big ideas his subordinates promoted in the great
hand-wringing review the White House conducted in the autumn of 2009.
Instead, he constructed a compromise, in which, if Mr Woodward is to be
believed, only he has confidence.

The big idea that bubbled up through the chain of command was a long-haul
counter-insurgency campaign. The opposing idea from Joe Biden, the
vice-president, was “counterterrorism-plus”: keep only enough force in, near
and above Afghanistan as needed to prevent al-Qaeda returning from Pakistan,
which should in fact be the focus of American policy. In the end, eager as
he was to find an exit from a war his own party hated, Mr Obama rejected the
Biden plan. But nor, quite, did he accept the generals’. He sent 30,000 new
troops, not the 40,000 General Stanley McChrystal in Afghanistan wanted, and
according to Mr Woodward insisted to his commanders that “this is not a
nationwide counter-insurgency strategy”, because the public would not accept
a plan that could cost up to $1 trillion and break the budget. He also
wanted the troops to start leaving by July 2011.

Was this a brilliant compromise or a refusal to take a hard decision? The
answer may not come until the withdrawal is due to begin next summer. By
then, however, Mr Gates could well have quit. He says that he might depart
in 2011, but has not said whether he will stay until the fateful deadline.
He may not relish being stuck in a new fight between the president and his
generals.


*The thinning ranks*

If Mr Gates does go, Mr Obama will miss him. Nobody else can provide the
same support and cover. Hillary Clinton is still a potential rival. Jim
Jones has outlasted serial rumours of impending defenestration, but Mr
Woodward’s book suggests that the national security adviser’s relations with
Mr Obama are at best proper, verging on awkward: the towering former marine
is no *consigliere*. Nor will Mr Obama have a trusted ally on the ground:
General McChrystal has been replaced by General David Petraeus, a registered
Republican who remains a stubborn believer in the counter-insurgency
strategy he invented for Iraq and which Mr Obama says America cannot afford
in Afghanistan. The president is intimate with no foreign ally in the way
that Mr Bush was with Tony Blair. Even if he sought such a friendship, it
might not be forthcoming: British prime ministers have now learnt the perils
of poodledom, whether real or perceived.

Inside the White House, of course, there is still the loyal Mr Biden. The
vice-president is one of the surprises of Mr Woodward’s narrative. His
prolixity is a legend, yet he emerges as an original thinker and iconoclast,
more familiar than his master with Afghanistan and Pakistan and more willing
to challenge the military’s most basic assumptions, such as the one that
maintains that America’s vital interests are still at stake in a country
from which Osama bin Laden has long since fled. Had the vice-president been
able to exercise the same influence over Mr Obama as Dick Cheney did over Mr
Bush, America might already be winding down its war. But this is a president
who does his deciding alone, no matter how widely he consults. Just as well,
perhaps. Mr Obama faces the prospect of a lonely summer in 2011.

--
Eric D. Schwerin
Rosemont Seneca Partners
(202) 333-1880
eschwerin@rosemontseneca.co