Obama's Tricky Battle with the Military-Media Complex

On February 27, 2009, just a month after being elected as an anti-war candidate, President Barack Obama revealed his plans for completing the combat portion of America’s ongoing military involvement in Iraq. “Let me say this as plainly as I can,” Obama said. “By August 31, 2010, our combat mission in Iraq will end. I intend to remove all U.S. troops from Iraq by the end of 2011.”

Obama has arguably met his self-imposed deadline. But will the powerful military-media complex allow him to remove “all US troops from Iraq” by the end of next year? Moreover, will they ever support his July 2011 deadline for US troops to begin leaving Afghanistan – a country the US invaded earlier and has occupied longer than Iraq?

Given that Obama has delivered on his promise in Iraq, why should we doubt next year’s pending pullouts from both Iraq and Afghanistan? Simple: high military officials and their accomplices in the media ardently oppose both – and the president is either unwilling or simply unable to confront them.

As ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern noted in a recent post entitled “Obama Boxed In by Generals on Afghanistan,” the president’s policy regarding both Iraq and Afghanistan has been consistently and quite publicly undermined in the media by military leaders.

Peter Baker also noted Obama’s “tense relationship with the military” in the New York Times. Baker detailed the “uneasy balance between a president wary of endless commitment and a military worried he is not fully invested in the cause,” quoted a former Obama adviser who described the president’s relationship with the military as “troubled,” and noted that he “doesn’t have a handle on it.” Baker also quoted former Bush adviser Peter D. Feaver as saying “There’s deep uncertainty and perhaps doubt in the military about his commitment to see the wars through to a successful conclusion,” and concluded, “The next two years are far more likely to witness a Donnybrook between the Pentagon and White House, as the security situation in Afghanistan continues to deteriorate and [General David] Petraeus — now commander of U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan, with his vaunted reputation riding on success — inevitably demands more troops.”

Recently Marine Commandant General James Conway used a news conference to attack the July 2011 date now set for Afghanistan troop withdrawal. Conway said the Obama deadline might be helping the Taliban:

“In some ways … it’s probably giving our enemy sustenance. … We think he may be saying to himself … ‘Hey, you know, we only have to hold out for so long.’”

Conway then noted that will change in the fall [of 2011] when “we’re still there hammering them like we have been.”

Conway’s press conference followed similar remarks by General Petraeus, newly appointed commander of U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan, who said it will be “years” and not months before Afghans can take over from U.S. troops:

“I honestly think it will be a few years before conditions on the ground are such that turnover will be possible for us.”

Ray McGovern believes, “The Obama administration’s reluctance to discipline senior generals for comments bordering on insubordination seems to have encouraged the generals to believe they can speak their mind with impunity about President Obama’s management of the Afghan conflict.”

They are clearly correct in that assumption, even though Obama supporters like to point to his firing of Stanley McChrystal (Petraeus’ predecessor as commander in Afghanistan) after McChrystal was quoted in the now-infamous Rolling Stone article “Runaway General” as mocking Obama and other civilian leaders. Rolling Stone also described how McChrystal said the president had been intimidated in meeting with military commanders.