Reading in The Washington Post the excerpt from Obama’s Wars, Bob Woodward‘s new book, I was reminded of nothing so much as –me!
In The Coup, I described the people Vice President Godwin Pope saw gathered on the floor of the House of Representatives as he sat on the dais awaiting the president’s State of the Union address: “`On the right, the guardians, our military chefs, the members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Not our most valiant warriors, mind you, or our bravest, or our most most bloody-minded, or our most efficiently lethal, but six professionally accomplished, ribbon-bedecked commanders who have learned, through decades of bureaucratic maneuvers, that the answer to every military question, whether it’s about money, time, firepower, or troops, is “We need more.”’
In Obama’s Wars, Woodward writes “From the beginning of the review, it irked Obama that [General] Petraeus, [Admiral] Mullen and Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, then the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, had been out campaigning for more troops on top of the 21,000 that Obama had approved shortly after taking office. In September 2009, Petraeus called a Washington Post columnist to say that the war would be unsuccessful if the president held back on troops. Later that month, Mullen repeated much the same sentiment in Senate testimony, and in October, McChrystal asserted in a speech in London that a scaled-back effort against Afghan terrorists would not work. . . .The only distinctly new alternative offered to Obama came from outside the military hierarchy. Vice President Biden had long and loudly argued against the military’s 40,000-troop request. He worked with Gen. James E. Cartwright, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to develop a “hybrid option” – combining elements of other plans – that called for only 20,000 additional troops. It would have a more limited mission of hunting down the Taliban insurgents and training the Afghan police and army to take over. When Mullen learned of the hybrid option, he didn’t want to take it to Obama. “We’re not providing that,” he told Cartwright.
Obama should have read my book.