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Politics : President Barack Obama -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ChinuSFO who wrote (65029)	11/14/2009 5:43:02 PM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 149317

The Tenacity Question nytimes.com By DAVID BROOKS Columnist New York Times October 30, 2009 Today, President Obama will lead another meeting to debate strategy in Afghanistan. He will presumably discuss the questions that have divided his advisers: How many troops to commit? How to define plausible goals? Should troops be deployed broadly or just in the cities and towns? For the past few days I have tried to do what journalists are supposed to do. I’ve called around to several of the smartest military experts I know to get their views on these controversies. I called retired officers, analysts who have written books about counterinsurgency warfare, people who have spent years in Afghanistan. I tried to get them to talk about the strategic choices facing the president. To my surprise, I found them largely uninterested. Most of them have no doubt that the president is conducting an intelligent policy review. They have no doubt that he will come up with some plausible troop level. They are not worried about his policy choices. Their concerns are more fundamental. They are worried about his determination. These people, who follow the war for a living, who spend their days in military circles both here and in Afghanistan, have no idea if President Obama is committed to this effort. They have no idea if he is willing to stick by his decisions, explain the war to the American people and persevere through good times and bad. Their first concerns are about Obama the man. They know he is intellectually sophisticated. They know he is capable of processing complicated arguments and weighing nuanced evidence. But they do not know if he possesses the trait that is more important than intellectual sophistication and, in fact, stands in tension with it. They do not know if he possesses tenacity, the ability to fixate on a simple conviction and grip it, viscerally and unflinchingly, through complexity and confusion. They do not know if he possesses the obstinacy that guided Lincoln and Churchill, and which must guide all war presidents to some degree. Their second concern is political. They do not know if President Obama regards Afghanistan as a distraction from the matters he really cares about: health care, energy and education. Some of them suspect that Obama talked himself into supporting the Afghan effort so he could sound hawkish during the campaign. They suspect he is making a show of commitment now so he can let the matter drop at a politically opportune moment down the road. Finally, they do not understand the president’s fundamental read on the situation. Most of them, like most people who have spent a lot of time in Afghanistan, believe this war is winnable. They do not think it will be easy or quick. But they do have a bedrock conviction that the Taliban can be stymied and that the governments in Afghanistan and Pakistan can be strengthened. But they do not know if Obama shares this gut conviction or possesses any gut conviction on this subject at all. The experts I spoke with describe a vacuum at the heart of the war effort — a determination vacuum. And if these experts do not know the state of President Obama’s resolve, neither do the Afghan villagers. They are now hedging their bets, refusing to inform on Taliban force movements because they are aware that these Taliban fighters would be their masters if the U.S. withdraws. Nor does President Hamid Karzai know. He’s cutting deals with the Afghan warlords he would need if NATO leaves his country. Nor do the Pakistanis or the Iranians or the Russians know. They are maintaining ties with the Taliban elements that would represent their interests in the event of a U.S. withdrawal. The determination vacuum affects the debate in this country, too. Every argument about troop levels is really a proxy argument for whether the U.S. should stay or go. The administration is so divided because the fundamental issue of commitment has not been settled. Some of the experts asked what I thought of Obama’s commitment level. I had to confess I’m not sure either. So I guess the president’s most important meeting is not the one with the Joint Chiefs and the cabinet secretaries. It’s the one with the mirror, in which he looks for some firm conviction about whether Afghanistan is worthy of his full and unshakable commitment. If the president cannot find that core conviction, we should get out now. It would be shameful to deploy more troops only to withdraw them later. If he does find that conviction, then he should let us know, and fill the vacuum that is eroding the chances of success. Gen. Stanley McChrystal has said that counterinsurgency is “an argument to win the support of the people.” But it’s not an argument won through sophisticated analysis. It’s an argument won through the display of raw determination. Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

To: ChinuSFO who wrote (65029)	11/14/2009 9:36:46 PM
From: koan	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 149317

If Obama wanted a meeting on jobs, he should have done it the first day, not a year later. It makes him look like he does not know what to do. He should have lots of ideas he can implement by administrative action right now to relieve the suffering of the poor. Legend has it FDR asked one of his primary presidential advisors the first day in office: "go out and find out what the people need. Today!" Meetings like Obama is proposing seldom resolve anything. People just argue. Been to a million of them. When I wrote the states EMS plan the previous people had a million meetings over a 5 year period and the desk was filled with organizational charts. Nothing ever got done. I threw almost everything away and started from scratch. all I saw was a bunch of chaos. Thomas Jefferson was the principle author of the Declaration of independence (one guy). You know what they say, a platypus looks like it was designed by a committee. The one thing people did like about Bush was he took action. Chinu, Bob Herbert (I am in good company with Herbert) and many other smart honest writers can see Obama is not leading like he should be and it is the poor who are suffering right now. Herbert Hoover dithered. FDR did not dither, he took action. I can think of lots of things he should do right now. Stiglitz and Krugman have been yelling at the top of their lungs for a year now and Obama makes light of their yelling. And as mentioned, I just watched Elizabeth Warren (she is as close to a mixture of Einstein and a saint as you will get on this earth) on the PBS program "NOW" say, very little is getting done to help the middle class, or reign in Wall street. I spoke to a banker last week who said the fed is coming down with regulations and Wells Fargo, B of A, etc are disregarding them e.g. 100% refinancing of VA loans and Wells Fargo will only go to 85%. And credit card companies are disregarding new rules. Obama is a thousand times better than Bush, but we can never refuse to question his judgement; especially when we see the poor suffering. Obama needs to take some action.