One forgotten bit of history, brought to mind by a post over on Tom Ricks' blog:[W]hen Bush endorsed the surge, he was rejecting the advice of almost all his military advisors. By contrast, if Obama goes for a troop escalation, he will be embracing the recommendations of his generals.The surge came about in large part because a retired general, Jack Keane, maintained a back-channel from field commander David Petraeus to the White House, and proponents of the surge were able to leverage that relationship into a massive strategic change that involved firing most of the military's senior officers, who disagreed with Petraeus' approach. In Ricks' words: Bush "got a whole new chain of command in place -- a new secretary of defense, a new Central Commander, a new commander in Iraq, and a new ambassador there too. (And six months later, a new chairman of the Joint Chiefs.)" True, there is a difference between siding with commanders in the field over top brass and vice-versa, but the case is still illustrative.Rejecting, or accepting, the advice of military commanders is something presidents can and will do, because they have broader responsibilities, something that has been forgotten by Republicans who are using the White House policy process to exploit tired cliches about which party is better suited to national security policy -- you'd think that the Iraq War would have changed that calculus. (Ricks himself mumbles in his post about Obama seeming ambivalent about being a "war president," which is silly, but then again whenever he gets too far off the reporting trail he's prone to embarrass himself with hackneyed stereotypes). It's not clear at all that Obama will end up differing with McChrystal, but if he does there is significant precedent for that decision, and plenty of good reasons to cite.
-- Tim Fernholz
