A Man Called Petraeus Storms The White House

Well, we expected this, didn't we? From an excellent piece by Gareth Porter:

CENTCOM commander Gen. David Petraeus, supported by Defence Secretary Robert Gates, tried to convince President Barack Obama that he had to back down from his campaign pledge to withdraw all U.S. combat troops from Iraq within 16 months at an Oval Office meeting Jan. 21.

But Obama informed Gates, Petraeus and Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen that he wasn't convinced and that he wanted Gates and the military leaders to come back quickly with a detailed 16-month plan, according to two sources who have talked with participants in the meeting.

One thing we can say about Obama is that, for good or for ill, he has generally kept to his bigger campaign promises. In this case, he knows that his foreign policy success is in large part predicated on getting us out of Iraq, and he refuses to bend to both the foreign policy establishment and institutional military pushback. Not only that, but reneging on a signed agreement with the Iraqis would endanger American troops and ensure chaos in Iraq and abroad. Sure, the warmongers will get a war (Obama is likely to hold to his promise in Afghanistan), but not Iraq.

According to Porter, the Gates-Petraeus plan was to reclassify combat troops as "support troops" to get around that little status of forces agreement mandating set withdrawals of US forces. Apparently Obama wasn't willing to risk American credibility in that shell game.

Of course, Petraeus is trying to circumvent his commander-in-chief, which I believe they call insubordination:

Obama's decision to override Petraeus's recommendation has not ended the conflict between the president and senior military officers over troop withdrawal, however. There are indications that Petraeus and his allies in the military and the Pentagon, including Gen. Ray Odierno, now the top commander in Iraq, have already begun to try to pressure Obama to change his withdrawal policy.

A network of senior military officers is also reported to be preparing to support Petraeus and Odierno by mobilising public opinion against Obama's decision.

Petraeus was visibly unhappy when he left the Oval Office, according to one of the sources. A White House staffer present at the meeting was quoted by the source as saying, "Petraeus made the mistake of thinking he was still dealing with George Bush instead of with Barack Obama."

Looks like Petraeus is using those handy Pentagon embeds to implement this strategy, too:

The opening argument by the Petraeus-Odierno faction against Obama's withdrawal policy was revealed the evening of the Jan. 21 meeting when retired Army Gen. Jack Keane, one of the authors of the Bush troop surge policy and a close political ally and mentor of Gen. Petraeus, appeared on the Lehrer News Hour to comment on Obama's pledge on Iraq combat troop withdrawal.

Keane, who had certainly been briefed by Petraeus on the outcome of the Oval Office meeting, argued that implementing such a withdrawal of combat troops would "increase the risk rather dramatically over the 16 months". He asserted that it would jeopardise the "stable political situation in Iraq" and called that risk "not acceptable".

The assertion that Obama's withdrawal policy threatens the gains allegedly won by the Bush surge and Petraeus's strategy in Iraq will apparently be the theme of the campaign that military opponents are now planning.

Here we go again. Honestly, I don't know why anyone would even want the Presidency, beset as it is by palace intrigue on all sides. Then again, nobody told Obama to hang on to Bob Gates. By the way, this epic whine about Obama actually following through on his promise is all about properly assigning blame:

The source says the network (of military officials), which includes senior active duty officers in the Pentagon, will begin making the argument to journalists covering the Pentagon that Obama's withdrawal policy risks an eventual collapse in Iraq. That would raise the political cost to Obama of sticking to his withdrawal policy.

If Obama does not change the policy, according to the source, they hope to have planted the seeds of a future political narrative blaming his withdrawal policy for the "collapse" they expect in an Iraq without U.S. troops.

I heard Bill Kristol parrot this strategy on Fox News Sunday, answering a question about why Obama hasn't officially announced drawdowns in Iraq by saying "Because he's a responsible man, and he won't withdraw if it isn't safe to do so." Kristol, who has never met a disaster he wasn't responsible for, has his own neocon fantasy agenda of keeping troops in the region to teach Arabs a lesson and enable them to fight in the 8 or 9 other wars he keeps in a list on his Blackberry. And the people who have been wrong about every foreign policy situation for decades upon decades are certainly not the people to listen to about "collapse."

As for Petraeus, it was clear that he was nothing more than a political animal for a while. He figured that his public stature was such that the President of the United States would have to take orders from him. And now he wants to use the media, which is enamored of him, to exact a price on Obama for disobeying him. Maybe he should just declare for 2012 now.

You could see this clash between the military and the young President coming. They don't like taking orders from lowly Democrats and they don't mind undermining their superior officer to make their point.

...By the way, defense spending will increase by 8% in the 2010 FY budget and unnamed sources at the Pentagon are pissed because it's 10% less than what they asked for, portraying this increase as a spending cut. It never stops.

...Shorter PowerTools - You can't cross David Petraeus because he got a lot of applause at the Super Bowl.

Actually that's almost verbatim.

Iraq Slips Off The Table

For a few days, I've been saying that the Obama campaign needed to turn the tables on the Clinton campaign, suggesting that her rhetoric didn't match reality on issues like NAFTA and, in particular, Iraq. There was plenty of evidence that she would not pull our troops out with anything resembling speed. Well, they brought it up today, but the problem it they did so from a defensive crouch:

The skirmishing over Samantha Power continued on an Obama campaign conference call moments ago, with the action shifting over to this recent interview with Power about Obama's commitment to withdrawing from Iraq.

In that interview, Power said the following about Obama's future approach to withdrawal from Iraq: "He will, of course, not rely on some plan that he’s crafted as a presidential candidate or a U.S. Senator." As Ben Smith notes, she seemed to be expressing "a lack of confidence that Obama will be able to carry through" his withdrawal plan.

Asked about the comments on the call, Plouffe argued that Obama's commitment to pulling out of Iraq was "rock solid." He also pointed out that Retired General Jack Kean, who is close to Hillary, had recently characterized Hillary's approach to Iraq as follows:

"I have no doubts whatsoever that if she were president in January '09 she would not act irresponsibly and issue orders to conduct an immediate withdrawal from Iraq, regardless of the consequences, and squander the gains that have been made."

The parallel isn't perfect, but Plouffe's push-back nonetheless seems fair here -- the larger point is that both candidates, for obvious reasons, want to preserve some wiggle room for themselves on Iraq.

This effectively ends this as an issue. It's now a he said/she said, and I don't think the Obama campaign is skilled enough politically to ignore their own vulnerabilities on this issue and just press forward and say "She won't end the war and I will."

This is extremely damaging to the Obama campaign. He needed to take an issue and run with it and Iraq made the most sense. His strength is supposed to be as an antiwar candidate. Obama gave me some hope by talking about how he not only wanted to end the war, but end the mindset that got us in there. But I don't see him pushing this much further, and in fact he's getting pushed around. He's losing the bar fight primary and it doesn't give me hope that he can stand up to the Republicans.

UPDATE: Here's Obama today in Wyoming.



That's not bad. We'll see how this goes.

Well, Let's Talk About Doublespeak Then

If the trend holds and Hillary Clinton winds up taking Ohio, two factors will be cited as the reason: her 3AM ad questioning Obama's national security credentials, and the NAFTA/Canada kerfuffle, which suggested that Obama says one thing in speeches and another in private. I've said consistently that I don't think Obama or Clinton are wild-eyed populists, and neither will go to the mat over free trade. But if this is the new standard, if scrutinizing whether policy matches rhetoric, then Clinton could be on very shaky ground. Because there are indications that she won't end the Iraq war if elected, and will indeed carry the Bush/McCain policy forward.

This is mainly coming from outside sources at this point. Gen. Jack Keane is claiming that she would not move to end the war.

If Senator Clinton can best Senator Obama in today's round of primaries and caucuses and go on to capture the White House, a co-author of the surge strategy in Iraq says he is convinced she would hold off on authorizing a large-scale immediate withdrawal of American soldiers from Iraq.

In a weekend interview, a retired four-star general, Jack Keane, said that when he briefed Mrs. Clinton in late 2006 and January 2007 on the counteroffensive strategy known as the surge, she "generally supported the surge strategy in the sense she wanted it to succeed but she was skeptical about its chances."

The Obama campaign yesterday seized on the general's comments after they appeared in an article on The New York Sun's Web site, with the chief spokesman, William Burton, issuing a statement saying: "Senator Clinton needs to explain to the American people what she said to the architect of George Bush's surge that made him think she wouldn't end the war."

Is this any different than Austin Goolsbee talking to the Canadian Embassy about NAFTA? Ken Pollack said pretty much the same thing:

Kenneth Pollack, a Persian Gulf specialist who worked for the Clinton White House, and who has become a proponent of the military surge in Iraq since leaving government, said yesterday: "I don't know what she would do as president. But all of my experience with her when she was first lady is that this is a woman who would put our nation's interests first and any campaign promises a distant second."

This is that sickness in the foreign policy community that confines options to this narrow sliver, ignoring the reality on the ground. The truth is that Iraq is a two trillion dollar nightmare which has constrained our domestic policy for a generation, ruining the opportunity to fix Social Security and Medicare and provide decent health care to our veterans. The surge (and these are largely the architects of the surge saying Clinton won't end the war) has absolutely not worked and it's starting to fracture. The insurgents that we decided to arm so they wouldn't kill us have no loyalty to us, and are ready to strike at the Shiites at the slightest provocation. That provocation may already have manifested itself in the collapse of a legal case against two Shi'a charged with kidnapping and killing Sunnis, which speaks to the total breakdown of the legal system along sectarian lines. We've built a house of cards that can only end by falling apart.

And in this context, here's what Sen. Clinton has actually said at a recent event in Texas.

"We have given them the gift of freedom, the greatest gift you can give someone. Now it is really up to them to determine whether they will take that gift."

This is a justification for launching the war, as a fight for Iraqi freedom, and nobody who actually believes that is going to do anything other than stay the course.

As long as we're going to talk about policy not matching rhetoric, then this has to be in the equation. Will she actually end the occupation of Iraq, return diplomacy to the fore in our dealing with the world, and move to a different foreign policy with a different mindset?

Principled Moderate

Rudy Giuliani, savior to moderate Broderists everywhere, has in the past few days:

• Restated his support for the federal government to intervene in the Terri Schiavo case, a position supported by maybe 20% of the country, only the most hardcore theocrats (how's this going to play in the Libertarian West?)...

• Is being advised on Iraq by Jack Keane and John Bolton, one the co-author of the "surge" strategy, the other the most neoconny neocon of the entire bunch.

This guy is no moderate. He's an authoritarian narcissist with strong ties to the some magical thinkers who got us in the current foreign policy mess.