The Hyde Park Hamlet Cashiers McChrystal

President Obama has accepted General Stanley McChrystal's resignation as commander of U.S. and Allied forces in Afghanistan. Conservatives have been mostly supportive of this move and I am not prepared to buck that trend.

It is not true, as some have argued, that the President had no choice. It is certain that he had good cause. This is twice now that McChrystal has embarrassed himself and his Commander in Chief in public, and that is two times too many. The President may have taken this action in order to "look strong," but that is a perfectly valid reason for the action. Presidents need to look strong.

In one way the President is very lucky that McChrystal shot himself in the ass during this Rolling Stone interview. If he hadn't, the Press might be focused on the real scandal haunting our efforts in Afghanistan.

Let's take a stroll down memory lane, back to last December. For a year the President had put off deciding what to do about Afghanistan. For several months leading up to December, the Administration frequently hinted that it was about to announce a decision, and again and again announced that the decision would be delayed.

Finally the President did decide to decide, sort of. He would put in more troops for a surge-like push (the strategy that McChrystal favored), but he also announced that troops would be withdrawn after 18 months. It has been clear ever since that this is a strategy at odds with itself. But how was the decision reached? The Washington Post told the story.

Just after twilight on Nov. 29, Obama gathered Biden, Gates, [Gen] Petraeus, Jones, Emanuel, Cartwright and Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in the Oval Office. He had called Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton earlier…

He had made his decision.

Obama then went around the room asking one question: Do you support the strategy?

"If they didn't support the decision, he was going to issue another decision" until there was unanimity, a senior administration official said. "But it was his assessment that everyone could and should get behind it." Each of them did.

I pointed out in a December post how disturbing these paragraphs were. The President is supposed to get contradictory advice from his advisers; otherwise he isn't getting a full picture. His job in such circumstances is precisely to decide which advice to follow. Instead of that, Obama insisted on unanimity from his advisers.

It is starkly clear what happened. Biden and others who opposed an Afghan surge swallowed their misgivings because if they hadn't the President would never have arrived at a decision. The people in that room made the decision for him. Still, he might have put his weight behind it, if he weren't, in fact, weightless.

Now fast forward. E. J. Dionne shows how pitifully weak the President's leadership is within his own Administration.

Everyone on the president's team, including McChrystal, said they had signed off on the Obama compromise: to give McChrystal the troops he said he needed to improve the situation but to place a clear time limit on how long the troops would stay.

In practice, the president's advisers continued to feud, sowing uncertainty about what the policy actually was. Those who had been against McChrystal's proposed buildup said Obama's declared deadline of July of next year for beginning troop withdrawals was firm. McChrystal's backers said the deadline was flexible.

To this day no one in the Administration knows what the Administration's Afghanistan policy really is. No wonder the war seems to be a mess. I don't often quote Tom Friedman approvingly, but here he is dead spot on.

You know you're in trouble when you're in a war in which the only party whose objectives are clear, whose rhetoric is consistent and whose will to fight never seems to diminish is your enemy.

It is scarcely any wonder that the public's confidence in the President is collapsing, and with it, confidence in the government as a whole. From a WSJ/NBC poll:

Amid anxiety over the nation's course, support for Mr. Obama and other incumbents is eroding. For the first time, more people disapprove of Mr. Obama's job performance than approve. And 57% of voters would prefer to elect a new person to Congress than re-elect their local representatives, the highest share in 18 years.

As a lot of us suspected, the touch screen is lit up in front of Obama's chair, but no one is home.

Comments

[BillW]

"49% rate him positively when asked if he has 'strong leadership qualities', down from 70% when Mr. Obama took office and a drop of 8 points since January"

"Just 40% rate him positively on his "ability to handle a crisis," an 11-point drop since January"

Those quotes are from the poll article cited in the post.

The inability to make tough decisions with less than perfect information and in the face of contrary opinions is what we get when we elect a community activist, rather than someone with executive experience.

It is why senators and social workers make lousy presidents, and why former governors, military leaders and business people do better. They know how to make hard decisions and get things done. Obama is much better suited to debate the theory of offshore drilling and the philosophical underpinnings of our involvement in Afghanistan than he is to make quick, big decisions about what to do in those areas

[KB]

BillW: I am guessing that a lot of community activists would make great leaders. Barack Obama would have made a great anchor man.

[BillW]

Ken,

I agree that many community activists have the potential to be good leaders, but making important decisions under pressure with less than perfect information is not something one just wakes up one day and starts doing. Whether it is in business or in the military learning (often from making lots of bad decisions) is a skill that people learn and develop. That is why those organizations gradually promote people as they demonstrate mastery of such decision making skills, and they are given more and more responsibility.

Knowing when to act and when to hold off for more information; knowing when not making a decision is, in fact, a decision; having the self-confidence and maturity to solicit and listen to contrary opinions; having thick enough skin to realize that there will always be people who disagree with your decisions; and knowing when to be conservative and when to be aggressive with decisions – these are all talents that are developed with experience.

The lack of such skill is painfully apparent in Obama. The paralysis of analysis of this administration is painful to watch and the sort of thing you see in a front line factory supervisor or army sergeant as they face the burden of accountability for their decisions for the first time. A community activist is accountable for nothing. Obama has to accept accountability for his decisions for the first time in his life, and he is often paralyzed by it.

Being smart is an important element of being a good decision maker, and Obama is certainly a smart guy. But the US and the world rarely operate according to theory. Reality is always messy and vague, and the perfect data one assumes in an academic case study is never available. Intellectual mastery of a perfect world is not enough to make one an effective leader of the real, messy world - better qualifications,as you say, for an anchor man who also does not have much accountability.

For that matter, he might make a pretty good blogger :)