About five weeks ago, the Washington Post had a fascinating scoop: the White House was looking (unsuccessfully) for a “high-powered czar to oversee the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.” The person would apparently be the new Commander in Chief — coordinating military policy and having the power to issue directions to the Pentagon, the State Department, and other agencies.
Unfortunately for the administration, no one wanted the job. Several generals were approached about the position, and all of them said no. “The very fundamental issue is, they don’t know where the hell they’re going,” said retired Marine Gen. John J. “Jack” Sheehan, a former top NATO commander who was among those rejecting the job.
It was hard to blame them. The “war czar” is not only unnecessary, it’s largely pointless — whoever got the job would have minimal power, no money, an ambiguous position in the chain of command, and likely would find himself or herself in a position to get blamed for a policy that the White House is responsible for.
The good news for the Bush gang is that they finally found a sucker person to take the job. The bad news for the Bush gang is they hired a man who thinks the White House is wrong.
President Bush tapped Army Lt. Gen. Douglas E. Lute yesterday to serve as a new White House “war czar” overseeing the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, choosing a low-key soldier who privately expressed skepticism about sending more troops to Iraq during last winter’s strategy review. […]
In choosing Lute, Bush picked a key internal voice of dissent during the administration review that led to the troop increase. Reflecting the views of other members of the Joint Chiefs, Lute argued that a short-term “surge” would do little good and that any sustained increase in forces had to be matched by equal emphasis on political and economic steps, according to officials informed about the deliberations.
Lute believed the situation in Iraq reflected the same mistakes as the ineffective and disorganized response to Hurricane Katrina, according to a source familiar with the debate. Like others at the Pentagon, he was also irked because civilian agencies, in his view, had not done nearly enough to help stabilize Iraq. And he was outspoken about the increasing strains on the U.S. military, officials said.
Yes, the general Bush has tapped to coordinate his war policy happens to believe Bush is wrong about his war policy.
In August 2005, Lute said the U.S. was planning to draw down troop levels as part of a more effective strategy. “You have to undercut the perception of occupation in Iraq. It’s very difficult to do that when you have 150,000-plus, largely western, foreign troops occupying the country.” In January 2006, Lute told PBS’s Charlie Rose that “we would like to see a smaller, lighter, less prominent U.S. force structure in Iraq.” Lute argued such a move would “undercut the enemy propaganda that in fact we have designs on Iraqi resources or Iraqi bases and so forth.” It would also reflect a lesson “we’ve learned in post-conflict scenarios like…the Balkans” to avoid “the dependency syndrome.”
To be clear, this isn’t criticism of Lute. On the contrary, I think he’s been right for quite some time — about troop deployments and counter-terrorism in general.
The point, however, is that the White House couldn’t find someone who agrees with Bush’s policy, so the Bush gang apparently had to settle for someone who doesn’t. A sign of maturity for a president who usually doesn’t want to be in the same room as a dissenter? I kind of doubt it — Lute was low on the list precisely because he didn’t accept the Bush line blindly. The White House appears to have simply run out of alternatives. (Better yet, they prefer to maintain the fiction that they’re all on the same page.)
As for the politics of all of this, Swopa raises a very good point.
You can start the stopwatch now on the amount of time it takes for Dubya or one of his spokesliars to use their new cardboard cutout to deflect questions on the lack of progress in Iraq: “Well, we’re bringing Gen. Lute on board, and he’s the kind of guy who gets results,” etc., etc.
Quite right. It’s the same with every new “czar” position the White House comes up with — using public relations to buy time and get out of a jam. In this case, the Bush gang will no doubt repeat the rhetoric they’ve been using about Gen. Petraeus: “Democrats want to cut short the war policy before Gen. Lute has even had a chance to help implement the strategy.”
No one will buy it, but that won’t stop them from saying it.