The shift toward deficit reduction is a dangerous one, given the unsettled foundation on which this less-than-modest recovery is built. We need more stimulus to pump more cash into the economy and create jobs, not cuts that will lead to a reduction in government payrolls and an end to programs designed to help the folks hit hard by the downturn.
We are facing the worst employment crisis in memory, but Senate Republicans insist on playing political games with jobless benefits, forcing the Democrats into a counterproductive slashing of the bill and then still voting as a block against it. I’m waiting to hear a coherent argument for why they pushed for this thing to play out as it did.
Anyone who seriously thought President Barack Obama might use the McChrystal affair to alter the course in Afghanistan needs to understand that the firing of Gen. Stanley McChrystal will do nothing to change direction.
On the contrary, his firing and replacement with his boss, Gen. David Petraeus, shows that the president is committed to the current course and has no intention to change directions:
In the short term, choosing Petraeus to replace Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal avoids many of the problems associated with removing the commander of a war effort involving 120,000 U.S. and NATO troops, billions of dollars in reconstruction projects and sensitive diplomatic negotiations.
As the head of the U.S. Central Command, Petraeus is more steeped in the Afghan war than any other four-star general in the military. He has played an active role in shaping the overall strategy as well as McChrystal’s tactical plans, and he knows Afghan President Hamid Karzai and many other senior Afghan government officials. During a recent trip, he met with the Afghan leader’s half brother, the chief power broker in the violence-plagued province of Kandahar.
“The decision to name Petraeus is the least disruptive way of removing McChrystal,” said Bruce Riedel, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the leader of an Afghanistan-strategy review team for Obama in early 2009. “Petraeus knows the strategy inside and out, he knows the plans — he is as much of an architect of this as General McChrystal.”
The Petraeus appointment, therefore, stands as a recommitment to the failed policy, one that compounds mistakes made first by President George W. Bush and exacerbated when President Obama approved his surge.
This is a dicey one, because there must be dissent within the war council and any administration, but it is clear that public ridicule of one’s bosses is not the best way to get your point across. In any case, this was not about the conduct of the war — which is, in many ways, a Gen. McChrystal production — but about the president asserting his authority.
The saddest part of this mess, however, is this:
Mr. Obama stressed that the change in leadership did not signal a shift in his overall war strategy in Afghanistan, where thousands of new American troop levels have been arriving in recent months among increasing casualties and growing questions about the progress of the war.
“It is a change in personnel, but it is not a change in policy,” Mr. Obama said.
In the end, this is the real issue. We need a change in strategy — i.e., we need to get out. The Afghanistan war has been a disaster and will remain so. Our best hope for stabilizing the region is to leave.
Several years ago, Neil Young issued a solid, if overrated, musical polemic directed against the Bush White House and its ideology of endless war called Living with War. The disc worked, as far as it went, full of piss and vinegar, as the saying goes, but lacking the kind of poetry that has made his best work remain timely and relevant in changing times.
In this respect, however, the record was no different than most protest records — think of “Eve of Destruction” by Barry McGuire or much of the Country Joe and the Fish catalogue. One song on the record, however, stood out for me as capturing the cultural zeitgeist. “Looking for a Leader,” with its bald desire to have someone rise up and save us, some kind of political Christ figure who could lead us to a new promised land (or, given that this is Neil Young, back into the mythical American past), encapsulates our tendency to demand action through our own paralysis, the idea that all it will take is the right man or woman in the White House (or State House or mayor’s house) to make things right and restore America’s lost prestige and power.
One just has to look at our castrated left and its relationship to Barack Obama to see the devastating consequences of this kind of political sycophancy.
But this post is not really about the left and Obama. It is about Gen. Stanley McChrystal and the potential hijacking by the military of Afghan War policy. McChrystal did something that generals are not supposed to do: He spoke openly and derisively of the nation’s civilian military leadership. McChrystal may be the “man” in Afghanistan, but he reports to Gen. David Petraeus, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and, ultimately, to President Barack Obama.
I was watching the news last night when the issue came up — should Obama fire the general? My dad, who is in from Las Vegas, let slip with, “maybe the general should fire Obama,” as though he had the authority to do so (a strange comment from my dad, who dislikes Obama but likes to offer a veneer of rationality and moderation in his political thinking). My dad’s comment, though, comes from the same kind of thinking about leadership that de-animates the left when it comes to the president.
The problem is that we have invested our leaders with too much authority, too much prestige, with an almost royal sense of power. We have lost sight of our own authority, especially in regards to war.
