Bush and military advice

Newsweek has an intriguing piece called (including subtitle) Bush in the Bubble: He has a tight circle of trust, and he likes it that way. But members of both parties are urging Bush to reach beyond the White House walls. How he governs - and how his M.O. stacks up historically by Evan Thomas and Richard Wolffe 12/19/05 issue; accessed 12/12/05.

This article is one sign that our "press corps" is now taking notice of the groupthink that has basically been standard operating procedure in the Bush White House since Day 1.  This article has some gratuitous nonsense that, sadly, has long been S.O.P. for our mainstream media.  Like introducing a Clinton quote with the comment that it was made in Clinton's "sometimes whiny way".  Actually, it was the first time I recall seeing someone suggest that Clinton was "whiny".  Oh, well, silly me.

A couple of items related to military issues stuck out at me in the Thomas/Wolffe article.  There is this one:

On the overriding issue facing the president - the war in Iraq - some reality has slowly crept in. Last spring Cheney was still whistling past the graveyard, describing the Iraqi insurgency as in its "last throes." Since then, Bush's ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, has tried to educate the president and his top advisers on some "ground truth" - that the new Iraqi Army and police are a long way from being able to defend their own country and nascent government. According to senior Pentagon officials who did not want to be identified discussing private meetings, in October Bush received an unusually unvarnished briefing on the military situation from the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Marine Gen. Peter Pace.

I wonder how many times since the public push for war in Iraq began in January 2002 that Newsweek has informed its readers that the president was refusing to let reality creep in to his planning for the war.  Better late than never, I suppose.  Here they mention it as though it has long been common knowledge.  Which it has.  But how long have they been reporting it this way?

I'm tempted to think that there's a heavy dose of Republican spin going on here, letting Cheney be the out-of-touch bad guy now that Cheney's approval ratings have sunk to around Charles Manson levels.  Are they telling us that ambassador Khalilzad is speaking truth to power on the readiness of Iraqi security forces as a way of telling us we have to accept the grim reality that American troops will be needed there as long as a Republican sits in the White House?

Thre more interesting point was that Pace in October gave Bush  "an unusually unvarnished briefing on the military situation".  Since we saw Pace corrrect Rummy in a public news conference on a statement about US soldiers' responsibility to stop torture if they see it occurring, this is somewhat more credible to me than the idea that Bush's civilian advisers are now levelling with him frankly. I wonder just how "unvarnished" that briefing was.  And what did Bush actually learn from it, if anything?

This was the other point that struck me:

In subtle ways, Bush does not encourage truth-telling or at least a full exploration of all that could go wrong. A former senior member of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad occasionally observed Bush on videoconferences with his top advisers. "The president would ask the generals, 'Do you have what you need to complete the mission?' as opposed to saying, 'Tell me, General, what do you need to win?' which would have opened up a whole new set of conversations," says this official, who did not want to be identified discussing high-level meetings. The official says that the way Bush phrased his questions, as well as his obvious lack of interest in long, detailed discussions, had a chilling effect. "It just prevented the discussion from heading in a direction that would open up a possibility that we need more troops," says the official.

Long before Bush, a habit got established - an unhealthy one for a democracy - that the president should never overrule his top military chiefs on troop levels during a war.  So they get the generals not to request more than they intend to send.  And then say they are giving the generals everything they need.  LBJ did the same during the Vietnam War.  That quote gives an example of the ways in which these sorts of presidential desires are communicated to the brass.  I'm sure it's done much more explicitly in more restricted meetings.  It's also a plausible scenario for how Dick Cheney and others could have communicated to CIA analysts and officials what they expected to get in their intelligence briefings on Iraqi WMDs.

It's not a good thing for the president to say, as Bush does, that he's ready to grant any troop request the Joint Chiefs give to him.  Because whether he's accepting particular military recommendations or not, it is the president's decision to make.  For better or worse.

On the side of the military leaders, though, it's also part of their job to give their best military advice to the president.  Are they really giving Bush "unvarnished" reports of results in the field?  And equally candid assessments of their military needs as they see them in light of the goals Bush has set for the Iraqi mission?  (As noted in an earlier post, goals far in excess of the goals Congress implicitly set in the October 2002 war resolution.)  We may not know the answer for years.  But I'm very curious to hear it, whenever we find out.