Obama goes with LBJ style war policy

James Robbins:

Vice President Joe Biden seems obsessed with avoiding "another Vietnam," according to Bob Woodward's new book, Obama's Wars, about wartime decision making in the Obama administration. But the picture Woodward paints of President Obama's conduct as a war leader indicates they are already there.

Ignoring the generals. Like President Lyndon Johnson, Obama is not taking the guidance of his uniformed military advisers, but instead crafting and micromanaging his own war strategy. Yet Obama, like Johnson, is not a military expert, and both men showed impatience with the military suggesting policies that did not fit their political agenda. The scene of Obama passing out a six-page typed instruction to his military leaders like a school teacher handing out an assignment is the contemporary "no-drama" equivalent of the obscenity-strewn dressings-down LBJ gave the Joint Chiefs.

Fascination with arbitrary limits. Obama was the author of the 30,000-man troop surge limit in Afghanistan, just as Johnson came up with a troop ceiling in Vietnam. These arbitrary limits give the illusion of control but do not necessarily reflect military reality. If an urgent need for more troops arises, the president will be faced with either taking political heat for breaking his own limit, or risking defeat on the ground.

During Johnson's tenure, the debate over breaking the troop ceiling to send reinforcements to Vietnam in the wake of the Tet Offensive was portrayed as a defeat, and the necessary troops were never sent.

This issue, combined with Obama's seemingly random July 2011 "begin the withdrawal" date will hamper the president's ability to respond to changing circumstances. The president has psychologically dug in on these limits, but they have no importance other than that which he has given them.

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There is much more.

Robbins also sites Obama's playing to the doves with the withdrawal date and his concern about the war cutting into his domestic spending agenda.

What I come away with in reading about what is in the book is how cynical Obama was in campaigning that we should be focused on winning the war in Iraq, and when he gets his chance it is all about an exit strategy and nothing about victory. He is playing to his anti war puke base instead of looking out for our national security.