Obama takes a different approach as commander in chief

Obama takes a different approach as commander in chief
By Sheryl Gay Stolberg
Copyright by The International Herald Tribune
Published: March 23, 2009
http://www.iht.com/articles/2009/03/23/america/chief.php


WASHINGTON: President Barack Obama rarely, if ever, uses the phrase "war on terror." Like presidents before him, he has a top-secret intelligence briefing every day, yet it is not necessarily first on his schedule. And when he sent 17,000 troops to Afghanistan, he announced the news in a written statement, not a public address.

As he heads toward his next big commander-in-chief moment — a decision on strategy for Afghanistan, possibly this week — Mr. Obama, by necessity and temperament, is wearing the role in ways distinctly different from his predecessor, George W. Bush.

Mr. Obama, of course, leads in very different times; Mr. Bush forged his identity as commander in chief during the crucible of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Mr. Obama faces not only two wars, but a crumbling world economy that his homeland security secretary, Janet Napolitano, described as a threat to the nation on CNN last week. But while Mr. Bush often called himself "a war president," that phrase seems missing from Mr. Obama's lexicon.

The shift is evident in Mr. Obama's schedule. The first person Mr. Bush saw in the Oval Office every morning was his national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, for a discussion, among other things, about what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan overnight. The President's Daily Brief, the top-secret intelligence briefing, had a sacrosanct place in the presidential schedule: 8 a.m.

Mr. Obama has added a new briefing, on the economy, and the timing of his Oval Office intelligence sessions varies. One day early in his presidency, he visited his daughters' school and held a bill signing first. Mr. Obama has also discontinued Mr. Bush's practice of weekly videoconferences with ground commanders in Iraq — a sign that conditions have improved, but also a stylistic change.

And while Mr. Bush had routine secure video exchanges with Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki of Iraq and President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, Mr. Obama has less personal contact with those heads of state, his aides say.

"The president believes that we've got multiple means of communication," Mr. Obama's senior adviser, David Axelrod, said.

The new president's style of decision-making is different as well. Mr. Obama "is somewhat more analytical and he makes sure he hears from everybody in the room on an issue," Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, who has worked for both men, told NBC News this month. Mr. Bush "was interested in hearing differing points of view," Mr. Gates said, but "didn't go out of his way to make sure everybody spoke."

Mr. Bush often said he relied on his military commanders to determine troop levels; his last step before making such decisions was typically to meet with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a process set up by Mr. Gates. But Mr. Obama has made clear he wants to hear from his entire national security team, including his secretary of state, before making big military decisions.

Thus Mr. Obama's first visit to "the tank," the secure Pentagon conference room, did not focus exclusively on Iraq and Afghanistan.

"This was less a meeting about the wars than it was an opportunity for the new commander in chief to get to know his top generals," said Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon press secretary, who was there. "It was a very energetic, sophisticated conversation about global threats."

The weight of military leadership has hardly disappeared. In an interview with the CBS News program "60 Minutes" broadcast Sunday, Mr. Obama said sending the additional troops to Afghanistan had been the hardest decision of his young presidency.

And Mr. Obama has followed some precedents.

As is traditional for presidents, Mr. Obama, like Mr. Bush, has sent letters to the families of those killed in combat; he signs them, simply, "Barack." Mr. Axelrod said the letters take a toll on the ordinarily even-keeled president: "He doesn't get too high or too low, but to the extent that he does become reflective, it is after the notification of a soldier's loss."

Like Mr. Bush, Mr. Obama tries to meet privately with wounded soldiers, as he did at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. In his speech there, the new president also took pains to praise the troops, declaring, "We sent our troops to Iraq to do away with Saddam Hussein's regime, and you got the job done."

Now Afghanistan is high on Mr. Obama's agenda; as early as this week, senior White House officials say he will decide on a new strategy for the war, which could define his presidency the way Iraq defined Mr. Bush's.

Top aides to the president said last week that they were still deciding what format Mr. Obama's announcement might take: perhaps an Oval Office speech or a White House ceremony. If the past two months are any guide, the president, who has never served in the military and campaigned as an antiwar candidate, will use the occasion to try to reach out to troops, all the while forging a path very different from Mr. Bush's.

"After the attacks on 9/11, George Bush talked about the global war of terror as a kind of central theme of his thinking, and he viewed all of his actions, including the accumulation of executive power, even the phrase 'enemy combatants,' as flowing from the commander in chief's powers," said Lee H. Hamilton, a former congressman who was the Democratic co-chairman of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, who was vice chairman of the Sept. 11 commission, and who occasionally advises Mr. Obama. "With President Obama, conceptually it is very different."

Mr. Obama's critics accuse him of trying to minimize the role of commander in chief; several former Bush advisers said they were shocked that Mr. Obama sent troops to Afghanistan without a formal public explanation.

"The contrast to Bush could hardly be more striking," said Tom Donnelly, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who was deputy executive director of the neoconservative Project for the New American Century. He called Mr. Obama's action "L.B.J. and Vietnam-type behavior," a reference to former President Lyndon Baines Johnson.

Mr. Obama is too young to have faced the draft and is unencumbered by the ghosts of the Vietnam War, an accident of birth that his advisers believe give him a certain freedom in cultivating relationships with the military, a core constituency for Mr. Bush.

"He's been able to shift the paradigm a little bit," said Mark Lippert, a top foreign policy adviser.

His words of praise for the troops at Camp Lejeune were part of that presidential courtship. Soldiers who knew how critical Mr. Obama had been of the war in Iraq were surprised.

"Marines are a tough crowd, and he is our new commander in chief," Sgt. Maj. Joel Collins of the Lejeune "wounded warrior battalion" said in a telephone interview. "That went a long way toward telling us that the president does have our back."

The language was included at Mr. Obama's direction, aides said.

"He wanted to acknowledge that, from a military standpoint, the troops in Iraq have succeeded in their mission," said Ben Rhodes, Mr. Obama's foreign policy speechwriter. "He wanted to be very clear about that, from his standpoint as commander in chief."












Financial Times Editorial: Obama strikes new tone with Tehran
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009
Published: March 22 2009 19:01 | Last updated: March 22 2009 19:01
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/617f1fb4-1713-11de-9a72-0000779fd2ac.html


Barack Obama’s overture to Iran, delivered by video on the eve of Monday’s Iranian new year, is a smart move, tone-perfectly delivered, and a clear departure not just from George W. Bush’s bellicose attitude but the visceral animosity that has bedevilled relations between Washington and Tehran since the Islamic Revolution of 30 years ago.

Mr Obama managed simultaneously to address Iran’s innate sense of cultural superiority as an ancient civilisation, and its paranoid sense of vulnerability. “The US wants the Islamic Republic of Iran to take its rightful place in the community of nations,” he said. “You have that right but it comes with real responsibilities and that place cannot be reached through terror or arms, but rather through peaceful actions that demonstrate the true greatness of the Iranian people and civilisation”.

His use of the formal title of Islamic Republic implies US recognition of the revolution and abandonment of regime change. The emphasis on rights and responsibilities – the sort of discourse tailored for, say, China – suits Iran’s sense of entitlement and ambition to be acknowledged as a regional power.

The address is well aimed, furthermore, not just at Iran’s leaders but at the Iranians, arguably the most instinctively pro-American people in the wider Middle East.

It is worth recalling that after the constitutional revolution a century ago, Iran tried to resist Britain and Russia looting the country through coercion and bribery by appointing an American finance minister.

The more recent history, in which Iranians feel under US and western siege, has enabled the theocrats to consolidate their puritan hegemony and their dense network of material interests. But this artificial national unity cracks and debate flourishes when Iranians sense the west is willing to engage with them. Not for nothing were the mullahs discomfited by the advent of Mr Obama: he faces them with choices.

But the US and Europe, as well as Israel and the Arabs, face choices too. After the enlargement of Iranian influence that followed the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s regime, the resolution of most conflicts in the region – Iraq itself, Afghanistan, Israel-Palestine and Lebanon – needs at least Tehran’s quiescence.

The west’s overarching aim of preventing Iran acquiring an atomic bomb is best achieved by a “grand bargain”, offering Iran security but making it part responsible for the security and stability of the region. If we ever reach that point – a big if – the US and its allies will have had to decide if they can accept that Iran has reached technological mastery of the full nuclear fuel cycle.



Our foundering father Our foundering father
By Kathleen Parker
Copyright © 2009, Chicago Tribune
March 23, 2009
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/chi-oped0323parkermar23,0,7018407.column


WASHINGTON—What a relief to hear Barack Obama tell a California audience the other day: "I am the president of the United States of America."

Who knew?!

Lately, it's been hard to tell whether Obama himself knows he is the leader of the country formerly known as The Most Powerful Nation on Earth. Obama's self-identification centered around the American International Group's bonus problem, which, Obama reminded us, he did not create, but . . . "the buck stops here."

That cliche is awfully busy these days.

Most presidents doubtless have to pinch themselves for a while after arriving at the White House. The campaign over, Mr. President suddenly realizes that he is, in fact, in charge. The successful courtship ultimately leads to marriage and reality pitches a tent where hope once crooned the night away.

Giving the man his length of slack, Obama has had more reality than most.

As he has said more than once, he'd be delighted to have just one crisis or just one war to deal with, but he's got a couple of each. Still, one can't help wishing Obama would pinch himself a little harder and get on with it.

The White House mess, to steal a title from a Christopher Buckley book, sure is who's in charge over there?

"I think they're drinking water from a fire hose even more than we were," a Bush White House official said to me a few days ago. "I actually feel sorry for them."

That fire hose apparently is tapped into the Dasani aquifer. The plugging-leaks-in-the-dike metaphor is no longer adequate to the titanic episode engulfing the nation's capital.

Despite civic rage and political blame—even death threats aimed at business executives—there is a carnival air of unseriousness and grotesquerie loose upon the land. Life has become one grand, comic burlesque, a vaudevillian game show where plumbers are journalists, war heroes Twitter and the president hits the late-night circuit in the midst of crisis.

Obama's appearance on Jay Leno's show Thursday night—joking lamely that his bowling is "like Special Olympics or something"—is symptomatic of a broader blending of the serious and the comic that makes sane people feel slightly displaced. Infotainment isn't a new topic, but the lines are becoming increasingly blurred. Although Obama is the first sitting president to appear on "The Tonight Show," his presence is historically significant only if you believe that Jon Stewart is Edward R. Murrow and Rush Limbaugh is William F. Buckley.

I don't begrudge Stewart his artful takedown of CNBC's Jim Cramer, or his role in keeping audiences abreast of the news with humor. We need that. And a financial guru whose program has more bells and whistles than FAO Schwarz at Christmastime—and treats audiences like kindergartners at a Dow Jones camp—is surely fair game. Leave it to the comedian to point out to the former hedge fund manager that the financial market "is not a . . . game!"

At least we're entertained as we try not to notice that no one's in charge.

Except, of course, for Fox TV's Glenn Beck, who is now channeling televangelist Jimmy Swaggart, choking back tears on his Friday the 13th special—"We Surround Them, You Are Not Alone." On his Web site, Beck asks: "Mob rule in Washington?" while he hawks T-shirts with pithy slogans such as "Hate U" and "Torches and Pitchforks."

Whose mob goes there?

Yes, we're all angry, especially at the AIG culprits who keep paying themselves bonuses with our money.

That the payouts caught Obama by surprise does not bode well for confidence in his leadership, especially when, as Time reports, Treasury Department staff knew of the bonuses as early as Feb. 28, and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner knew at least two days before word reached the president.

Even so, a little bit of outrage goes a long way, and those who crank out emotional pleas for populist retribution should beware what they hype. Mobs eventually want a prize for their trouble, and gladiators are in short supply.

With the stage so crowded with actors, meanwhile, Obama may want to focus on the role for which he was elected, lest Beck's question becomes an assertion. Repeat: "I am the president of the United States of America."

Washington Post Writers Group

kparker@kparker.com