Bob Woodward from The Washington Post was already well-known for having made public the Watergate scandal with Carl Bernstein in 1972. He then published many books on US politics that have all become unavoidable for everyone studying the United States. With Obama’s wars , Woodward wrote an essential text about the decision-making process on foreign policy . This publication is a major event in America’s political season, just some weeks before the mid-term elections, and has already become a Classic in American political literature.
Obama’s wars deals with the American strategy towards Iraq and especially Afghanistan. How was this shaped? How were made the decisions? Who really decides? How can we explain what’s happening on the Afghan ground with what happened in the Oval Office? More broadly, what’s happening at the highest level of US politics? Woodward’s book gives passionate, informative, and disrupting answers.
The book is disrupting, because it first describes an Obama administration undermined by internal divisions. There is, according to Bob Woodward, an increasing conflict between short-term political interests and long-term military strategies that shapes the decision-making process in the Obama administration . We meet a lot of characters in this book; each of them has his own opinion about the war. Vice-President Biden, for instance, underlines the fact that “progress in Afghanistan depends on reducing corruption”; he considers the Afghan President, Hamid Karzaï, as unreliable since he learned by the CIA that he is manic depressive. He especially supports a less important military presence in the country and even a rollback, while General McChrystal, then General Petraeus, claim for a bigger military commitment. At the contrary, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, chief of the American diplomacy, endorses the military’s position.
When Vice-President Joe Biden insulted the special US representative in Afghanistan, Richard Holbrooke, as a “fuckhead”; when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton uses the expression “your decisions” instead of “our decisions” while she’s talking to the President; when Barack Obama spends many days hearing at each contradictory point of view, there is no need of others words to understand how bad the atmosphere is in Obama’s administration.
Especially, Woodward describes a hesitating President, under several and contradictory influences, sometimes unable to settle the conflicts. Barack Obama seems to be “ fixated on an exit strategy ”. The book underlines his uncertainty several times.
Thus, the weight of internal politics appears as the main factor in this decision-making process . Obama refused a long-term commitment in Afghanistan because he thought he had the confidence of Democrats and voters for only two years. It explains his refusal of a “ Nation-building strategy ” ("Nation-building" meaning the whole reconstruction of Afghanistan: the economy, the political institutions, the civil society, a running private sector), that would have cost 1 000 billion dollars. That is why he sent only 30 000 new soldiers in Afghanistan while the Pentagon claimed for 40 000. According to him, the war in Afghanistan must be as short as possible, just in order to keep the support of the Democratic Party. Broadly, Woodward’s book describes Obama as focused on short-term goals linked with internal politics while the situation on the ground requires a long-term strategy . It draws a gap ever larger between the President and military officials .
By depicting the atmosphere in Obama’s administration, the President’s difficulty to settle, and especially the growing gap between the “Commander in Chief” and the military, Obama’s wars by Bob Woodward explains All Of The hesitations, all of The Turnaround Strategy in the U.S. That Have Been blatant Since 2009. More broadly, it explains us the complexity of the decision-making process in US Foreign policy.
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