State-Croft in the Obama Administration, cont.: the Deputies' Committee

A detailed portrait of the Obama administration's foreign policy apparatus by the FT's Edward Luce and Daniel Dombey presents a mixed bag, a work in progress.  One key facet  has an interesting pedigree: personnel from the Clinton administration slotted into a structure adapted from the administration of George Bush, Sr.  That is the "deputies' meetings":

Mr Obama’s character is also stamped on the inter-agency process, set up and managed by Tom Donilon, deputy national security adviser. The nitty-gritty of foreign policy-making is done at these frequent “deputies’ meetings”, which can sometimes consume four to six hours a day
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Described by one insider as “the most powerful man in the White House whose name isn’t widely known”, Mr Donilon, who was an official in the Clinton administration, is the man who keeps Mr Obama’s trains running on time. And there are a lot of trains. Last year, Mr Donilon held 270 deputies meetings – a workload described as “clinically insane” by a former senior diplomat under Bill Clinton.

When Obama stole a line from Cheney

One of the defining moments of the 2008 campaign came in the wake of the Lehman Brothers collapse, when John McCain announced that he was suspending his campaign and called on Obama to postpone their upcoming debate while al hands were called on deck to deal with Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson's request for $700 billion to bail out the megabanks. Obama's response - a President has to be able to do more than one thing at a time -- exposed McCain for the shallow showboating bully that he is.

Who noticed at the time that Obama was quoting his distant cousin, Dick Cheney?  I just stumbled on this exchange in a Tim Russert interview with Cheney on March 16, 2003, days before the U.S. attacked  Iraq:

MR. RUSSERT: In order to pay for this war, would the president consider suspending his proposed tax cut?

VICE PRES. CHENEY: We don’t believe that’s the right course of action, Tim. This is one of those times when as important as the war on terror is and as important as the problem of Iraq is, we’ve also got a lot of other balls in the air. And an American president these days doesn’t have the choice of focusing on only one thing. We’ve also got to deal with the Middle East peace process, with Israelis and Palestinians which we did this week. We’ve got to deal with the domestic economy. It’s very important to get the economy growing again. And one of the reasons we’ve had a fall-off in revenue, obviously, is a slow economy and we need to get growth started again....

I imagine that in one form or another, the observation that a President has to focus on many issues simultaneously is a truism going back many decades, if not a couple of centuries.

BTW, a look back at the Russert interview highlights what we lost with his untimely death.  He asked Cheney every question he should have -- whether he disagreed with the International Atomic Energy Agency's assessment that Iraq had no nuclear program, whether the U.S. was alienating allies, whether the invasion would stimulate anti-American feeling and terrorism among Muslim populations, whether we would need hundreds of thousands of troops on the ground to secure the country after invasion, whether the war mightn't cost $100 billion, whether Brent Scowcroft's vocal criticism of the rush to war gave him pause -- and, per above, whether war might require scaling back tax cuts..   You can't accuse Cheney of being unwilling to engage these questions, either -- though you may marvel how wrong he was about everything.

Son of Bush Sr.? Obama prepares for state-croft

Some weeks ago, Obama let it be known that he admired the way foreign policy was conducted during the administration of George Bush, Sr. Today, the Wall Street Journal notes that "many of the Republicans emerging as potential members of the Obama administration have professional and ideological ties to Brent Scowcroft" -- Bush Sr.'s national security adviser. And it's widely reported that Obama will keep on Robert Gates as defense secretary. Gates was deputy national security adviser under Scowcroft.

The Journal article stresses policy affinities between Scowcroft and Obama -- most notably that both opposed going to war in Iraq. But "no drama Obama" is probably equally drawn to Scowcroft's management style. Here's how his eternally loyal deputy, Gates, described Scowcroft's modus operandi in his memoir, From the Shadows:

A dogged defender of the Presidency, Scowcroft's lack of egotism and his gentle manner made possible the closest working relationships with other senior members of the national security team. Further, the strong individuals who ran State, Defense, CIA, and the other key institutions of national security trusted Scowcroft as no other National Security Adviser has been trusted--to represent them and their views to the President fairly, to report to him on meetings accurately, to facilitate rather than block their access to the President. Scowcroft ran the NSC and its process as it should be run (457-58).

Gates himself ran the deputies committee, which oversaw the interagency NSC process. Of that group he claims:

The friendships--and-trust--that developed among the core members of the Deputies Committee in 1989-1991 not only made the NSC process work, but cut down dramatically on the personal backstabbing and departmental jockying that had been so familiar (459).

It's often been reported that Obama welcomes -- and in fact demands -- open debate from his advisers. Gates describes Bush Sr. in similar terms:

He was an eager learner and interested in reaching out beyond government experts for insights and information...his decision process was encompassed in small, frequent meetings of trusted advisers and an open dialogue with former senior officials and others, from whom Bush encouraged different views and debate (454).

Gates is not a disinterested observer: he is immensely proud of the role he played in Bush Sr.'s Administration. But he's not indiscriminate in praise, either: he describes Bush's foreign policy team as the most cohesive and effective among those of five presidents for whom he worked (Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush). It's plain that Obama's bent is to forge teams with the cohesion (as well as the intellectual firepower) that Gates claims for George H. W. Bush's foreign policy shop.

Related posts:
Obama and Gates in Sync on Pakistan
On the Same Page: Gates, Mullen, Powell, Obama
Back from the Shadows: Can Gates Steer the Surge?

Jeffrey Goldberg retails the Bobbit Fallacy

Is Jeffrey Goldberg, in an attempt to expose a fallacy, falling victim to a fallacy? Goldberg relays a report by Steven Coll of a John Kerry dinner party where Brent Scowcroft assered, "Saddam, in fact, was quite well contained. And we had a big problem following 9/11 in dealing with this greater threat of terrorism." Goldberg demurs:

It is an open question, however, whether Saddam was in fact "contained." The sanctions regime was crumbling; the world was tired of keeping Saddam in a box. And as John Kerry himself said in October of 2002, "It would be naive to the point of grave danger not to believe that left to his own devices, Saddam Hussein will provoke, misjudge, or stumble into a future, more dangerous confrontation with the civilized world. He has as much as promised it."

But let's assume it was true that Saddam was actually contained in early 2003. Does this mean that he would have remained contained in 2004? Here, Scowcroft falls victim to Parmenide's Fallacy, which occurs when a policymaker considers the merits of a particular proposal by judging it against its current context, rather than by what might occur in the future if the proposal isn't acted upon. In the words of Phillip Bobbitt, "indefinitely extending the present is never a realistic option." Just because Saddam was contained in 2003 (assuming he was) has no bearing on whether he would have been contained in 2004 or 2005.

Is it true that "indefinitely extending the present is never a realistic option"? Depends, I guess, on what your definition of "present" is. The U.S. contained Soviet expansion for forty years until the Soviet Union imploded, relatively peacefully; conditions, tasks and tactics changed many times within that space. Saddam had maybe five-fifteen years to go. And "containment" does not necessarily mean "indefinitely extending the present." The pressure Bush applied to Saddam and to the world in fall 2002 was effective; renewing invasive inspections was a terrific idea. But the case against "indefinitely extending the present" does not amount to a case for invading every country where we consider the status quo unsustainable.