And His Hate of The Military

The clamor among White House staffers to present their boss Barack Obama and themselves (not necessarily in that order) in the best possible light has backfired spectacularly. A president has no more solemn duty than that of being commander-in-chief. Judging from the evidence presented by Woodward, Barack Obama's view of that role is at best disquieting.

The first book about a new administration by Bob Woodward, Washington's court chronicler, usually promises to be the high watermark for an incoming commander-in-chief.  Officials are reluctant to dish the dirt because they have the chance of years of employment ahead of them.   It’s of little surprise that the biggest problem Woodward must have had with his Obama's Wars was deciding how to cull the herd of White House officials eager to spill the beans.

Nearly 100,000 American troops are now committed to Afghanistan but Obama's principal war aim is to withdraw and his main preoccupation is how the conflict plays domestically, particularly within his own Democratic party.

"This needs to be a plan about how we're going to hand it off and get out of Afghanistan," Obama says at one stage. At another he declares that "everything we're doing has to be focused on how we're going to get to the point where we can reduce our footprint".

Obama comes across as viewing his generals with thinly-disguised hostility, while at the same time acquiescing to their proposals for the escalation of the Afghan war he so wants to avoid. His arbitrary drawdown of July 2012 was a signal to the Taliban to hang on because American commitment to success was lukewarm and time-limited.

The description of Obama staffers glorying in the firing of General Stanley McChrystal because they believed it boosted the Obama's macho credentials (it did the opposite) brings shame on the administration.  The  most revealing aspect of the coverage of it is that the White House is so delusional it seems to think Obama has come out of it rather well. In fact, Woodward's book will further damage Obama and could not have come at a worse time.

Obama can't stop blaming George W Bush for anything that goes wrong but it will be the current rather than the former president who Democrats and America will take to task after November.

Obama scarcely helped himself last week when he responded in a CNBC "town hall" event to a black woman who said she was "exhausted of defending you" by prefacing his answer with "as I said before" – code for "you're clearly too dumb to have understood me the first time".

Obama's Democrat allies on Capitol Hill are either running away as fast as they can from him or curling up in the fetal position by postponing a congressional vote on whether to extend the Bush tax cuts, a move that makes them look both weak and cowardly.

For the first time, and despite the fact that no credible Republican candidate for 2012 has yet emerged, Obama is looking like a one-term president while one-party rule in Washington is in its death throes.

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