Obama 'voracious' in studying national security issues
By Helene Cooper
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
CHICAGO: He has read "Ghost Wars," a history of the adventure by the Central Intelligence Agency in Afghanistan over decades and its fruitless attempt to capture or kill Osama bin Laden. He has sought out the counsel of an old Republican realist - Brent Scowcroft, the former national security adviser - who has long argued against an ideologically driven foreign policy.
And he has one-upped President George W. Bush's six intelligence briefings a week by demanding seven, prompting Mike McConnell, who handles presidential briefings as the director of national intelligence, to joke that "I don't know if there's some kind of competition going."
As Barack Obama gets ready to assume the presidency Jan. 20, the former junior senator from Illinois has been boning up on the large number of national security issues that await his first day in the Oval Office. The list spans the globe, literally, from the obscure - whether he should break with the Bush administration's pro-Morocco policy in the dispute over independence for Western Sahara - to the familiar - whether his plan to send more troops to Afghanistan is feasible.
On Monday, Obama held his first full-blown national security meeting since announcing his national security team two weeks ago. The planned assembly included Vice President-elect Joseph Biden Jr.; Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who is just back from a trip to Iraq and Afghanistan; Secretary of State-designate Hillary Clinton; National Security Adviser-designate James Jones; McConnell; Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Attorney General-designate Eric Holder; and Susan Rice, who is Obama's pick for ambassador to the United Nations. Aides said the primary focus of the meeting was Iraq and Afghanistan.
During an earlier transition period, President John F. Kennedy was meticulous about consulting Dwight Eisenhower about national security issues. During his, Bush sought out Condoleezza Rice and other members of his foreign policy team of "Vulcans" for cramming sessions.
And Obama?
"He has been voracious," said one senior adviser to the president-elect. He has had several long sessions, both on the telephone and in person, with Jones, in what the general has described as a "walk around the world."
Perhaps surprisingly, Obama has also been seeking foreign policy guidance from a number of Republicans and conservatives. Besides the outreach to Scowcroft, Obama has also called the former Reagan secretary of state, George Shultz.
Obama has also sought advice from Richard Armitage, who was Colin Powell's deputy at the State Department and who advised John McCain during the presidential campaign; General Tommy Franks, the commander of the Iraq invasion; and Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, the Democrat turned independent who supported McCain in the election and is known for breaking with prevailing Democratic criticism of the Iraq war.
But even as he moves to the center, some classic liberalism has also become a part of Obama's study program. Obama, having finished "Ghost Wars," by Steve Coll, is now reading "Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet," by the economist Jeffrey Sachs. Sachs argues that big governments like that of the United States could successfully tackle global warming, environmental destruction and extreme poverty by refocusing just a small fraction of global income toward those issues.
Obama has also been making use of a military that he is soon to inherit as commander in chief. Three weeks ago, he called Mullen to Chicago for a 45-minute private session.
"It struck the chairman very much that the president-elect is working very hard to bring himself up to speed, that he's willing to listen and to learn as he moves his way through the education process," a senior military official familiar with the meeting said.
Like many presidents before him, Obama expects the early months of his term to be dominated by the economy, Democratic advisers said, and indeed, the proposed auto bailout and the recession have controlled how he has spent much of his time. But he has also quickly learned - as his predecessors did before him - that issues of national security do not sit back and wait for the president to get done dealing with domestic policy.
"Mumbai was a little bit of a wake-up call," one foreign policy adviser to Obama said.
During the campaign, Obama had spent far more time talking about Pakistan's relationship with Afghanistan, particularly along the lawless border regions between the two countries, than about Pakistan's long-running fight with India over the disputed region of Kashmir. The Mumbai attacks, for which officials have blamed Lashkar-e-Taiba, a guerrilla group that has been preoccupied with Kashmir, shoved South Asia's other simmering security crisis-in-waiting to the front burner.
On the day of the Mumbai attacks, Obama was in Chicago, getting ready to play host to 60 guests at his Hyde Park home for Thanksgiving the next day. He did not cancel his party but ended up spending part of the day in briefings with two CIA officials on the response to Mumbai. He called Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice several times to get updates about the crisis and the American response. One Bush administration official with knowledge of the conversations characterized Obama's questions as "gathering information. He wasn't telling her how to run policy."
And that Friday, Obama placed a 10:30 p.m. phone call to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India to offer condolences about the loss of life in Mumbai.
Obama had already been accused in the Indian news media of giving India short shrift by having called President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan before he connected with Singh as he returned some of the hundreds of congratulatory phone calls from world leaders about his election.
Obama began getting daily intelligence briefings two days after his election victory.
"We go through a great deal of substance, on any topic you can imagine in the context of national security and potential threats to the United States," McConnell told an audience at Harvard last week.
But Obama may have already discovered that the daily briefing is not enough, said Robert Dallek, a presidential historian.
"During the crisis in India," he said, "would the daily briefing suffice to tell Obama what was happening? I don't think so."
Dallek said former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger once scoffed to him about the daily briefings.
"He said, if there was something vital or crucial or a crisis developing, these daily briefs end up being just pro forma business that didn't bring you up to speed."
Kissinger, Dallek said, "didn't think they always gave you an up-to-the-minute picture of what's going on." |
