General McChrystal Kicked

General McChrystal Kicked

The McChrystal affair has revived doubts about Barack Obama's qualities as a war president

 

GEORGE McGOVERN flew 35 bombing raids over Nazi-occupied Europe during the second world war and received the Distinguished Flying Cross for bravery; but in the election of 1972 he lost 49 states. John Kerry received three Purple Hearts for service in Vietnam; but lost in 2004 to George Bush, who had spent the war safely at home in the Texan Air National Guard. For one reason or another, no matter how glorious their records, Democrats have often found it hard to persuade voters that they can make good war presidents. Will the disarray in Barack Obama’s Afghan strategy this week restore the old idea the Democrats are not to be trusted with national security?
Mr Obama would be the first to admit that it took a certain audacity for a former community organiser to run against an authentic Republican war hero in 2008, when America was at war on two fronts. Three things helped him neutralise John McCain’s military expertise. The first was that many Americans thought the former community organiser had got it right by opposing the invasion of Iraq. The second was that by polling day the economy replaced both wars as the paramount concern of most voters. The last was that Mr Obama was careful to avoid giving the impression that this particular Democrat was some sort of cooing dove. He would fight—but he would fight the good war in Afghanistan, not the misbegotten one in Iraq.
Since becoming president Mr Obama has indeed taken his role as a warrior seriously. He was criticised on the campaign trail for suggesting that he would bomb al-Qaeda inside Pakistan but has sent the CIA’s drones to do just that, with murderous effect. To ensure continuity in national security and protect a vulnerable political flank, he asked Robert Gates, Mr Bush’s defence secretary, to stay in his job. He let Mr Gates replace the stolid General David McKiernan in Afghanistan with the piratical master of black ops, Stanley McChrystal. In the latter part of 2009, after weeks of intensive discussion, Mr Obama reset the Afghan strategy and decided to send an additional 30,000 troops, pushing the American total to around 100,000. And just in case his message of martial resolve was failing to get through, he used his acceptance speech for his Nobel Peace Prize last December to explain to some startled Scandinavian peaceniks why some wars, such as the one against al-Qaeda, were just and necessary.
All in all, Mr Obama has not shrunk from war and has waged it in a characteristically methodical way. But an old military saw holds that no plan survives contact with the enemy. However methodical his planning, the war has gone badly.
If voters had not been paying much attention lately, that is only because they have been transfixed by other things that have refused to go to plan, such as job creation and efforts to stop the oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico. In recent weeks the media have flayed the president for failing to get a handle on the spill. Foes have mocked the counterfeit machismo of his promise to “kick ass”. So it may have been the timing of the McChrystal affair that made him feel he had to insist on the resignation of the egregious general. Mr Obama had to show that he could be decisive, and has done so, but he will pay a political price.
Some of his foes will no doubt say that Mr Obama has put the amour propre of the White House above the successful prosecution of the war, though the choice of the hero of Iraq, David Petraeus, to replace General McChrystal will largely allay that fear. But the real failing exposed by the McChrystal fiasco is that the senior members of the president’s national-security team are at sixes and sevens and that he has allowed them to stay that way for a while. It has, accordingly, not taken long for this week’s events to revive the question of whether the Democrats can handle the armed forces as well as the Republicans. Les Gelb, a veteran journalist and former Pentagon official, suggests that the generals have more faith in Republican politicians to issue clear orders and stay the course when wars turn sour.

An outcry on the left as well

That is a harsh judgment to pass on a president who so far has adhered steadfastly to his doctrine that Afghanistan is a necessary war from which America cannot retreat. Indeed, many Democrats on the liberal wing of the president’s party think it is they who have the bigger cause for complaint. Some say that the war is unwinnable and that he should not have reinforced it. Memories of how Vietnam spiked Lyndon Johnson’s dreams of a Great Society haunt party elders. Younger Democrats complain that Mr Obama panders to his generals: he has not fulfilled his pledge to close Guantánamo, and for fear of the resistance the services mounted against Bill Clinton he has moved at a glacial pace to redeem his promise to let gays serve openly in the military.
Mr Obama, it seems, wants it both ways. That is understandable. Like Johnson before him, he is torn between his desire to build a liberal America at home and his need to fight an old-fashioned war abroad. He wants to succeed in Afghanistan but senses the limits of what America can achieve there. He would like the courage of his convictions but also a second term. To square these wants he may therefore have been a bit too clever for his own good. The great review last autumn produced a plan that both ramped up the war in a hurry and, with an eye on the 2012 election, set a date of July 2011 to begin to wind it down as well. The aim was to give the generals a chance to make progress and himself a chance to extract the forces if the generals failed.
It is ingenious—far more so than the refusal of Mr Bush to believe the experts who told him the Iraq war was lost. But winning a war can require a single-minded will as well as a subtle brain. Mr Obama has the latter; whether he has the stubbornness to stick to an unpopular war remains to be seen.