{"id":1568,"date":"2020-12-09T08:54:00","date_gmt":"2020-12-09T08:54:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.radiofree.org\/?p=135935"},"modified":"2020-12-09T08:54:00","modified_gmt":"2020-12-09T08:54:00","slug":"obamas-memoir-offers-insights-into-major-shortcomings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2020\/12\/09\/obamas-memoir-offers-insights-into-major-shortcomings\/","title":{"rendered":"Obama\u2019s Memoir Offers Insights Into Major Shortcomings"},"content":{"rendered":"

We have a complicated country and Barack Obama was a complicated president.  In terms of presidential performance and temperament, Obama was one of our best.  His inheritance from the mediocre George W. Bush was wretched, and, in view of the ugly racist opposition that he faced, Obama played his political and economic hand better than could be expected.  The fact that this graceful and elegant man was succeeded by the loathsome and pathetic Donald J. Trump is the ugliest of ironies.<\/p>\n

With the possible exception of the memoir of President Ulysses Grant, there has never been a presidential memoir as useful or insightful as Barack Obama\u2019s \u201cThe Promised Land<\/a>.\u201d  There has never been one more gracefully written than Obama\u2019s.  Interestingly, he provides clues to the shortcomings of his performance that was successful in many ways but nevertheless disappointing to his devoted following.  And I\u2019m proud to be part of that following.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a Sherlock Holmes\u2019 novel that offers the clue of a dog that doesn\u2019t bark.  Obama does the same in skirting those areas where he underperformed or even performed poorly.  His first cabinet selections in the field of national security was certainly one of those areas.  Obama offers one sentence on the selection of Marine general Jim Jones as a national security advisor, and another sentence on his resignation.  It would take an unusual general officer to perform the duties of national security adviser, and Jones was clearly not one of them.  One sentence is devoted to describing the appointment of Leon Panetta as director of the Central Intelligence Agency, where he was \u201ccaptured\u201d by the clandestine and operational personnel of the agency and performed poorly.  Therefore, it was surprising to find Panetta advancing to the more difficult position of secretary of defense in 2011, although unsurprising that he was similarly \u201ccaptured\u201d by the senior general officers of the Pentagon.<\/p>\n

When Obama provides rhyme and verse of his reasons for selecting Hillary Clinton and Robert Gates as secretaries of state and defense, respectively, the explanations sound self-serving and superficial.  Obama merely states that Clinton was the \u201cbest person for the job.\u201d  It is more <\/a>likely, however, that Obama wanted the Clintons (both Bill and Hillary) inside the tent pissing out rather than outside the tent pissing in.  Obama is hard pressed to cite any of Clinton\u2019s contributions but he does note, paraphrasing Woody Allen, that \u201c80 percent of success is a matter of showing up\u201d and that \u201cHillary\u2026was a whirlwind.\u201d  Obama concludes that \u201cseeing the excitement her visits generated in foreign capitals, I felt vindicated in my decision to appoint her as America\u2019s top diplomat.\u201d  Yes, Hillary Clinton made herself America\u2019s roving ambassador, but the position of secretary of state demands substantive accomplishment, and that was lacking.<\/p>\n

Obama\u2019s explanation for the reappointment of Bob Gates as secretary of defense is similarly inadequate. Obama states that he wanted Gates to remain at the Department of Defense in order to \u201cend constant partisan rancor\u201d and that he thought of Gates as a hard-nosed realist who would challenge the image of Obama as a \u201cstarry-eyed idealist who instinctively opposed military action.\u201d  But Gates record at the CIA demonstrated that he was wrong about every major strategic challenge facing the United States in the 1980s, and we have a memoir from former secretary of state George Shultz documenting that view.  And, of course, we also have Gates\u2019 politicization of intelligence.  The memoir of former secretary of state James Baker is similarly critical of Gates.  More likely, Obama was intimidated by the conservative military-industrial class, and left Gates in place to signal the absence of any challenge to their domination of decision making.<\/p>\n

As Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie stated in her glowing review in the New York Times<\/em>,  Obama tends to give his critics and opponents the benefit of the doubt.  Well, he certainly gave  Gates the benefit of the doubt, particularly in view of Gates\u2019 mean and gratuitous criticism of Obama and Vice President Joe Biden in his memoir \u201cDuty.\u201d  Gates charged that Obama didn\u2019t have his \u201cheart\u201d in the Afghan war, which could only have had a devastating impact on the young men and women serving there.  Gates noted that Obama \u201ccan\u2019t stand\u201d Afghan President Hamid Karzai, which was similar devastating in view of Obama\u2019s efforts to negotiate a Status-of-Forces Agreement with the Afghan government.  On one occasion, Gates instructed one of his senior generals to tell a senior member of Obama\u2019s National Security Council to \u201cgo to hell,\u201d which was typical of Gates\u2019 ignorance of the need for civilian control over the military.<\/p>\n

Gates\u2019 memoir is even meaner toward Joe Biden because it was the vice president who warned Obama that Gates and the senior military leadership were undercutting the president\u2019s efforts to draw down forces in Afghanistan. Gates was joined by senior generals such as David Petraeus, Stanley McChrystal, and even a former student of mine at the National War College, Mike Mullens in campaigning publicly and privately for more forces for Afghanistan than the president and vice president wanted to deploy. Obama realized that Afghanistan was not the \u201cgood war,\u201d but Gates did not want to let go.  When Gates resigned in 2011, he couldn\u2019t \u201cimagine being part of a nation, part of a government\u201d with a \u201csmaller military\u201d unable to \u201cgo fewer places and do fewer things.\u201d  As far as Biden goes, Gates consistently used interviews to malign the man who wanted to change the national mindset on national security issues that has been dominated by Cold Warriors such as Bob Gates.<\/p>\n

A major shortcoming of the Obama presidency, which gets no attention in the memoir, is Obama\u2019s attack on oversight and accountability, particularly in the field of national security.  I apply the term \u201cattack\u201d pointedly because it is shocking that a graduate of Harvard Law School and a professor of constitutional law could be so cavalier and insufficiently scrupulous in enforcing political accountability.  Obama contends that his \u201chighest priority was creating strong systems of transparency, accountability, and oversight,\u201d but there is little discussion of the Central Intelligence Agency and no mention of the agency\u2019s Inspector General (IG) who is responsible for accountability and oversight.  In fact, Obama made sure that there was no statutory IG in place at CIA during most of his eight-years in the White House, and he  acquiesced in Panetta\u2019s neutralization of the CIA\u2019s Office of the IG.  Moreover, Obama tolerated CIA director John Brennan\u2019s interference with the Senate Intelligence Committee\u2019s authoritative work on the CIA\u2019s illegal and sadistic use of torture and abuse.<\/p>\n

Obama\u2019s administration also conducted a campaign against journalists and whistle-blowers that was unprecedented, using the one-hundred-year-old Espionage Act more often than all of his predecessors combined.  Leonard Downie, a former executive editor of the Washington Post<\/em>, called Obama\u2019s control of information the \u201cmost aggressive I\u2019ve seen since the Nixon administration.\u201d  The executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation concluded that Obama \u201claid all the groundwork Trump needs for an unprecedented crackdown on the press.\u201d  In contributing to a culture of secrecy, Obama furthered the national security state.  I\u2019m hopeful that President-elect Joe Biden will try to reduce and limit that state.<\/p>\n

Next week Part II of the review of \u201cThe Promised Land\u201d will deal with the memoir\u2019s disappointing discussion of foreign and national security policy, particularly the overestimation of the Russian threat and the underestimation of the Chinese challenge.<\/p>\n\n

This post was originally published on Radio Free<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We have a complicated country and Barack Obama was a complicated president.\u00a0 In terms of presidential performance and temperament, Obama was one of our best.\u00a0 His inheritance from\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":200,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1568"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/200"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1568"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1568\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1569,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1568\/revisions\/1569"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1568"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1568"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1568"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}