44's War

Direct Hit!

Has HRC's campaign caveat about the 3 a.m. cell call came true with paw paw era Watergator guy's hot! new expose' on 44 @ War?

Maybe!

"First, the president really hates being commander-in-chief in a time of war. Second, and perhaps related, the fight the White House most wants to win is the battle over who gets blamed for a defeat in Afghanistan."

Kinda all Greek Tragic:

• A president "misleading" the American public: 44 campaigned on the claim that Afghanistan is a war of necessity that was under-resourced because 43 ignored military advice, but he privately was forcing his nat'l sec team to embrace arbitrary resource and time constraints and to rush to a minimum footprint, and in doing so running roughshod over military advisors.

• Feuding advisors arguing as much over personality as over policy: More ominously, the turf fights and mistrust seem to crisscross the civil-military divide as well as the official hierarchy, with Cabinet principals dissing deputies (look for the revenge of the deputies in later installments).

• National security policy dictated more by partisan interests than by the national interest. Thus imposing an artificial timeline on the Afghan surge because 44 is adamant that "...I can't lose the whole Democratic party."

• The White House political team front and center in national security policy: "The result is a strategy-making process that has ground down even Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Gen. David Petraeus, two of the most publicly imperturbable and iron-disciplined figures imaginable. Anyone who has observed Gates in recent years or throughout his career will find it stunning to think, as Woodward apparently relates, that he would be “tempted to walk out of an Oval Office meeting.” Likewise that Petraeus, who did not flinch through the darkest “General-Betray-Us” months of the Iraq surge, might mutter to his staff that “the administration was ‘effing with the wrong guy,’” is equally remarkable.

• A White House discounting inconvenient intelligence warnings about terrorist attacks planned against the United States. In one of the most damning anecdotes from the previews, "Mr. Blair warned the president that radicals with American and European passports were being trained in Pakistan to attack their homelands. Mr. Emanuel afterward chastised him, saying, "You're just trying to put this on us so it's not your fault." Mr. Blair also skirmished with Mr. Brennan about a report on the failed airliner terrorist attack on Xmas. 44 later forced Mr. Blair out."

• A White House ignoring a war where U.S. troops are engaged. 44 campaigned against 43's "inattention" to the Afghan War, but Woodward appears to document an even more profound disregard for the ongoing war in Iraq.

• A fundamental naiveté about military operations. Thus one finds a commander-in-chief willing to authorize a surge of combat troops but unwilling ("I am done doing this") to authorize the requisite enabling troops that make those combat troops effective. Or a commander-in-chief refusing ("Why do we keep having these meetings?") to revisit, review, and revise earlier decisions as the enemy reacts and as the situation on the ground develops.

"At best, administration policy is a coerced consensus. But beyond providing a weak foundation for strategy, the process seems almost inexorably headed toward destroying the trust upon which healthy civil-military relations depend.

Pic - "They can say whatever, I'ma do whatever, No pain is forever, Yup, you know this" with Rhianna