Published for Shadow Government on foreignpolicy.com, August 31st, 2010:

How did Obama do in his Iraq speech on those Four Essential Items I was tracking? Better than I feared, but not as well as I hoped.

Gimmickry vs. Candor? He did not say “mission accomplished” but he did say mission completed and responsibility met (specifically: “The Americans who have served in Iraq completed every mission they were given.” and “we have met our responsibility”). The emphasis is all on what has been done and not on what still needs to be done.  If what remains to be done is light and easy, the speech is strong enough to sustain it. But the speech did not prepare Americans for any hard and dangerous  tasks to come in Iraq.

The gestures towards reality — “Of course, violence will not end with our combat mission” — felt like nothing more than gestures. And the breezy confidence — “But ultimately, these terrorists will fail to achieve their goals. Iraqis are a proud people. They have rejected sectarian war, and they have no interest in endless destruction. They understand that, in the end, only Iraqis can resolve their differences and police their streets.”  – seemed disconnected from the real challenges still confronting the Iraqi people, and therefore the United States.

Defining the mission going forward? The way forward seemed dotted with hopes and aspirations — a vague commitment to “support Iraq as it strengthens its government, resolves political disputes, resettles those displaced by war, and builds ties with the region and the world” — rather than with hard-headed strategies for achieving realistic goals. He also doubled down on the promise that all U.S. troops will be out of Iraq by the end of the year, leaving no flexibility for responding to the expected Iraqi request for a post-2011 American presence.

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Published for Shadow Government on foreignpolicy.com, August 29th, 2010:

President Obama’s planned “big speech” on Iraq this week poses real challenges for the president. He wants to tout the fact that the military met his  September deadline of reducing the number of troops below an arbitrary 50,000 threshold — a milestone that many, including myself, doubted they would meet on schedule. But he needs to do so in a way that does not make some already thorny Iraq problems worse than they are.

There are lots of things speechwriters and advisors wrestle with when confronted with a task like this. Here are four that I think are especially important.

The first is tempering a boasting frame/optic that wants to declare victory with a candor that still acknowledges the challenges ahead. Bush’s advisors memorably failed to get the balance right when President Bush gave the address that became known as the “Mission Accomplished speech.” The remarks were delivered in front of a banner declaring “Mission Accomplished” aboard an aircraft carrier that was returning home after, well, after accomplishing its mission. Everyone remembers the vivid image of former jet-pilot Bush landing aboard the carrier and striding confidently on the tarmac. No one remembers the actual content of the speech he gave.

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Published for Shadow Government on foreignpolicy.com, August 25th, 2010:

Marine Commandant James Conway may have gotten himself in a bit of hot water with his recent public remarks about Afghanistan and the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.

On Afghanistan, General Conway said, “”We think right now [Obama's announced Afghanistan timeline is] probably giving our enemy sustenance… We’ve intercepted communications that say, hey, you know, we only have to hold out for so long… ” The New York Times gave this a more problematic headline ( Top Marine Says Afghan Deadline May Help Taliban) than did theWashington Post (Taliban could be misleading its forces) ( ). I bet the White House prefers thePost’s spin. But either way, Conway was simply stating the obvious: President Obama’s announced timeline for Afghanistan has some downsides. Even supporters of the timeline, if they are honest, must acknowledge this inarguable fact. Most experts go on to say that Obama mishandled the announcement and created needless confusion about the meaning of the timeline, thus exacerbating the downsides; this is my view. And most experts probably say that on balance the costs of the announced timeline may outweigh the benefits; this is also my view. And some even go so far as to view it as a strategic blunder that may inadvertently sabotage the surge, possibly jeopardizing the war; I am not prepared to say this at this point, but it is not an absurdly unreasonable fear. If General Conway had volunteered any of those additional opinions in public, he might have crossed a civil-military line (unless those opinions had been solicited in Congressional testimony). But he didn’t, and so he deserves a pass.

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Published for Shadow Government on foreignpolicy.com, August 18th, 2010:

I have held off commenting on the “Ground Zero mosque” controversy, in part because it seemed to be primarily a domestic political issue but mainly because I was dismayed by the hyperbole, demagoguery, and dishonest argumentation I found — and, sadly, there are plenty of culprits on both sides of the debate. Some of the debate has been principled, nuanced, and careful, but not enough of it has and like an email flame war, the rhetoric has escalated even as the actual underlying points of dispute have narrowed.

However, one underappreciated point of consensus in the debate has prompted me to weigh in. Both sides of the debate appear to agree on one narrow claim: that the Ground Zero mosque is an important issue, symbolic or otherwise, in the ideological struggle in which the war on terror is embedded — what Bush administration insiders referred to as the war of ideas.

I think it is certainly relevant to the war of ideas. Al Qaeda has sought to turn a broad civil war within the Muslim world into a war between Islam and the infidels (everyone else). If al Qaeda ever succeeded in that aim, our prospects for success would dim considerably. In fact, as President Bush and his advisors made clear within hours of the 9/11 attacks, and as leaders from both parties have emphasized repeatedly ever since — and as most Americans have accepted to a remarkable degree — the United States has not viewed the war on terror as a war against Islam. On the contrary, Americans have expended considerable blood and treasure to help protect Muslim victims of al Qaeda and other like-minded terrorist groups. And American leaders have sought, wherever possible, to reach out to the Muslim world and highlight America’s long tradition of religious freedom and unrivaled record as a society that welcomes and integrates immigrants from all walks of life.

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Published for Shadow Government on foreignpolicy.com, August 13th, 2010:

Amidst all of the (mostly pessimistic) reporting on Afghanistan, one squib caught my eye: Congressman Frank Wolf has sent a letter to President Obama calling for the establishment of an Afghanistan-Pakistan Study Group. The proposal is self-consciously modeled on the Iraq Study Group (ISG, aka the Baker-Hamilton Commission), which Congressman Wolf also helped launch.

Wolf’s new letter has not generated a lot of DC buzz yet, but I would not be surprised if it gathered steam this fall when Congress returns from recess. Whether it makes sense to launch such an independent group is a separate matter, and in assessing that question it would be helpful to clear up some myths about the Iraq Study Group.

Wolf initially proposed the Iraq Study Group back in the summer of 2005, at a time of eroding public support for the Iraq mission amidst vigorous elite debate about whether President Bush had a viable strategy or was simply “staying the course” in Iraq. Critics would complain loudly about what the Bush administration was doing — but then recommend back to the administration a course of action basically identical to the one already being pursued (I called this “bushwhacking” in a chapter I wrote on the politics of the war on terror in Lessons for a Long War, a book edited by Tom Donnelly and Fred Kagan). Critics who visited Iraq and heard General George Casey explain the military effort (called the “Casey Campaign Plan”) and heard U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad explain the broader political strategy tended to come back more encouraged than when they went.

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Published for Shadow Government on foreignpolicy.com, August 5th, 2010:

David Ignatius appears to have been convinced that the Obama administration is deftly playing its Iran hand. I am not so easily persuaded, but I did see in Ignatius’s report one thing worth praising: President Obama now appears to understand that the sanctions track is the diplomatic track.

There are basically three schools of thought regarding diplomatic engagement with Iran. One school thinks the prospect is hopeless from the get-go and not worth doing. I understand this school’s pessimism — for 30 years, anyone betting that diplomacy with Iran would fail made money — but I have not been in this school because of its naiveté. That’s right, naiveté. It is hardly naïve about the intentions and stubbornness of the Iranian regime, but it is naïve about everything else regarding American foreign policy options regarding Iran. Everything else we might have to do with respect to Iran — whether it is the hawkish option of military strikes or the dovish option of learning to live with an Iranian nuclear weapon — is easier to do if we have thoroughly tried and exhausted other diplomatic options. So pragmatism requires that we try diplomatic engagement, even if pragmatism also leads us to be bearish about its prospects for success.

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Published for Shadow Government on foreignpolicy.com, August 3rd, 2010:

President Obama’s speech on Iraq was a disappointment. Not a surprise, but a disappointment.

It was disappointing because it was yet another missed opportunity. He could have shown real statesmanship by acknowledging he was wrong about the surge. He could have reached across the aisle and credited Republicans who backed the policy he vigorously opposed and tried to thwart, a policy that has made it possible (but by no means certain) to hope for a responsible end to the Iraq war. He could have have told the truth about his Iraq strategy, that what he has pursued thus far has not been what he was arguing for in the campaign — that would have involved the departure of all U.S. troops by mid 2008 — but rather he has followed, in a more or less desultory fashion, a script written in the status of forces agreement negotiated by President Bush and Prime Minister Maliki.

Instead of giving such a speech, Obama gave a campaign address trying to claim credit for anything that is going well in Iraq and trying to avoid blame for anything that is going poorly. That may be shrewd campaign politics, but it is not the statesmanship the occasion warranted. The commander-in-chief missed an opportunity, and I worry that it will come back to haunt us.

Given how perilous his political position is, it should not surprise that Team Obama chose to play politics with the moment. The latest USA Today poll has Obama down to 41 percent presidential approval, very dangerous waters indeed for a first-term president heading into the mid-term elections.

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Published for Shadow Government on foreignpolicy.com, July 26th, 2010:

Another week, and another Big Bombshell Story in the national security press, this time a series of stories based on the leak by Wikileaks of over 90,000 classified cables and reports from the Afghan theater. (A sidebar: The word “leak” just doesn’t seem adequate for a data dump and security breach of this magnitude. This is not so much a leak as a gusher.)

After reading the stories, my reaction is similar to FP colleague Tom Ricks: There does not appear to be any bombshell revelation here. Perhaps the more interesting and damning revelations are to come, but presumably the newspapers led with their best stuff.

If so, I would go a step further: The bombshell is that, with 90,000 classified documents from which to cherry-pick, the reporters were obliged to conclude, “Over all, the documents do not contradict official accounts of the war.” That is pretty significant, given the layers of distrust and skeptical reporting that have accumulated over the years. (By contrast, a few days of reporting from a very different kind of data dump, the archives of JournoList, seems to have generated far more damning revelations.)

In other words, the general understanding of the overall arc of the Afghan war thus far that an attentive public audience would develop by staying abreast of the information already in the public domain is what one would glean if one digested 90,000 classified documents from the same period. That is a big story, but it is not the one the editors are hyping.

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Published for Shadow Government on foreignpolicy.com, July 19th, 2010:

There are two breathless stories today that are hyped as shock and awe assaults on the national security establishment. I have read both and tried several times to muster the requisite emotion, but both struck me as the analytical equivalent of fizzles.

The first and biggest, is the Washington Post’s long-awaited investigative series on the growth of the national security establishment. Taking its cue from British tabloids, the Post has breathlessly promoted this series with its own brand — “Top Secret America” —  sensational headlines — “A Hidden World, Growing Beyond Control” — and extravagant but somewhat unprovable claims — such as the charge that the intelligence community failed to connect the dots in a timely manner on the recent terrorist attempts because of the redundant nature of the system. Its most innovative aspect is a series of nifty interactive features that allow tailored searches and graphics-rich displays of two basic (and I would have thought, well-established) facts: (1) that the national security world is complex and (2) that defense spending has grown in the last decade. Bottom line: This is a very glossy website that so far seems to try a bit too hard to shock viewers with how much gambling is going on in the casino.

The series has just begun and perhaps future installments will offer more bombshell revelations, but the first installment leaves me wondering what the fuss was about. The major claim that the complexity of the intelligence community has made it hard to manage in a centralized fashion is neither new nor proven in a novel way. I am sympathetic to the charge — anyone who has worked in government understands how complex the national security establishment is and can probably name a publication or an organization that, in one person’s humble opinion, could be dropped without fatally wounding national security. The difficulty is that when you aggregate across a variety of experienced perspectives, you do not come up with a common list of things to axe. One man’s meat is another man’s fluff, and vice-versa. You need look no further than this very series to establish this fact. The Washington Post team have spent two years talking with scores of people and compile all of the complaints without producing (yet, yet … perhaps the best is yet to come) any coherent and viable set of reforms.

Published for Shadow Government on foreignpolicy.com, July 12th, 2010:

One further thought apropos my recent post on how to conduct partisan debates in an election cycle: Is it always unseemly to claim partisan credit for a national security policy success? I think the answer is no, but it is a delicate and highly fraught business.

The electoral imperative requires in-parties to claim that they have adequately safeguarded America’s national security, and that booting them from office will jeopardize those gains. Likewise, out-parties face the same imperative and make the equal-but-opposite claims. This was not invented by Karl Rove nor by the Republicans, though of course it has been a staple of Republican campaign rhetoric for decades. Yet, whether it is bomber/missile gaps, “Daisy” commercials, pointed charges about a reckless Reagan’s finger on the button, bombast about coddling the “butchers in Beijing,” or the slash-and-burn critique offered by Gore, Kerry, and Obama in three successive electoral cycles, Democrats have shown themselves to be equally willing and capable of playing this basic game. There are no slouches on either side of the aisle, so far as I can see.

We can bemoan this, but it is not like bemoaning tar balls; it is more like bemoaning the tide. There is little point to complaining about it because it originates from the structure, not from some temporary breach in the structure.

There is a point, however, to policing the process and reflecting on noteworthy high or low points in the saga. Which brings me to Vice President Biden’s recent trip to Iraq. I just can’t decide whether it is a high or a low point.

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