Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Obama fails to grasp the gravity of going to war

Obama fails to grasp the gravity of going to war Byron York Politics Washington Examiner

Obama fails to grasp the gravity of going to war

I see Obama's visiting the United States," said Rush Limbaugh on Thursday, the president's first full day back in Washington after a spring break diplomatic tour of Latin America. For the White House, it was a touch of well-deserved sarcasm; Obama's absence at the start of the Libyan hostilities, along with his haphazard conversations with members of Congress and his nonexistent effort to prepare the American public for war, left more than a few Washington insiders shaking their heads over how the president could have mishandled things so badly.

Say what you will about the Bush White House. It knew something about preparing Congress and the public for war, having done so before invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. A president needs to lay the foundation for military action by holding extensive briefings for Congress and also by explaining to the American people why action is needed and what it will involve.

That's why veterans of the Bush White House can't quite believe what they are seeing from the supposedly communications-savvy Obama administration.

"I am completely mystified," says former top Bush aide Karl Rove, who supports the Libya intervention, "that this administration, of all administrations, makes a decision on a Tuesday night and does not bother to call anybody in Congress until Friday morning, 90 minutes before the policy is going to be executed, to tell them what is going to happen. Can you imagine what would have happened if we had tried to do that? We'd have been barbecued!"

There's also the question of why Obama did not explain his decision to the public in a forum that conveyed the gravity of the situation. After ordering troops into action, the president headed off to South America with his wife, daughters, mother-in-law, and mother-in-law's friend in tow. There was no solemn, reasoned speech to explain why the U.S. was going to war.

"We would have marked that in a very significant way," says Dan Bartlett, the former White House communications director. "We would have built a whole, for want of a better word, campaign to articulate what was happening." The president would have given a speech, probably from the White House, and in following days would likely have visited a military base from which some of the forces were deployed. Other high-ranking administration officials would have been dispatched to defend the effort.

Bartlett, who also supports U.S. involvement, believes the laid-back White House handling of the war might be an intentional strategy to downplay the U.S. role -- "Maybe they're thinking that if we had the president out there in a big way, it's going to be viewed as an American effort." But the fact is, going to war is a very big deal to the American public, and Obama simply didn't treat it as such.

The consequence is that both Republicans and Democrats are lobbing complaints at the White House. House Speaker John Boehner sent Obama a letter Wednesday with several pointed questions that might not have been necessary had there had been more consultations with Congress. On the Democratic side, Rep. George Miller, a longtime ally of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, said flatly, "I don't think there's a lot of evidence that they sufficiently consulted the Congress."

And the public? A Gallup Poll taken during the first days of fighting found that just 47 percent of those polled approve of U.S. involvement in the Libyan fighting, while 37 percent disapprove. That is lower than support at similar stages of military action in Iraq in 2003, Afghanistan in 2001, the Balkans in 1999, Haiti in 1994, and Somalia in 1993. That's what happens when you don't prepare the public for what you're going to do.

Meanwhile, the White House is at times having difficulty simply making sense. The president talked about an "exit strategy" in which American forces would not exit at all. And administration officials are going out of their way to deny that the Libyan fighting, which involves a significant fleet of U.S. warships and U.S. warplanes, is a "war." Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes told reporters Wednesday that Libya wasn't a war, describing it instead as a "kinetic military action."

"The president has gotten us involved in a war, but they won't call it a war," says Peter Wehner, another Bush White House veteran. "Muddled thinking creates muddled language, and we're getting a lot of muddled language." There's no sign that will change anytime soon.

Byron York, The Examiner's chief political correspondent, can be contacted at byork@washingtonexaminer.com.

http://washingtonexaminer.com/politics/2011/03/obama-fails-grasp-gravity-going-war

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