It’s one thing for White House staffers to write books to settle scores and make a quick buck – as Bush’s former Press Secretary Scott McClellan did with his truly damning What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception. But it sets a new precedent for betrayal in this respect for a former cabinet secretary to do so. Especially given not just that Obama is still in office, but that this self-described “secretary of war” knows full well that he’s still commanding American troops in the killing fields of Afghanistan.
(“Former Secretary of Defense Gates Betrays Own Views and Obama’s Trust in Memoirs,” The iPINIONS Journal, January 9, 2012)
Many commentators argued that the nature of partisan politics in Washington these days is such that, as a lifelong Republican, Robert Gates had to parrot the Party line (about Obama being weak and incompetent) to reestablish his bona fides after serving in a Democratic administration.
Except that it’s far more likely that Gates was motivated not by partisan politics, but by a compulsion to settle scores, as well as a desire to make money. Indeed, only this explains McClellan’s memoirs, as well as the more critically acclaimed one by George Stephanopoulos – who settled all kinds of scores with his boss, Bill Clinton, and got a pretty penny for All Too Human.
Which brings me to former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta. For he has now made it patently clear that there is no cabinet secretary who won’t betray the president to settle scores, which usually means publishing memoirs in which they make themselves seem even more presidential than the president himself. Not to mention collecting their proverbial “thirty pieces of silver.”
After all, Panetta had such a highly regarded reputation for loyalty, trust, and professionalism that Bill Clinton hired him as chief of staff when his White House was beginning to function more like a frat house.
This is why, despite the sorry record of bipartisan betrayal in this respect, Obama can be forgiven for being shocked and dismayed that Panetta has joined this rogues gallery of former Cabinet members.
Here is how the Washington Post is characterizing his book, Worthy Fights, noting that it is so surreal and spooky in its vindictiveness that the launch is “the sine qua non of the pre-Halloween party of season:”
The book, as we recently noted, includes a scorching takedown of President Obama’s foreign policy operation and says Panetta was thwarted in his effort to keep a residual U.S. force in Iraq.
Lest the point was lost, Panetta zeroed in on his former boss in an interview published Monday. Obama has ‘kind of lost his way,’ Panetta told USA Today’s Susan Page.
And then the heavy artillery: Obama has a ‘frustrating reticence to engage his opponents and rally support for his cause,’ Panetta says in the book, and too frequently ‘relies on the logic of a law professor rather than the passion of a leader.’ ‘Sometimes,’ he writes, Obama ‘avoids the battle, complains, and misses opportunities.’
(Washington Post, October 6, 2014)
The problem with all of Panetta’s self-serving psychobabble about Obama’s logic and passion, however, is that he’s referring to a president who:
- defied 90 years of futility by his predecessors to enact comprehensive healthcare reform;
- defied his political and military advisers to order the incursion into Pakistan to get Osama bin Laden;
- defied his political base by launching more drone strikes against terrorists than George W. Bush;
- defied “drill-baby-drill” critics by implementing energy policies that led to the United States becoming a net exporter of oil for first time since 1949; and
- defied an open and notorious conspiracy among Republicans to make him a “failed president” by not only getting re-elected, but leading the economy from the brink of “economic Armageddon” in 2009, when unemployment was at 10 percent with monthly job losses of over 700,000, to the most stellar recovery since the Great Depression, with unemployment now at 5.9 percent with monthly job increases of over 200,000. Not to mention economic policies that have led to a doubling of the stock market (from 7949 on the day he took office to 16,719 at the close yesterday). Yet it speaks volumes that Obama’s biggest critics are Republican fat cats on Wall Street who have made out like bandits, literally, during his presidency. Frankly, they appear to be pining for the bear markets of the Bush years to justify their (racial?) hatred of Obama.
I could go on, but you get the point: which is that I defy any fair-minded person to point out what about Obama’s objective record is either weak or incompetent?
Meanwhile, Panetta is all over TV feigning political and ethical conflict over betraying this president. But his rationalizations will boomerang on him even more than Gates’s did on him. After all, Panetta’s main critique is that Obama fatally undermined his presidency by:
a) failing to secure an agreement with the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to keep U.S. forces stationed in Iraq;
b) failing to do to Syrian President Bashar Assad what he did to Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi; and
c) failing to arm Syrian opposition forces to fight a two-pronged war against Assad and Daesh terrorists (aka ISIS).
However, all any interviewer has to do to throw his critique back in his face is to pose the following questions:
a) Are you suggesting, Mr. Secretary, that the president of the United States should have either allowed Maliki to dictate the terms under which U.S. troops would continue to defend his country from enemies foreign and domestic, or ignored the protestations of this democratically elected prime minister and leave U.S. forces stationed there as a de facto hostile occupying force, hell-bent on doing for the Iraqis what they seem unwilling or unable to do for themselves (despite the 10 years U.S. soldiers spent training them; to say nothing of the hundreds of billions spent and oceans of American blood expended doing so).
b) Are you suggesting, Mr. Secretary, that the failed state Libya has become since the United States helped depose Gaddafi is a commendable outcome to be replicated elsewhere. Is it not likely that Obama has simply learned from the unintended consequences of deposing dictators, no matter how brutal…?
c) Finally, apropos of unintended consequences, are you suggesting, Mr. Secretary, that if Obama had armed Syrian rebels two years ago Daesh would not be the menace it is today? Are you not aware, Sir, that this assumption was belied in rather spectacular fashion when tens of thousands of U.S.-trained Iraqis not only cowered in the face of a few hundred Daesh fighters, but blithely abandoned all of their U.S.-made weapons, which Daesh is now using to kill them and their Syrian foes? In other words, is it not more likely the case that, had Obama heeded your counsel to bomb Assad and arm the so-called Syrian opposition, Daesh would not only control huge swathes of Iraq today, but all of Syria as well…? Or would you have advised putting American boots on the ground to police Syria in perpetuity – the way you and others would have them police Iraq and Afghanistan?
Trust me, even a savvy politician like Panetta cannot square the circle such questions would put him in. His overweening lament is that Obama is sending “the wrong message to the world.” Except that the only people who are getting the wrong message are Afghans, Iraqis, Kurds, and Syrians; and they’re getting it, not from Obama, but from misguided imperialists like Panetta and Republican Senator John McCain. That wrong message, of course, is that Obama will ape Bush by ensuring that American foot soldiers will always be there to fight their internecine wars and police their dangerous streets….
And you probably thought Republicans were the only ones possessed of a congenital aversion to acknowledging the transformative accomplishments of Obama’s presidency (think Roosevelt more than Reagan).
But you ain’t seen nothing yet. Just wait until Bill and Hillary start spinning (as part of their 2016 presidential campaign) the notion that his highly touted healthcare reform was just dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s on work they did during the first period of their two-for-one presidency (1992-2000); and that there’s nothing commendable about Obama’s foreign policy, which Hillary famously insinuated just weeks ago is predicated on nothing more than the fiddle-while-Rome-burns principle of “don’t do stupid stuff.”
That said, I feel constrained to end by clarifying that, notwithstanding all of the above, I am no Yellow-Dog Democrat or proud Black for whom Obama can do no wrong. Indeed, my recent commentary, “Demystifying ISIS: the Case against Obama’s Bush-lite War on Terrorism,” September 10, 2014, will attest to this. Not to mention my abiding criticism of the (too big to fail, too rich to jail) “wrong message” his administration sent to the Wall Street bandits I referenced above, which I commented on most recently in “SEC Lawyer Admits Big Dogs on Wall Street Untouchable,” April 29, 2014.
I just think this narrative about Obama being a weak and incompetent leader is belied by so many stubborn facts that it requires a willful (if not racial) suspension of disbelief to continue propagating it.
NOTE: I declared in “Demystifying ISIS…” that Daesh terrorists pose no security threat to the United States, and nobody has produced any evidence or proffered any argument to the contrary. They pose a threat only to Syria, Iraq, Iran and other (Muslim) countries in the Middle East. Not to mention that, if we can live in a world with a wacko nation like North Korea amassing stockpiles of nuclear weapons, surely we can live in one with jihadists fighting to set up a medieval Caliphate in the Middle East.
Therefore, it smacks of an imperial and inherently misguided form of geopolitical noblesse oblige for the United States to be leading this fight, especially given that these countries are quite capable of defending themselves … if the United States sent them the right message, namely, that they must do so.
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