POLITICS: DENIS STAUNTONreviews Obama's WarsBy Bob Woodward Simon Schuster, 441pp. £20
ALMOST TWO YEARS after the euphoria of election night in Grant Park in Chicago, Barack Obama faces the prospect of the Democrats losing control of Congress as an angry, energised Republican base prepares to assert itself in the midterm elections. Reviled by the conservative Tea Party movement as a sinister figure bent on destroying all that is best in the US, Obama has disappointed his more liberal supporters, who had hoped for more transformative change.
Obama’s $787 billion stimulus plan has failed to revive the US economy, curb rising unemployment or prevent the loss of their homes to foreclosure by newly impoverished middle-class Americans. After months of political heartache the president’s healthcare plan has become law only for Republicans to nibble away at its most important elements at state and federal level.
None of Obama’s challenges is as formidable, however, as the military campaign in Afghanistan, which this summer outlasted Vietnam to become the longest war in US history. And, according to Bob Woodward’s Obama’s Wars, nothing has created so much discord and feuding within Obama’s White House as the struggle over what to do about it.
Like the inauguration, the first State of the Union address and the first state visit overseas, the first Woodward book of each president’s term is a Washington rite of passage. The most famous reporter in the US for almost 40 years, who made his name breaking Watergate, a story that toppled a president, has become the ultimate Washington insider, with privileged access to successive presidents and their top aides.
Obama’s Wars opens with a detailed account of an intelligence briefing that was so highly classified that the head of Obama’s presidential transition team was not allowed to participate, and the book contains numerous revelations about US covert activity, including the existence of a clandestine CIA paramilitary force on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. These revelations are all the more remarkable in view of the energy with which the Obama administration pursues leaks, launching more prosecutions over unauthorised disclosures than the previous three administrations combined.
There are numerous explanations for Woodward’s unrivalled access, but one of his most effective methods for persuading sources to open up is the shameless use of flattery, often over dinner at the reporter’s elegant Georgetown home. For some lucky sources, particularly military officers, the flattery oozed on to the page so that, in the current book, Gen David Petraeus is described like this: “Perhaps no general in America had been held in such near-universal esteem since General Dwight David Eisenhower after victory in World War II. Young-looking with his neatly parted brown hair, Petraeus could pass for a 35-year-old. The Iraqis called him ‘King David.’ Some on his staff called him ‘The Legend of Iraq.’ Colleagues believed that Petraeus was so competitive that he preferred fighting a war when the odds were against him, even with both hands tied behind his back, so that his eventual victory would be all the greater.”
Woodward’s method is to pile detail upon detail, noting the height and weight of almost everyone who walks into the Oval Office, but he avoids analysis or commentary. This approach can be infuriating – Christopher Hitchens famously described Woodward as “stenographer to the stars” – as can the author’s practice of reconstructing conversations he cannot have heard and even describing what his protagonists are thinking. “Any attribution of thoughts, conclusions or feelings to a person was obtained directly from that person, from notes or from a colleague whom the person told,” he says in a less-than-reassuring note to readers.
For all its inadequacies, Woodward’s mass of detail is effective in describing how the White House operates, and a vivid picture of Obama as president emerges from these pages. As a candidate, Obama made much of his opposition to the Iraq war, which he promised to end without delay, but characterised Afghanistan as the “good” war that had been neglected on account of George W Bush’s preoccupation with toppling Saddam Hussein.
As soon as he became president, however, Obama started looking for an exit strategy from Afghanistan, telling advisers that he was not prepared to spend $1 trillion on the war or to engage in extended nation building. Above all, Obama was not willing to “lose the whole Democratic Party” over a war that is now opposed by 58 per cent of Americans – and 75 per cent of Democrats.
Woodward depicts a thoughtful, smart and highly engaged president who tests each proposition presented by his advisers and demands that the Pentagon present him with a number of military options rather than a take-it-or-leave-it recommendation. In the end, however, Obama appears to have been outmanoeuvred by his generals, who presented a number of options that boiled down to just one: the deployment of tens of thousands of extra troops for a counterinsurgency operation aimed at weakening the Taliban and strengthening the government of Hamid Karzai.
Obama approved the troop surge but insisted on setting a date in the middle of 2011 for the start of a withdrawal of US troops. He also took the unusual step of dictating “final orders” defining the scope of the surge and seeking to ensure that the generals would not come back in a few months looking for more troops.
Surrounded by hawks like Petraeus, secretary of state Hillary Clinton and defence secretary Bob Gates, Obama has few advisors prepared to challenge the conventional wisdom about Afghanistan head on. An honourable exception is his vice-president, Joe Biden, who warns the president that the war risks becoming another Vietnam, calling for a much smaller military operation focused on attacking al-Qaeda and for the opening of negotiations with the Taliban.
Obama sacked Stanley McChrystal as the US commander in Afghanistan earlier this year for apparently insubordinate comments in a Rolling Stone profile, replacing him with Petraeus. An exceptionally ambitious and highly political figure with close ties to the Republican Party, Petraeus has long been touted as a potential presidential candidate.
The wily general has now manoeuvred himself into a position where Obama cannot fire him without paying an enormous political price. With Petraeus and the White House hawks calling the shots to a president likely to be damaged by his party’s congressional losses and focused on his own re-election, the United States’ longest war is set to run and run.
Denis Staunton is Foreign Editor of The Irish Times
