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Today we concentrate on making war. The change in generals responsible for the Afghan conflict has brought this into focus, and many of our favorites have thoughts and comments. We think the change is interesting in two ways. First, it demonstrates, not Obama’s strength, but his weakness. Second, David Petraeus now owns Barack Obama’s presidency.
Today’s last item comes from the Economist and it describes war-making among chimpanzees. You can be appalled by the human condition and our evident propensity for conflict, or you can be encouraged by the thoughts of Robert Ardrey who wrote forty years ago;
“We were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. And so what shall we wonder at? Our murders and massacres and missiles, and our irreconcilable regiments? Or our treaties whatever they may be worth; our symphonies however seldom they may be played; our peaceful acres, however frequently they may be converted to battlefields; our dreams however rarely they may be accomplished. The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen. We are known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses.”
Mark Steyn wonders what it would take to get the president engaged.
… He doesn’t seem to know, and he doesn’t seem to care that he doesn’t know, and he doesn’t seem to care that he doesn’t care. “It can seem that at the heart of Barack Obama’s foreign policy is no heart at all,” wrote Richard Cohen in The Washington Post last week. “For instance, it’s not clear that Obama is appalled by China’s appalling human-rights record. He seems hardly stirred about continued repression in Russia.
The president seems to stand foursquare for nothing much.
“This, of course, is the Obama enigma: Who is this guy? What are his core beliefs?”
Gee, if only your newspaper had thought to ask those fascinating questions oh, say, a month before the Iowa caucuses.
And even today Cohen is still giving President Whoisthisguy a pass.
After all, whatever he feels about “China’s appalling human-rights record” or “continued repression in Russia,” Obama is not directly responsible for it. Whereas the U.S. and allied deaths in Afghanistan are happening on his watch – and the border villagers killed by unmanned drones are being killed at his behest. Cohen calls the president “above all, a pragmatist,” but with the best will in the world you can’t stretch the definition of “pragmatism” to mean “lack of interest.”
“The ugly truth,” wrote Thomas Friedman in The New York Times, “is that no one in the Obama White House wanted this Afghan surge. The only reason they proceeded was because no one knew how to get out of it.”
Well, that’s certainly ugly, but is it the truth? Afghanistan, you’ll recall, was supposed to be the Democrats’ war, the one they allegedly supported, the one the neocons’ Iraq adventure was an unnecessary distraction from. Granted the Dems’ usual shell game – to avoid looking soft on national security, it helps to be in favor of some war other than the one you’re opposing – Candidate Obama was an especially ripe promoter. In one of the livelier moments of his campaign, he chugged down half a bottle of Geopolitical Viagra and claimed he was hot for invading Pakistan.
Then he found himself in the Oval Office, and the dime-store opportunism was no longer helpful. But, as Friedman puts it, “no one knew how to get out of it.” The “pragmatist” settled for “nuance”: He announced a semisurge plus a date for withdrawal of troops to begin. It’s not “victory,” it’s not “defeat,” but rather a more sophisticated mélange of these two outmoded absolutes: If you need a word, “quagmire” would seem to cover it. …
Victor Davis Hanson noticed Obama’s criticisms of Bush have returned home to roost.
Do you remember candidate Barack Obama offering his hope-and-change platitudes in front of the fake Greek columns during the Democratic convention? Or, earlier, pontificating at the Victory Monument in Berlin?
Why didn’t an old cigar-chomping Democratic pro take him aside and warn him about offending Nemesis? She is the dreaded goddess who brings divine retribution in ironic fashion to overweening arrogance.
Or maybe a friend could have whispered to Senator Obama to tone it down when he was merciless in damning the Bush administration for its supposedly slow response to Hurricane Katrina.
Obama railed that Bush showed “unconscionable ineptitude.” Obama further charged that Bush’s response was “achingly slow,” a result of “passive indifference,” and that his team was rife with “corruption and cronyism.”
Those phrases now apply to Obama himself, as he seems lost amid his own disaster — eerily, in about the same Gulf environs. Adding insult to injury, a recent poll revealed that Louisiana residents thought Bush had done a better job with Katrina than Obama has with BP. …
Can Petraeus do it again? Charles Krauthammer thinks a weak-willed vacilliating president like Obama will create problems. Guess we need a courageous commander in chief like George W. Bush.
… However, two major factors distinguish the Afghan from the Iraqi surge. First is the alarming weakness and ineptness — to say nothing of the corruption — of the Afghan central government. One of the reasons the U.S. offensive in Marja has faltered is that there is no Afghan “government in a box” to provide authority for territory that the U.S. military clears.
In Iraq, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, after many mixed signals, eventually showed that he could act as a competent national leader rather than a sectarian one when he attacked Moqtada al-Sadr’s stronghold in Basra, faced down the Mahdi Army in the other major cities in the south and took the fight into Sadr City in Baghdad itself. In Afghanistan, on the other hand, President Hamid Karzai makes public overtures to the Taliban, signaling that he is already hedging his bets.
But beyond indecision in Kabul, there is indecision in Washington. When the president of the United States announces the Afghan surge and, in the very next sentence, announces the date on which a U.S. withdrawal will begin, the Afghans — from president to peasant — take note.
This past Sunday, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel reiterated that July 2011 is a hard date. And Vice President Biden is adamant that “in July of 2011 you’re going to see a whole lot of people moving out. Bet on it.”
Now, Washington sophisticates may interpret this two-step as a mere political feint to Obama’s left — just another case of a president facing a difficult midterm and his own reelection, trying to placate the base. They don’t take this withdrawal date too seriously.
Problem is, Afghans are not quite as sophisticated in interpreting American intraparty maneuvering. …
John Podhoretz agrees Petraeus owns Obama now.
… Now that he has sent Petraeus to take direct charge of the fight in Afghanistan, Obama has tied his own hands. Having successively relieved two commanders in Afghanistan (first Gen. David McKiernan, and now McChrystal), and having given the reins to the signal US general of the last two generations, the president has little choice but to accept the recommendations Petraeus makes to him — and not just about Afghanistan but about Iraq as well.
If Petraeus departs, his own conduct throughout his career and his own carefully chosen words over the past few years ensure it won’t happen because he foolishly cooperated with a reporter. It will happen because Petraeus will have lost the surety that his commander in chief is committed to the victory he wishes to secure for the United States. And that will be the greatest political disaster of all for Obama.
Petraeus is also on the hook, of course. He has to win this thing, and it hasn’t been going well. At least we know the effort is in the best possible hands.
Claudia Rosett has a clear view of what happened.
Rolling Stone’s piece on The Runaway General hit the web, and presto! before the print edition was even on the newsstands, Gen. Stanley McChrystal was ordered back to Washington for a sitdown with President Obama. If only Obama had been as eager to clear time on his calendar for McChrystal back in 2009. That’s when really getting to know the general — the man entrusted with winning the war in Afghanistan — should have been one of the top priorities of the new president.
I’m not suggesting that with earlier close acquaintance Obama might have spotted the seeds of McChrystal’s “enormous mistake” — as White House spokesman Robert Gibbs described it at press briefing Tuesday. I’m suggesting that better leadership from Obama himself would have averted this mess altogether. Whatever comes next for McChrystal, the biggest lesson here is one the commander-in-chief himself has yet to master.
It’s this simple: To win this war, America, and its generals, need to be led by someone who really wants to win the war. Someone who believes his country is great, and extraordinary, and deserves to win its wars. Someone who takes a direct and genuine interest in those he sends to the frontlines. Someone who makes a point of really getting to know the general he puts in charge. Someone, in sum, who does what’s needed to inspire loyalty and respect.
Has Obama done that? He put McChrystal in command last summer, and over the following 70 days talked with him exactly once — by videoconference (something it was left to Fox News to discover in late September). He left McChrystal dangling during an agonizingly drawn-out strategy review last fall. He showed strangely little regard for the internal conflicts he set in motion. …
J. E. Dyer argues in Contentions that this is Obama’s war now.
… we shouldn’t exaggerate the signal sent about Obama’s leadership by a personnel shift that was essentially thrust on him by a discipline problem. Unlike other celebrated personnel replacements made by war-time presidents — Lincoln, Truman, the younger Bush — the replacement of McChrystal was not prompted by this president’s strategic concern about the conduct of the war. That is Obama’s great failing; what he owes the armed forces that do his bidding is precisely that strategic concern.
George W. Bush gave Bob Gates, Ryan Crocker, and David Petraeus a level of strategic concern — attention, political investment, diplomatic cover — that enabled them to adopt an executable plan for Iraq and then execute it. What Obama has done, by contrast, is take McChrystal’s original executable plan and, after months of seemingly aimless deliberation, compromise its executability. …
Toby Harnden suggests the president changed commanders when McChrystal impugned the honor of the French.
So now that General Stanley McChrystal’s storied military career has been brutally ended, we get the customary “tick tock” accounts that White House have spoonfed to its press corps. These accounts – surprise, surprise – paint a picture of President Barack Obama as being a leader of Solomonic wisdom and Churchillian decisiveness, a prince among men, a giant among pygmies, a commander-in-chief for all ages.
The New York Times describes the self-serving details eagerly provided by the White House as offering “an insight into the president’s decision-making process under intense stress”.
Intense stress? Sure, being President of the United States is a tough job. But how about the intense stress McChrystal was as he oversaw around-the-clock Special Forces missions to dismantle al-Qaeda in Iraq, including going out on the missions under fire himself? How about the intense stress of running a war in Afghanistan when your commander-in-chief has announced an arbitrary exit date of July 2011 and created a muddled civilian command structure in which everyone is dissing everyone else?
But I digress. The New York Times sagely concludes that the details provided by White House advisers show an Obama who “appears deliberative and open to debate, but in the end, is coldly decisive”. Got that? Obama is deliberative, he listens to everyone but ultimately he is a steely-eyed decider. What a guy. Give him a Medal of Honour. …
Abe Greenwald wonders where all of Obama’s power has gone.
… The big historic health-care victory was nothing more than a procedural high-wire act. Kind of like getting your package to FedEx at 7:55 p.m. on a rainy Friday. Never mind that the package is empty or, worse, that its contents are dangerous. ObamaCare’s popularity sinks with each day’s new frightening analysis.
What people do want are jobs. The Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll shows that Americans chose “job creation and economic growth” as their top-priority issue for the federal government to address. “The Gulf Coast oil spill and energy” was second. Health care came in at a distant number six, beating last place “social issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage.”
Like Tom Friedman says, you don’t have to be Machiavelli to see that Obama isn’t competently addressing the most important issues; you just have to be American. In fact, you don’t have to be Machiavelli at all. You just have to be effective. People instruct the president to get mad or get compassionate. But he only needs to get things done. All the “impressive leadership” stuff comes after a leader actually accomplishes something. For now, the new poll does at least partially vindicate Peter Beinart: people are certainly afraid of Barack Obama.
Toby Harnden says Michael Yon gets results.
Well, I wouldn’t cross Michael Yon, the intrepid independent war reporter and photographer who has covered the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan with distinction and dogged intensity. For weeks, he was fulminating about two men – Brigadier-General Daniel Menard of the Canadian Army and General Stanley McChrystal.
Then, two things happened. First, Menard was fired. Then, McChrystal was fired.
True, neither was dismissed for reasons directly related to Yon’s reporting …
We have spent our time today on the country’s methods of making war. Would that we could spend our time on other pursuits. However, it is in our genes. The Economist reports this week about the wars of our nearest relative. I allude to the chimpanzee.
PEOPLE are not alone in waging war. Their closest living cousins, chimpanzees, also slaughter their own kind—in brutal attacks that primatologists increasingly view as strategic, co-ordinated assaults rather than random acts of violence. But however tempting it is to see these battles through the lens of human warfare, the motives for chimp-on-chimp violence are poorly understood. In particular, researchers have long debated whether the apes fight for land, or for females.
A report just published in Current Biology may help to settle the question. The study it describes, led by John Mitani, of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, is the first to offer a detailed picture of organised conflict between chimpanzees. Drawing on a decade of observations in the field, it concludes that, as with human conflict, wars between chimpanzees are fuelled by territorial conquest.
Between 1999 and 2008 Dr Mitani and his colleagues shadowed a group of chimpanzees called the Ngogo, who live in the Kibale national park in Uganda. Most of the time, the Ngogo chimps were anything but model soldiers—squabbling, foraging and lolling about their domain. But on 114 occasions Dr Mitani’s colleague Sylvia Amsler watched large groups of males strike out on silent, single-file patrols to the fringes of their territory.
These forays often turned violent. All but one of the 18 fatal attacks Dr Amsler witnessed occurred during boundary patrols. In each case, males colluded to kill chimps from a neighbouring group. …
More on this from Pickings two and a half years ago.
Pickings from the Webvine
December 20, 2007 http://www.pickerhead.com/?p=627
Robert Ardrey, playwright, screenwriter, wise observer and recorder of discoveries in anthropology and the behavioral sciences, is one of Pickerhead’s favorite authors. A central theme of his books, African Genesis, Territorial Imperative, Hunting Hypothesis, etc., is that the human race has descended from effective killing machines; social predators like wolves or African hunting dogs. Here is some of his prose;
“We were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. And so what shall we wonder at? Our murders and massacres and missiles, and our irreconcilable regiments? Or our treaties whatever they may be worth; our symphonies however seldom they may be played; our peaceful acres, however frequently they may be converted to battlefields; our dreams however rarely they may be accomplished. The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen. We are known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses.”
Ardrey thought Rousseau’s notion of the “noble savage” is foolishness that has caused much pain; most notably from the ideas of Karl Marx. Ardrey died in 1980, his views scorned by many. According to an article in the Economist, some in the natural sciences are coming around.
… Several archaeologists and anthropologists now argue that violence was much more pervasive in hunter-gatherer society than in more recent eras. From the
!Kung in the Kalahari to the Inuit in the Arctic and the aborigines in Australia, two-thirds of modern hunter-gatherers are in a state of almost constant tribal warfare, and nearly 90% go to war at least once a year. War is a big word for dawn raids, skirmishes and lots of posturing, but death rates are high—usually around 25-30% of adult males die from homicide. The warfare death rate of 0.5% of the population per year that Lawrence Keeley of the University of Illinois calculates as typical of hunter-gatherer societies would equate to 2 billion people dying during the 20th century.At first, anthropologists were inclined to think this a modern pathology. But it is increasingly looking as if it is the natural state. Richard Wrangham of Harvard University says that chimpanzees and human beings are the only animals in which males engage in co-operative and systematic homicidal raids. The death rate is similar in the two species. Steven LeBlanc, also of Harvard, says Rousseauian wishful thinking has led academics to overlook evidence of constant violence. …