Fog Of War
Withdrawal will be based on conditions on the ground … in Washington. That’s the best battlefield assessment I can offer, amid the fog of DC war, after scrutinizing this scrambled transmission via CBS’ Political Hotsheet. White House: July 2011 is Locked In For Afghan Withdrawal.
During the Senate Armed Services hearing today, Defense Secretary Robert Gates was pressed by Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C. on whether the July 2011 date for beginning to withdrawal troops is “locked in.”
Gates seemed to suggest there was some flexibility, that “it was a clear statement of his strong intent” and that “the president always has the freedom to re-evaluate his decisions.” After the hearing Graham said he took that to mean the date is “not locked in” and will depend on conditions on the ground.
It was a point of contention at the White House briefing today – I asked White House spokesman Robert Gibbs if senators were incorrect calling the date a “target.”
After the briefing, Gibbs went to the president for clarification. Gibbs then called me to his office to relate what the president said. The president told him it IS locked in – there is no flexibility. Troops WILL start coming home in July 2011. Period. It’s etched in stone. Gibbs said he even had the chisel.
Lindsey Graham will not be happy. Neither will John McCain – and a whole lot of other Republicans who believe any kind of time line means “advantage: enemy.”
Let them dicker over whether telling the enemy how long they need to wait is a bad idea, or whether “pull out and that’s final” constitutes a war strategy or a surrender one. I want to know how come, after multiple high-level meetings and a big speech, neither the secretary of defense or the White House press secretary seem to be clear on what exactly the commander in chief has in mind.
Here’s some stark clarity. One of the better analyses of the deliberation/speech/strategy quagmire I’ve seen yet. Eliot A. Cohen of Johns Hokpins SAIS, at WSJ. “A Wartime President.”
To succeed as commander in chief, Mr. Obama must accept some unpleasant truths: that a speech is but the beginning of the leadership required of him; that, in the end, however much he may prize his intellect, he will win by his grit; that the financial and human costs of this war will undercut much of the domestic program he wistfully discussed at the end of his speech; that he will have to turn his own energies to this problem not episodically but constantly—and that in so doing he will lose old friends and have to make uncomfortable new ones.
As a wartime leader he will tend many wounds, but the most grievous thus far are those he has inflicted on himself.
A precision strike. You’ll want to read the whole deadly accurate thing. As a reporter working on the “what it all means” pieces, there are people you can expect to fall on one side, and there are people you can expect to fall on the other, and you call them up to get your range and balance. Cohen is a guy I often called pre- and post-9/11 not always knowing exactly where he’d fall, but knowing I could generally expect some incisive insight and clarity of thought on complex foreign policy matters. In this case, he cuts through a lot of crap pretty neatly.
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Topics: Afghanistan,Obama
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 9:11 am Comments (1) on Thursday, December 3, 2009
One Response to “Fog Of War”
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December 3rd, 2009 at 10:54 am
The Thunder Run has linked to this post in the blog post From the Front: 12/02/2009 News and Personal dispatches from the front and the home front.