Obama’s yes men say no thanks
KONRAD YAKABUSKI
The Globe and Mail
Published Thursday, Nov. 27 2014
Barack Obama is set to nominate his fourth Defence Secretary before the sixth anniversary of his ascension to the Oval Office. The first two men in the job left and wrote tell-all books blasting the President’s micromanagement and poor grasp of military strategy. The third started out on the same philosophical page as Mr. Obama, but was shut out as soon as he began to question his policies.
It’s not surprising that a President who prefers yes men to truth-tellers appears to be having a hard time finding a replacement for Chuck Hagel, who was forced to resign this week after a series of public disagreements with the White House. The top candidates have already said: “Thanks, but no thanks.”
This does not augur well, as the President elected to end two unpopular wars in the Middle East reluctantly leads his country into a third of his own making. Mr. Obama is adamant that he won’t send U.S. ground troops to combat the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, but almost no prospective Pentagon chief wants to see his or her hands thus tied. And no president who’s serious about winning the war would thus tie them.
Even Jimmy Carter, the most military-averse president until Mr. Obama, thinks his successor dropped the ball. “We waited too long. We let the Islamic State build up its money, capability and strength and weapons while it was still in Syria,” the former president said last month. Without some U.S. ground troops, he said, the war has little possibility of success.
Mr. Obama’s first defence secretary, Robert Gates, was a holdover from George W. Bush’s administration who helped turn the tide in the Iraq war with a 2007 U.S. troop surge and by winning over Sunni warlords. He convinced Mr. Obama to increase troop levels in Afghanistan in 2009, but was soon shut out by a White House that regretted the optics of accelerating a war it had vowed to wind down.
Defence secretary No. 2, Leon Panetta, was a Clinton Democrat who had previously run the Central Intelligence Agency. He urged Mr. Obama to intervene in Syria’s civil war in 2011, in part to prevent the kind of vacuum that has allowed the Islamic State to thrive. He was ignored, then left and wrote a scathing book about a President who hears only what he wants to hear.
“Because of that centralization of authority at the White House, there are too few voices that are being heard,” Mr. Panetta said this month, adding: “You go there, and by the time you get to the White House, the staff has already decided, or tried to influence, what the direction should be.”
Mr. Hagel, a Vietnam veteran and former Republican senator who shared Mr. Obama’s opposition to George W. Bush’s war in Iraq, was expected to be more compliant. He was appointed after the 2012 election to complete the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and oversee budget cuts at the Pentagon.
But Mr. Hagel refused to sign off on administration requests to release prisoners from Guantanamo Bay. And when Mr. Obama was still comparing the Islamic State to a junior varsity basketball team, Mr. Hagel publicly called it an “imminent threat to every interest we have.” Strike three came last month, when the U.S. media reported on a memo Mr. Hagel had written criticizing a lack of clarity in the administration’s Syria strategy.
The departure of his third defence chief shatters once and for all the myth that Mr. Obama has surrounded himself with a Lincoln-inspired “team of rivals” to keep him on his toes and expose him to diverse points of views. Even if that was the intention in 2008, it did not last long.
As he enters the final quarter of his presidency, Mr. Obama relies on a tiny circle of White House aides who protect him, rather than challenging him. None looms larger than Valerie Jarrett, a friend from Chicago dubbed the “Obama whisperer” and “chief architect of his very prominent and occasionally suffocating bubble” by The New Republic.
No wonder former undersecretary of defence Michèle Flournoy, considered the top candidate to replace Mr. Hagel, moved immediately Tuesday to take herself out of the running. Anyone who’s read the Gates and Panetta books – and she surely has – would turn down the offer.
