The Failed Presidency of Barack Obama

I don't regret my vote.

Yet.

But it's becoming increasingly apparent that Barack Obama is racking up a record fit to be mocked by both Jimmy Carter and Lyndon Johnson. If Obama has decided that he will be a failed foreign policy president with a domestic "win" on his record - ala LBJ - well, so be it, but the least he could do would be to adopt a "first do no harm" approach to foreign policy by essentially doing nothing at all. Instead, Obama is actually making things worse.

On Iran 

Congratulations, 18+ months of begging cajoling diplomacy have earned a sanctions regime that is set up to become just as big a joke as the current sanctions regime which has been in place for many years.

Well, at least this new sanctions regime will stop Iran from acquiring modern anti-aircraft missiles from Russia, right?

Nope.

Conflicting statements from Russian officials on whether or not it will scrap the pending S-300 surface-to-air missile system sale to Iran because of new United Nations sanctions over Tehran’s continued pursuit of nuclear weapons. First, an “industry source” said the S-300 deal was off. Now, Russia’s Foreign Ministry says the sale is still on. Israel has stated publicly that the sale of S-300s to Iran is a red line that would prompt an Israeli military attack.

So, let's review. Obama has:

Not stopped Iran from getting the bomb.

Not stopped Iran from getting advanced Russian anti-aircraft missiles.

And probably not stopped Israel from wanting to attack Iran.

Great, mister president, that was an awesome use of 18 months and god knows how many face-to-face pathetic groveling sessions meetings with world leaders who have more important things to do.

But hey, at least Obama didn't alienate any allies in the process or anything:

Now, even as the U.N. Security Council prepares to impose its fourth round of sanctions on Iran with a vote slated for Wednesday, Tehran is demonstrating remarkable resilience, insulating some of its most crucial industries from U.S.-backed financial restrictions and building a formidable diplomatic network that should help it withstand some of the pressure from the West.

Iranian leaders are meeting politicians in world capitals from Tokyo to Brussels. They are also signing game-changing energy deals, increasing their economic self-sufficiency and even gaining seats on international bodies.

Iran's ability to navigate such a perilous diplomatic course, analysts say, reflects both Iranian savvy and U.S. shortcomings as up-and-coming global players attempt to challenge U.S. supremacy, and look to Iran as a useful instrument.
"We are very proud of our diplomacy, although we are mainly benefiting from mistakes made by the United States and its allies," said Kazem Jalali, a key member of the Iranian parliament's commission on national security and foreign policy. "We are using all our resources to exploit these weaknesses."

Ok, screw them anyway. It's not like the U.S. is committed to any sort of ongoing military operation where we might need allies or anything.

Except Afghanistan.

And Iraq.

And North Korea.. 

On Afghanistan

The COIN strategy appears to be faltering:

Government assassinations are nothing new as a Taliban tactic, but now the Taliban are taking aim at officials who are much more low-level, who often do not have the sort of bodyguards or other protection that top leaders do. Some of the victims have only the slimmest connections to the authorities. The most egregious example came Wednesday in Helmand Province, where according to Afghan officials the insurgents executed a 7-year-old boy as an informant.

Man, if we can't even protect friendly village and local leaders, what the hell are we still doing in Afghanistan?

Now, to be fair, Afghanistan is very complex situation and the Bush administration took its eye off the ball in Afghanistan before Barack Obama was even a senator. Still, Obama's plan to fail in Afghanistan remains overly Afghan centric, and at least some of that diplomatic energy wasted on those absolutely pointless Iran sanctions could have been used to find more partners to either help in Afghanistan or at least contain the worst exports from Pakistan's tribal regions.

A Set of Strategically Tone Deaf Priorities 

I've written that Obama has a nasty tendency to ask questions to which he should already know the answer. So far, his whole foreign policy has been based on asking for things that he should have known he was never going to get. For example, while he was considering how many more troops to send to Afghanistan, he was also haranguing China's president Hu about economic growth ManBearPig global warming rather than asking Hu to cooperate with U.S. efforts on Afghanistan. Because the Chinese are already nibbling around the edges of both peace building and investment in Afghanistan there was far more room for agreement on that issue as opposed to hoping they would sign on for "binding" limits on CO2 emissions.

You can take everything said above about China and replace China with India and its just as true.

Meanwhile, the U.S. continues to take a schizo-frantic approach to distinguishing between friends and enemies in the region. We bomb our "friends" while they support our enemies and while we continue to ramp up the tension with possible allies (see: Iran).

Then the KFR provokes and we are left dumbstruck, because Obama has been arguing with China and Russia about Iran (oh China, will you please poke your largest energy supplier with a large stick so we can stop a feit accompli in Iran's acquisition of a nuclear capacity?) rather than negotiating an end to the world's single greatest criminal enterprise - a country that actually has nuclear weapons and has shown no compunction what-so-ever about exporting to other rouge states.

Conclusion:Mad-Man Diplomacy, Dangerous Nations and Obama's Only Term

The problems that president Obama have are exasperated by several factors. He's backed himself into several rhetorical holes, on Iran and Afghanistan, for example, and so it will be hard for him to walk these situations back. Afghanistan will, unfortunately, end the same way Vietnam did, but with drones playing the role of off-shore balancer. Pakistan will be getting their backyard playground back and they will return to planning for their regularly scheduled war with India. Iran will go nuclear, and if they become angry/frightened enough they will shoot, just like other countries in the region have at moments of high tension.

And Obama will be returning to Chicago in 2013, despondent over his wasted potential. He won't be alone in his disappointment,  but he made his choices.   

With this in mind, the next president should adhere to a variant of Richard Nixon's Mad-Man Theory,except instead of trying to convince the world the U.S. would attack anybody at any time he or she should set out to convince the powers that be that the U.S. might normalize or break relations with various countries at any time. Specifically, the next president should find as many excuses to insinuate that he's prepared to break relations with Pakistan as possible. In a similar vein, he should be prepared to insinuate - and then follow through immediately - with normalization with Iran. Right now Russia Turkey and Pakistan enjoy all the fruits of both our strategic limitations and Iran's situation as an international pariah. Russia, Turkey and Pakistan want nothing more than an Iranian client state, stripped of all international connectivity and forced to conduct business through Russian/Turkish and Pakistani smugglers. These guys will be popping popcorn and laughing with glee as Israel destroys Iran's nuclear capacity - I'd not rule out Turkish, Pakistani and Russian complicity in such an attack, by the way - because it ensures an even weaker Iran position and greater levels of dependency upon its patrons.

But think of the alternative. Imagine a world where Turkey, Russia and Pakistan watch in horror as James Baker, Henry Kissinger and Bill Clinton step off a plane in Tehran and shake hands with A-Jad and his merry men. Yes, the Iranian leader (ship) is a thugocracy, but so was Mao and that didn't stop Nixon from securing a relationship with China, for similar strategic reasons. And the only thing that happened when Nixon went to China was that the Russians rushed to negotiate a series of arms control treaties, because they didn't want to be outbid by the Chinese. Oh, and a few things changes in China after that as well, or so I've heard.

Now, its important to realize that Iran is highly unlikely to negotiate away their nuclear stockpile, and we shouldn't ask that of them. It will be a lot more fun watching Russia and Pakistan figure out how to live with a nuclear Iran, and Turkey wants an excuse to get the bomb anyway, so we might as well embrace the future. Normalization between Iran and the U.S. will happen. It can happen now or it can happen after the next 9/11 or Mumbai when the the world comes together to dissolve Pakistan. Let's get proactive and maybe, just maybe, we can prevent the next 9/11.

In any case, the next president should make it a goal to come into office with as few international promises as possible. Leave global warming completely off the table and whatever you do don't wade into the morass that is Gaza and the West Bank. Stick to throwing strategic elbows - so to speak- by slapping down useless and dangerous allies like Pakistan and suddenly getting chummy with formerly blood enemies like Iran. And the day after the trip to Tehran, call China and let them know you'd love to talk to Kim. Tell him it will be two party talks. See if the possibility of the U.S. throwing the chess board into the air and openly negotiating with the KFR doesn't make China decide to hasten Kim's exit from this mortal coil (handle Iran first because negotiating with the KFR will bear no fruit, rack up a win before you go for something truly crazy).

America's fundamental strategic issue right now is stagnation and predictability. When GWB was president he tried to remind people that the U.S. can occasionally bob and weave with the best of them (see: Operation Iraqi Freedom) but his decisions have left his successor tied down in Afghanistan and Iraq. To make America again relevant is to make America again unpredictable, make us again Robert Kagan's Dangerous Nation.

The Worst of Both Worlds: Planning to Fail in Afghanistan, pt II

The above photo is from David Guttenfelder, a embedded journalist from the Denver Post. See more here

Barack Obama appears to have decided to roll the dice on a 2011 impeachment trial.

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama does not plan to accept any of the Afghanistan war options presented by his national security team, pushing instead for revisions to clarify how and when U.S. troops would turn over responsibility to the Afghan government, a senior administration official said Wednesday.

Obama is still close to announcing his revamped war strategy — most likely shortly after he returns from a trip to Asia that ends on Nov. 19.

Two things strike me about the President's position:

1. He will never find the guarantees he is looking for; he will never achieve 100% certainty that any strategy will or will not work. America can do many things right and Afghanistan can still be a basket case in 10-15 years. Decades of effort, billions or dollars and 58,000 American lives added up to loss in South Vietnam, mostly because of a bungled burglary at the Watergate Hotel.

2. This is more disconcerting, for a supposed "international relations major" from Columbia University, the president is remarkably naive about the nature of governments in developing countries.

The idea that you are going to build a strong, corruption free government in Kabul from the top down is nonsensical.  The Afghan's themselves pleaded with the U.S. to bring back the Afghan monarchy after we toppled the Taliban in 2002 but the U.S. insisted that Afghanistan should have national elections in which everyone would vote - a feat which the U.S. didn't even accomplish until the mid 1960s. 

That's right, it took 180 years to achieve something of a broad based democracy in an English society (the U.S.) with only 4 distinct (but related and complimentary) regional cultures and long standing and broad based sense of national identity.

TL;DR: We had the best possible set of circumstances in which to build a democracy and it still took the better part of 2 centuries.

And not for nothing, but I find it odd that Obama wants to hold Karazi to higher standards (WRT corruption) than he holds Tim Geithner. 

That being said, with the right COIN strategy the U.S. can focus on building up and connecting tribal authorities into some sort of patchwork tribal-state. And functioning tribes can provide legitimate authority that could connect into some sort of regional economic/security bloc.

But what Obama is doing here is ridiculous. He just keeps moving the goalpost and kicking the can down the road on making a decision at all. You don't want to commit to winning? Fine - that's stupid - but fine, bring the soldiers home. Otherwise, commit, give McChrystal the troops he requested and let him have a shot at winning this thing, or at least at losing good. But the status quo is unacceptable. Obama better pay attention, because current polling belies a coming Republican take over of - at least - the House.

And, Mr. President, you need to consider that Republicans are not at all squeamish about impeaching Democratic presidents and Clinton got it over sex with an intern when unemployment ~ 5%.

You are going to have a Republican majority, buttressed by Glen Beck and the Tea Baggers, who will be out for blood with an unemployment rate approaching 11% and you want to throw this war? Really? Going in big now, with the support of prominent Republicans in the House and Senate, inoculates you against the worst of their criticisms. Bucking your hand picked commander on the ground in the hope that Karzai will find religion on good government is a fools errand. Casualties are mounting and elites in the media are basically anti-American fellow travelers anyway, so the narrative can be easily won by the Taliban that we are losing and they are winning. But if you think the situation is ugly now just wait until 2011. You're going to have a primary challenge from your left. (And right? Watch Hillary) You're going to have a angry new majority in congress and you will have numbers in the mid to low 40s, if you're lucky.

TL;DR: You will be impeached. You might not be convicted. But you might be. And if CNN is showing us the last American Marine clinging to the skids of chopper as Kabul is overrun by the Taliban, you will have to resign.

President Obama, you are toying with my than your own career here, you are toying with American prestige. If the people who attacked us on 9/11 can get to run us out of Afghanistan it will invite more tests of our credibility. It will force allies to think twice about getting too close and it will force enemies to test our resolve elsewhere. It will destroy both the Leviathan and the burgeoning sys admin capability. It will sully the relationship between civilian and military leaders in Washington and create a level of mistrust and hand wringing by both the civilian and military establishments that will catapult us right back to the post-Vietnam era.

You were elected to bring change.

Change should not mean changing the clocks back to 1975.

When you took the oath of office America's reputation was damaged; we were feared but no longer repected.

If you continue on this course, if you keep doing what you're doing in Afghanistan and continue setting impossibly high standards of leadership on Afghanistan so you can avoid showing leadership in the United States, you will create a situation that is truly the worst of both worlds:

America will be neither feared nor respected. 

And a world in which America is neither feared nor respected would be the biggest gamble of all.

Petreaus 2012? Doubtfull....

One of the most interesting things I've read about the debate between advocates of leaving Afghanistan to the T&T (Terminators and Taliban) and those who advocate a COIN strategy was a short passage in a NYT article about general Petreaus's role in the debate:

General Petraeus’s aides now privately call him “Dave the Dull,” and say he has largely muzzled himself from the fierce public debate about the war to avoid antagonizing the White House, which does not want pressure from military superstars and is wary of the general’s ambitions in particular.

The general’s aides requested anonymity to talk more candidly about his relationship with the White House.

“General Petraeus has not hinted to anyone that he is interested in political life, and in fact has said on many occasions that he’s not,” said Peter Mansoor, a retired Army colonel and professor of military history at Ohio State University who was the executive officer to General Petraeus when he was the top American commander in Iraq.

“It is other people who are looking at his popularity and saying that he would be a good presidential candidate, and I think rightly that makes the administration a little suspicious of him.”

And, later in the article:

By then the general had been talked about as a potential presidential candidate himself, which still worries some political aides at the White House.

Is it possible that this whole hubbub about McChrystal and the debate over increasing troops in Afghanistan is really the White House projecting its fears that they'll face Patreaus/Jindal in 2012? Could the White House intentionally be trying to weaken the reputation of certain generals that they see as potential revivals for Obama?

It sounds pretty far fetched, and I wouldn't suggest that the president himself is thinking along these lines, but its entirely possible there are various political operatives within the White House who are both Lefties and hoping that there will be no one left to challenge Obama when the Taliban comes rolling back into Kabul.

Dick Morris - not the single most reliable source, I acknowledge - has often said that the Clinton administration spent the better part of 1994 and 1995 living in perpetual fear that Colin Powell was about to announce his presidential run and that that would be the end of Clinton's presidency.

Obama - or his administration - should put their minds at ease. I think it is highly unlikely that a general is going to take off his uniform and show up in Iowa and be considered a serious candidate. Petreaus would show up for the first primary and want to talk about his extremely complex and nuisance understanding of American foreign policy and national security but pretty soon he'd realize everyone in the room just wanted to know whether he was for or against abortion. Career politicians are used to the knucklehead issues the average slack-jawed yokel cares about, and would be well prepared to navigate the waters; a 4 star is not used to having his agenda dictated to him by dilettantes. Running for president is a process that takes years; decades sometimes, and you have to build a lrge base of domestic support. You have to have people who know you (meaning they know you will bring home the bacon) well enough to go door to door and make phone calls on your behalf. So any career officer (this is for 2012 - not 2016) will be at a distinct disadvantage when it comes to every aspect of campaigning, especially fund raising and a "get out the vote" effort.


Still, if Petreaus - or McChrystal, were to resign over a difference of opinion with the White House (I'm not sure that's something that's really in the cards, either) I would expect a number of polls to show either man beating Obama by 10-12%. I would also expect those poll numbers to drop precipitately as both the administration and Mitt Romney trained their fire on the potential future rival.