None of this strategic nuance mattered much to Obama. The majority of Americans agreed that after seven years of war, it was time to pack it in, let the Iraqis run their own state, and bring the troops home. And so it was with great political confidence and personal self-satisfaction that Obama addressed the American people on that late-summer evening in 2010.
Obama could have focused the nation on the fact that we had won a lengthy and hard-fought war in Iraq, which gutted al-Qaeda there, neutralized the Shiite militias and their godfathers in Iran, inspired a growing rejection of sectarianism and embrace of nationalism, and created a relatively stable climate for regular elections. He didn’t do that. Meanwhile, all that remained on Obama’s plate was to negotiate a new status-of-forces agreement to replace the one Bush had negotiated in late 2008, which would allow a skeleton force to remain to consolidate the gains and our burgeoning alliance with the Iraqis. Take a moment the next time you hop into a BMW from Germany, a Lexus from Japan, or a Hyundai from South Korea, and remember that we still have military troops in each of those countries. The reason none of them have become failed states is that Presidents Truman and Eisenhower had the wisdom and foresight not only to help rebuild them, but to ensure a defense against future belligerence. The same was supposed to be true for Iraq.
The Iraqis wanted and expected the agreement to be renegotiated. Obama knew from Day One of his presidency that this needed to be done, as well as to provide American direction toward a centrist coalition government made up of predominantly Shiite, Sunni, and Kurdish blocs that had won nearly 70 percent of the popular vote in the 2010 elections. In a show of how little he cared about the future of Iraq, Obama farmed out the critically important task of influencing the Iraqi government to Joe Biden, who promptly screwed everything up, leaving an Iraq run by a narrow sectarian coalition in which the radical Iranian-controlled Muqtada al-Sadr faction held the balance of power.
As to the status-of-forces agreement, Obama deliberately wrecked it. The ostensible reason for the collapse of the agreement was that Baghdad refused to agree to legal immunity for U.S. forces. That, however, was just the superficial excuse. With the acquiescence of the Iraqis, our military commanders had strongly recommended keeping a 20,000-troop residual force to deter the Iranians, train the Iraqis, and monitor our interests in the region. Obama wasn’t interested in doing any of those things. He just wanted to get out, regardless of the ultimate cost of losing a vastly important strategic interest and creating a power vacuum into which Tehran quickly and effectively would step. The Iraqis were stunned by Obama’s carelessness and disregard, as Sunni, Shiite, and Kurd must have turned to one another and asked, “What the @$%&! just happened?” In fact, the Iraqi government realized that it had to save the kook from his own bad decisions, so they quietly requested that a small U.S. training force stay in-country.
Obama, the man who claimed he would reject Bush’s hard-power cowboyism for smart-power diplomacy showed neither smarts nor good diplomacy. As the new commander in chief, Obama had the responsibility to turn America’s great sacrifice in Iraq into a long-term strategic win. Instead, he deliberately lost Iraq for the United States. He wanted us to ultimately fail there—for both political and strategic reasons—and he made sure it happened. He threw our hard-fought sacrifice into history’s dustbin, and with it he accomplished his true goal: downgrading U.S. power in the region and the world. It turns out that Reid’s declaration that “the war was lost” wasn’t entirely wrong; it was probably just premature.
While he was selling out Iraq, Obama was also busy pulling the rug out from under our war effort in Afghanistan. Savor the irony: the antiwar president expanded the war in Afghanistan by ordering a surge of the kind he criticized scathingly in Iraq. Obama being Obama, however, he couldn’t simply order an increase in troops along with a directive to achieve victory. No, Obama being Obama, he simultaneously announced the surge and the withdrawal, the plan to fight and the plan to exit, the commitment and the commitment phobia. He’s the charming cad who says he’ll call, then never does.
Long before he ran for president in 2008 and throughout that campaign, Obama cast Afghanistan as the “good war” in order to contrast it with Bush’s “bad war” in Iraq. He constantly criticized the Bush administration for taking its “eye off the ball” of terrorism in Afghanistan and suggested that he would have surged troops there, where it counted, rather than in Iraq where, after all, the war was already “lost.” Once he was elected president, Obama realized that he was now in a box of his own making. After three painfully long months of Hamlet-like indecision, Obama decided to surge 30,000 troops—tens of thousands of troops fewer than what the commanding generals requested—into Afghanistan, not because he wanted to but because he had to, lest his campaign word be broken and a perception grow that he was a typical kook, weak on national security.
Obama’s heart, however, was never in the fight. That’s why he gave only one major address about Afghanistan and never spoke about it again at any length. He sort of pretended that his surge wasn’t happening. But if you’re the commander in chief and you’re sending our selfless men and women into expanded combat operations, you’d better believe in the mission. And you’d better fight to win, or you’ve got no business being commander in chief.
In October 2009, while Obama was still contemplating his navel over what to do in Afghanistan, the commanding general there had a tough time getting the president’s attention. After all, he wasn’t a member of the International Olympic Committee, a golf ball, or Jennifer Lopez.
Given those self-indulgent presidential distractions, General Stanley McChrystal could be forgiven for airing publicly his strategic and troop-level preferences. Appearing on 60 Minutes and addressing a prestigious London think tank apparently were the only ways General McChrystal could get Obama’s attention. It was the general as matador, waving the red silk, hoping the bull would turn and notice him.
The bull certainly noticed. After the general’s disclosure that he had spoken to the commander in chief only once in the nearly hundred days he had the Afghanistan command, Obama then spoke to him twice: once by secure TeleLink and again aboard an idle Air Force One in Denmark for a twenty-five-minute discussion. So here was a four-star general who had been in uniform since 1976. A man who killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq. A West Point graduate with awards like the Defense Distinguished Service Medal. And President Barry gives him less time than he devotes to the average sit-down with Jay Leno.
Reports of the conversation said it involved a “candid exchange of views,” which probably meant that General McChrystal reiterated his request for up to 40,000 additional troops in order to accomplish the goal of destroying al-Qaeda, turning back the Taliban, and stabilizing Afghanistan, while Obama requested more time to think.
In his London speech, General McChrystal was brutally honest about the consequences of failing to adopt the surge strategy. The country, he said, will quickly become “Chaos-istan.” He summarily rejected the strategy advocated by Vice President Joe Biden to reduce troop levels and rely primarily on drone missile strikes, saying, “The short answer is no,” when asked if he’d ever support it.
He also said, “Waiting does not prolong a favorable outcome. This effort will not remain winnable indefinitely, and nor will public support.”
The White House was said to be “furious” with the general’s public comments, with some commentators suggesting that his comments bordered on “insubordination.” Obama’s national security adviser, General James Jones, was more careful, saying, “Ideally, it’s best for military advice to come up through the chain of command.”
General McChrystal could be forgiven his impatience. Obama had ten months as president to get off the fence. He said repeatedly, including in January, March, and June 2009 (when he installed General McChrystal), that he had a “new strategy.” When the general realized there wasn’t a plan, he himself prepared one, which had been public for seve
ral weeks before he took to the airwaves. The only way McChrystal could have gotten to Obama sooner was if he mounted an attack on ESPN headquarters and commandeered a SportsCenter broadcast to present his Afghan war strategy.
Obama knew that McChrystal was onto him, so when the general gave the president the ammunition with which to destroy him, Obama used it. Just eight months after the general openly stated the troop levels he’d need in Afghanistan, Rolling Stone reported some impolitic criticisms McChrystal and some of his aides made about the commander in chief and a few of his top advisers. The general was summoned to Washington for a terse meeting at the White House, during which he was relieved of his command. The counterinsurgency genius behind the successful Iraq surge, General David Petraeus, was asked to take a demotion from being commander of U.S. Central Command to run the Afghanistan war in McChrystal’s stead, and Petraeus agreed. Both generals must have said, “What the @$%&! just happened?”
Obama never laid out what victory in Afghanistan might look like—and his generals knew it. As he announced he was getting more in, he also announced he was getting out because, as with Iraq, that’s what he wanted to do all along. According to his game plan, approximately 33,000 troops will be home from Afghanistan in time for the 2012 election. The Afghan troop withdrawal isn’t in the national interest. It’s in Barack Obama’s interest.
On December 1, 2009, Obama gave his only comprehensive speech on Afghanistan, delivered in front of hundreds of cadets at the United States Military Academy at West Point. As he spoke, the camera panned the audience, capturing two moments that came to symbolize Obama’s Afghanistan policy. One cadet was caught napping through the speech. Yes, the man once considered the Greatest Orator of All Time put strapping young warriors to sleep. Another cadet was spied reading a book while Obama spoke. It wasn’t Heidi Montag’s How to Be Famous or Suzanne Somers’ Eat Great, Lose Weight. No, the West Point cadet was reading Kill Bin Laden: A Delta Force Commander’s Account of the Hunt for the World’s Most Wanted Man. That image said it all: the baby-faced cadet had more apparent fight in him, more passion for the cause, more urgency on behalf of his country, than the commander in chief under whom he was about to serve.
In his speech, Obama spoke not of victory but of national limitations. That wasn’t exactly the quintessential American way. We know we have limitations as a nation, but we don’t want to hear our president fence us in with them. The president is supposed to transcend those limitations, to get the country to go big—and win. He’s supposed to be Carol Brady, not Debbie Downer. His Afghanistan speech should have stirred the soul with a sense of renewed national commitment to defeating the mass-murdering al-Qaeda and Taliban enemy and an unwavering determination of a nation at war. Instead, Obama looked like the two-bit law lecturer he is, trying to community-organize Afghanistan.
In addition to containing the good war/bad war characterization of Afghanistan and Iraq, Obama’s speech was chockablock with his typical faculty-lounge dichotomies. On the one hand, he announced that it was “in our vital national interest to send an additional thirty thousand troops to Afghanistan.” On the other hand, he announced an exit strategy: “After eighteen months, our troops will begin to come home.” On the one hand, he was escalating the war. On the other, he was ending it. His policy was the equivalent of FDR telling Hitler and Hirohito that we were serious about defeating the whole fascism thing but we’re outta there by 1944.
Obama played his cards faceup. And he set up our military to fail. Once troop withdrawals begin in earnest, he’ll be able to say he gave the generals what they wanted (Petraeus, no less!) and they simply couldn’t make it work. Our enemies know what the timeline is. Our allies know they can’t count on us. And our troops know they’re risking their lives for a mission their commander in chief has written off. They weren’t allowed to win the war in a way that would have sent a clear message to the enemy.
Obama’s sole “strategy” on Afghanistan was to limit the enemy to al-Qaeda, so once bin Laden and other top al-Qaeda terrorists had been killed, he could declare success and get out. Beyond that, the policy has been all confused tactics, without a grand plan to create an effective Afghan fighting force, a responsible Afghan government, or a coherent strategy to deal with Afghanistan’s nuclear-armed neighbor, Pakistan. It had long been assumed by both Teams Bush and Obama that getting and keeping Pakistan on our side was the key to prevailing in Afghanistan. In fact, the opposite is true: proving our commitment to defeating the enemy in Afghanistan so they cannot return and use the country as a terrorist base would finally force Pakistan’s leaders to deal with their own Taliban and terrorist presence, before they have the chance to seize power, as they almost did in 2009 when the security situation in Afghanistan was particularly bad. If Obama goes through with his withdrawal, Pakistan will face rising Islamist radicalism and the unthinkable possibility of al-Qaeda or the Haqqani terror network getting control of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons. The inevitable chaos and carnage would most certainly spread into Afghanistan.
During his Afghanistan speech at West Point, Obama sounded exasperated that he had to deal with such a messy mess at all. After contemplating the age-old nature of war, Obama said, “I do not bring with me today a definitive solution to the problems of war.” Well now.
Then came his familiar invocation: “But we do not have to think that human nature is perfect for us to still believe that the human condition can be perfected.” Well now.
When the civilized world encounters evil, Obama believes he can formulate a sociological hypothesis for why it exists and how he can work with it.
An outrageous case in point: in very early 2012, the Hindu reported that Team Obama had turned to Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Muslim Brotherhood’s leading legal authority, to mediate secret negotiations between the United States and the Taliban. Qaradawi is the most influential Sunni Islamist in the world. In 2003, he issued a fatwa calling for the killing of U.S. troops in Iraq. He calls for a world dominated by Islam and a global caliphate governed by sharia. He openly calls for jihad, suicide bombings, and the murder of civilians, and he supports Hamas and the destruction of Israel. Obama allegedly wanted this sworn enemy of the United States and Israel to help him get a deal that would install our Taliban enemies as part of a sharia state in Afghanistan. Part of the deal was to involve the release of high-level Taliban prisoners from Guantánamo Bay in exchange for the Taliban opening a “political office” for “peace talks” in Qatar. One of the Taliban operatives on the Obama release list was Mullah Mohammed Fazi, a terrorist so fearsome that he’s wanted by the UN for war crimes for the slaughter of thousands of Shiites when he served as the Taliban army chief of staff. The U.S. military has continued to detain him because it’s deemed him a “high risk” for jihadist recidivism and a threat to the Afghan government. But Obama apparently thought it a swell idea to release this guy. As if that weren’t bad enough, the administration also signaled that it would agree to lift UN sanctions against the Taliban and recognize it as a legitimate political party. For its part, the Taliban claimed that it would forswear violence, dump al-Qaeda, and promise to play nice with its rivals in the Karzai government. As if. Perhaps this is what Obama meant when he talked of a “more perfect union”: one that got into bed with our most lethal enemies, believed their sweet nothing lies, and supported their ambitions while the American people got screwed without so much as dinner and a movie first.
The reality is that we’re not going to turn Afghan president Hamid Karzai into Thomas Jefferson, although we might be able to score him a panelist gig on Project Runway. We’re also not going to turn Afghanistan into Malibu. But what we can still achieve is an Afghan army strong enough to deal with the terrorist presence and a decent enough Afghan government that can work hand in glove with tribal leaders to keep the country stable.
And yet, as with Iraq, Obama has chosen weakness and surrender over strength and victory in Afghanistan. It’s a strategy that will likely lead to deadly gl
obal convulsions. But Obama’s objective in Iraq and Afghanistan is not to win and advance our interests but to wrap up what someone else started, redirect the “saved” money to his domestic projects, reduce American power and influence in the region, and use our losses there as punishing levers of humiliation against the United States.
You Say You Want a Revolution
* * *
The best day after a bad emperor is the first.
—Tacitus, Roman historian
In the mythology of the 2011 Arab Spring, a slap across the face set off a chain of events that changed the world. On the morning of December 17, 2010, a struggling Tunisian street vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi rolled his small cart of fruit and produce into his usual area in his hometown, Sidi Bouzid. The police arrived and began harassing him for not having the correct permit. Lacking the funds to bribe them, Bouazizi was then subjected to a humiliating beating by the local police, including a female municipal officer, Faida Hamdi, who allegedly slapped Bouazizi, spat on him, confiscated his weighing scales, and turned over his produce cart. Enraged and humiliated, Bouazizi dashed to the governor’s office, only to be turned away. He then ran to a nearby gas station, got a can of gasoline, and went back to the governor’s office. As he stood in the middle of midday traffic, Bouazizi shouted, “How do you expect me to earn a living?” He then doused himself and lit a match. Eighteen days after his self-immolation, he died.
Within hours of Bouazizi’s altercation, protests sprang up over his treatment at the hands of the Tunisian government, first in Sidi Bouzid and then across the country. To the protesters’ amazement, the army stood down and refused to fire upon them. Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, the dictator who had kept them poor and enslaved, fled to Saudi Arabia on January 14, 2011, a mere month after Bouazizi set himself aflame. He became the first dictator to fall in the so-called Arab “Spring.”
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