Obama’s Wars by Bob Woodward: review

[Ali Ahmad Syed]

Con Coughlin on the troubles that beset the military in the White House, as laid out in Bob Woodward's new book, Obama's Wars

By Con Coughlin
Published: 11:08AM BST 12 Oct 2010

Barack Obama did not go into politics to make his name as a war leader. Reforming health care, challenging Washington’s political establishment and repositioning America as a positive force in world affairs were the issues that inspired the young Illinois senator to launch his audacious bid for the White House.

Since taking office he has tried hard to stick to this Messianic script. But try as he might, Obama can’t shake off the fact that he’s the leader of a nation that is involved in a bitter war in a faraway place; a war, furthermore, that America stands a fair chance of losing, particularly if the President persists with the indecisive approach that has characterised his first year and a half in office.

One of the reasons often cited for Obama’s success in the 2008 presidential election campaign was his long-standing opposition to the Iraq war. And, as President, he has moved quickly to withdraw US combat troops and draw a line under one of the more contentious episodes in recent American history. But as Bob Woodward details in Obama’s Wars, the President’s instinct to apply the same cut-and-run approach to America’s military involvement in Afghanistan has been the cause of arguably the most vituperative policy turf war of his presidency.

Woodward has come a long way since those heady days in the Seventies when he broke the Watergate story that brought Richard Nixon’s presidency to a humiliating end. His books on the Bush administration’s response to the September 11 attacks and the Iraq war have been definitive, and now he has provided a similar account of the bitter feuds that have affected the Obama administration’s handling of the war in Afghanistan.

As Woodward points out early in the book, for a politician like Obama with pronounced anti-war sympathies, it was almost inevitable that he would have a difficult relationship with America’s top brass. But who would have expected that, in the course of just one year, he would have dismissed not one but two of the generals responsible for the success of the Afghan mission? And to judge by Woodward’s account of the acrimonious exchanges that took place between the White House and the Pentagon during the long, drawn-out review of US policy in Afghanistan, General David Petraeus, the current American commander of the Nato mission, can count himself lucky not to have suffered a similar fate.

Incensed by an article planted in the Washington Post by Obama’s White House staffers that questioned the need for a military “surge” strategy to defeat the Taliban, Petraeus planted his own story arguing for a fully resourced, counter-insurgency strategy. It is hard to believe a British general would have got away with such an open act of insubordination.

But then, Petraeus might have resisted the temptation to lobby the media if he had felt more involved in the President’s decision-making process and not, as he confides to Woodward, relegated to the bench. For one of the more divisive aspects of the Obama presidency to date is the “them and us” attitude that has defined relations between the President’s White House staffers and the rest of his administration.

For example, Woodward reveals that General James L Jones, Obama’s National Security Adviser, describes aides such as Rahm Emanuel, who resigned last week as Obama’s chief of staff, as “water bugs” who flit around the President but have no firm grasp of foreign policy or security issues.

Add to these tensions the President’s own inability to make up his mind and you have a recipe for potential disaster. Woodward writes that Obama was left in no doubt about the serious and active threat Islamist terrorists posed to America’s national security, the majority of them based in the lawless tribal territories between Afghanistan and Pakistan, during the intelligence briefings he received soon after he won the presidency. But this did not prevent him from sticking to his view that the Afghan war was an unwelcome distraction from his domestic policy agenda and a dreadful waste of money to boot.

Woodward has provided a detailed, if somewhat worthy (do we really need to know the height and weight of every official that enters the Oval Office?) account of the bitter policy disputes between Obama and his generals that led to this unhappy conclusion.

Persuaded by his generals that America would lose in Afghanistan if he did not send more troops, the President reluctantly acceded to their request, while at the same time insisting that they must be withdrawn at the earliest opportunity. Obama’s strategy of announcing you are withdrawing from a conflict before you have won it is certainly novel, but it is not one that is likely to achieve success.

Obama’s Wars

by Bob Woodward