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Sunday, January 12, 2014

Robert Fulford: Barack Obama may be commander-in-chief, but he’s a partisan at heart

Robert Fulford: Barack Obama may be commander-in-chief, but he’s a partisan at heart

Robert Fulford
Saturday, Jan. 11, 2014

A new book by a former White House insider portrays Barack Obama as a preening partisan surrounded by puffed up lackeys. Mario Tama/Getty Images

A newly published account of Barack Obama’s White House confirms the worst that outsiders have imagined: The Obama staff is over-politicized, over-confident and desperate to oversee every aspect of government. In questions of national security, it’s the most controlling administration since Richard Nixon’s in the 1970s.

This portrait emerges from Robert Gates’ book, Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War, published this week. Till now, we have been given only a few private glimpses of the Obama team, such as the famous “home alone” anecdote in Ron Suskind’s 2011 book, Confidence Men. He reported that in Obama’s first year, the chairman of the National Economic Council warned a colleague: “We’re really home alone. There’s no adult in charge.”

But that was second hand. The Gates book is an eyewitness account, and a rare one: Unlike most cabinet memoirs, it describes a president while he’s still in office. Gates was secretary of defence for two years with George Bush and stayed for two more with Obama. Earlier, he had served in the CIA for two decades and directed it under George H. W. Bush. According to a Washington Post book reviewer, Gates is considered the best of the 22 defence secretaries since the Second World War.

During the 2008 election campaign, Obama said that Afghanistan, not Iraq, was the war the United States should be fighting. But when the military did focus on Afghanistan, Obama struck Gates as uncommitted and impatient. He recalls a meeting in March, 2011, when it became clear that Obama didn’t trust the American commander, couldn’t stand President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, didn’t believe in his own strategy, and didn’t consider the war to be his: “For him, it’s all about getting out.”

Gates found Obama emotionally disconnected from much that happened in his administration. He noticed that only one military issue aroused deep passion in Obama, the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell law that prohibited gays from serving openly in the military until Obama got it repealed.

When a plan for Afghanistan leaked to the newspapers, Obama took it as a personal affront. Though he had leakers of his own, he assumed this one came from the military. Angrily, he asked, “Is it a lack of respect for me? Do they resent that I never served in the military? Do they think because I’m young that I don’t see what they’re doing?”

According to Gates, Obama’s staff were aggressive and suspicious when dealing with military leaders, sometimes condescending and insulting. It was routine for a member of the civilian national security staff to call up a four-star general and offer advice; Gates says this was unthinkable in earlier administrations.

He also found the political staff determined to take credit for every success while giving no credit to those who had done the work. The cluster of over-confident and isolated aides seems to have inflated the presidential ego. (On TV, Obama seems deeply pleased with himself, more than any earlier president I can recall — even when he’s explaining away some horrendous blunder.)

From the beginning, Gates realized that he had joined a new, inexperienced president determined to change course — “and equally determined from day one to win re-election.” After a while, he lost his faith in promises that came from above: “I felt that agreements with the Obama White House were good for only as long as they were politically convenient.” Despite all his experience, Gates seems to have been unsettled by the force of domestic politics on military decisions. At every turn, Vice-president Joe Biden talked about the reaction of the Democratic base.

At one point, Hillary Clinton told Obama that she’d opposed the troop increase in Iraq in 2007 because she was facing him in the Iowa primary. Obama himself conceded that his own opposition to the Iraq surge had been political. Gates was startled: “To hear the two of them making these admissions, and in front of me, was as surprising as it was dismaying.”

Gates now and then throws compliments to Obama, Clinton and even Biden, but what he has to tell us is mainly negative. He’s angry sometimes, disappointed at other times. Overall, he clearly wants to describe the clumsy and thoughtless atmosphere in which some of the most important decisions in the world are made.

His book will be frequently and ruefully consulted in the remaining three years of the Obama Era. He creates in the reader an aching sense of regret that another dream of enlightened leadership has disappointed those who wanted to believe in America’s 44th president.

National Post

robert.fulford@utoronto.ca

Posted in: Full Comment Tags: Barack Obama,PoliticsRobert GatesU.S. Politics

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