Mr. Obama Goes To War...

The Perspective:

Sixty days into his presidency, it’s official: President Barack Hussein Obama now owns the war in Afghanistan and has expanded it to Pakistan. And not a minute too soon.

As the president was unveiling his new strategy to “disrupt, dismantle and defeat al Qaeda” and its allies, Pakistanis were cleaning up the debris of a suicide bomber’s latest attack in northern Pakistan – an explosion inside a mosque, of all places, which killed 48 Muslims and wounded dozens more. Meanwhile, key Taliban leaders in Afghanistan and Pakistan were distributing an agreement to bury their differences in order to counter the new American-led offensive “for the sake of God, God’s happiness, and the strength of religion.”

Here’s what has changed, and what hasn’t, in the strategy that Mr. Obama and his key aides unveiled today:

First, the president’s policy is a “surge” of forces, though he studiously avoided using that word for fear of paying any tribute to what former President George Bush learned and accomplished, albeit belatedly, in Iraq. The addition of 4,000 more troops to the 17,000 the president has already committed will bring the number of combat, training, and support troops on the Afghan ground from the 31,000 deployed at the end of Mr. Bush’s term in December, 2008 to some 68,000 by this fall, senior military officials say. So those who have urged Mr. Obama to reduce America’s commitment to the Af-Pak conflict are likely to be disappointed. Indeed, Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, lost little time today in criticizing the strategy.

Second, Mr. Obama is adding hundreds more civilians to the effort to encourage Afghanistan’s development and internal stability and is tripling development aid to Pakistan. This “surge” of civilian forces and resources means that President Obama eschewed the advice of those in his inner circle – among them, Vice President Biden and adviser Jim Steinberg – who reportedly lobbied for downsizing our efforts and adopting a narrower counter-terrorism strategy that would have enabled Washington to build and train the Afghan army and police, declare victory and leave. President Obama’s announcement, followed by a briefing by three key advisors at the White House, suggests that the president has opted for the broader strategy favored by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Afghan special Af-Pak envoy Richard Holbrooke, and CENTCOM chief General David Petraeus. The goal of that more ambitious strategy is, in Mr. Obama’s words, to enhance the “military, governance, and economic capacity of Afghanistan and Pakistan.”

In remarks after the president spoke, Bruce Riedel, an author of the new Af-Pak strategy, specifically rejected the term “nation-building” to describe what the Obama Administration will do in Af-Pak. But his description of the road ahead sounds an awful lot like, well, nation building. “There are 396 districts in Afghanistan. There’s been no training at that level; There are lots of things like that we can do,” he said.

The aides also stressed Washington’s desire to help Afghanistan improve its embattled agricultural sector, hit hard by war and competition from the more lucrative poppy crops in southern Afghanistan, largely controlled by the Taliban. America and its NATO allies will also step up efforts to train more police, help protect judges, and stand up for courts at the district and provincial levels. Richard Holbrooke focused on the need to strengthen the psychological and communications aspects of the Af-Pak war. Washington, he said, would not repeat its mistake of ignoring the 150 illegal FM radio stations and the Taliban’s nightly broadcasts of “names of people they’re going to behead or they’ve beheaded.”

Make no mistake: this is an ambitious agenda.

Third, despite Mr. Obama’s call for a trilateral “dialogue” with Afghanistan and Pakistan, President Obama seems committed to continuing, and even increasing, the Predator attacks on Al Qaeda safe havens in Pakistan that have already killed an estimated 9 of the top 20 Al Qaeda leaders. Although the president only alluded to the strikes in his remarks, Michelle Flournoy, his number three at the Pentagon, said that the “counterterrorism piece” of the Af-Pak strategy would remain “a central part of this mission,.” Indeed, she added, “I certainly believe we are going to be increasing our intelligence focus in this theater, and as opportunities arise that may increase the pace of operations, as well.”

How different is the strategy announced today from what candidate Obama promised or for that matter, what leading Republicans have pressed for? Not very different, say some Washington insiders. Max Boot, a conservative analyst at the Council on Foreign Relations, concluded that President Obama’s strategy was “pretty much all that supporters of the war effort could have asked for, and probably pretty similar to what a President McCain would have decided on.”

James S. Robbins, a former Pentagon official with the American Foreign Policy Council in Washington, noted that the Obama strategy was remarkably similar to what former President Bush had proposed in 2004. The Bush strategy had “five pillars” that strongly resembled those outlined by Mr. Obama today: defeat terrorism, help build and strengthen the Afghan security structure, help Afghanistan“clear and hold” territory, promote reconstruction and good governance, and engage regional states in ensuring Afghanistan’s success.

But President Bush’s war of choice in Iraq sapped priority and resources from the war of necessity in Afghanistan. President Obama now intends to reverse that flow and also to place greater priority on stabilizing Pakistan, without which Afghan security is a non-starter.

Whether President Obama succeeds will depend on how he implements his strategy. And implementation is still a work in process, his aides acknowledge. Team Obama also chose not to clarify how they will reconcile the sometimes contradictory goals Obama endorsed with the realities of the region. For instance, how will they reconcile their determination to work closely with Pakistan with their knowledge that elements in the Pakistani security services are aiding and abetting the Taliban inside Afghanistan?

They also said little about the specific “benchmarks” they would adopt for measuring progress in this war. How will they measure, say, a decline in Afghan corruption? The President’s strategy, says Mr. Riedel, is a “road map for moving forward,” not a “campaign plan” or a “straightjacket.”

Giving your administration diplomatic and military wiggle room is almost always wise. But by making the defeat of Al-Qaeda and its allies in Afghanistan and Pakistan a key foreign policy objective, President Obama has now given the nation a benchmark for measuring him, his staying power, and the effectiveness of his foreign policy.

The Insane Obama Budget

The Perspective:

At his press conference last night, President Obama insisted once again that he inherited the budget deficit, and “we’re doing everything we can to reduce that deficit.”

But the deficits over the next 10 years that Obama proposed in his budget are not George Bush’s deficits. They are the deficits that Obama has proposed, resulting from the $1 trillion in increased spending he adopted in the no-stimulus stimulus bill, and the $400 billion supplemental spending bill he supported and also adopted the following week, and the $275 billion housing bailout he proposed the next week, and the $1 trillion bank bailout plan his Treasury Secretary just proposed this week, and the $638 billion he has proposed as a “downpayment” on a new national health insurance entitlement. The health insurance plan will be the most expensive entitlement of all — serious estimates are that it will cost at least $1.2 trillion or more. Does this sound like he is “doing everything we can to reduce that deficit?”

Under the Obama budget, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that the national debt will more than double over the next 10 years from 40% of GDP today to a shocking 82%! Ronald Reagan left office with the national debt at 42% of GDP. At the end of World War II, the national debt was just under 114% of GDP. If the economy does not recover permanently next year, as even the Congressional Budget Office (now controlled entirely by Democrats) assumes, Obama could even top that World War II record — spending mostly on welfare and entitlements rather than on fighting the Nazis and Imperial Japan.

Does this sound like we’re “moving from an era of borrow-and-spend to one where we save and invest,” as Obama also said last night?

In fact, there is not one item in Obama’s budget that promotes actual saving and investment. Quite to the contrary, the tax rate increases he proposes for the top income tax brackets, for capital gains, and for dividends will all reduce saving and investment.

The budget Obama proposes for this year increases federal spending by a fiscally insane 34% over the budget adopted for last year, with a total of $4 trillion in federal spending, the highest ever. That spending would equal 28.5% of GDP, an increase in the size of the federal government in Obama’s first year of 42% compared to the postwar average relative to GDP.

The deficit would reach a $1.845 trillion this year, according to the CBO — the highest ever except for World War II. That would be more than 4 times Reagan’s largest deficit, which caused so much howling among liberals and Democrats.

The CBO further estimates that this Obama budget deficit will total an astounding 13.1% of GDP, more than one-eighth of the entire U.S. economy, for the federal deficit alone! That is again the largest in U.S. history except for World War II and more than twice Reagan’s highest deficit as a percent of GDP.

Reagan adopted budget cuts soon after he entered office equal to close to 5% of the federal budget at the time. Even with his defense buildup — which won the Cold War without firing a shot — total federal spending declined from a high of 23.5% of GDP in 1983 to 21.3% in 1988 and 21.2% in 1989. That’s a real reduction in the size of government relative to the economy of 10%.

Obama last night also taunted Republican critics of his budget, saying, “we haven’t seen an alternative budget out of them.” But next week when Congress starts debating the budget, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), the ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee, will present precisely such an alternative budget. Then we will see what we could have had if we hadn’t elected left-wing extremists to the White House and to run the Congress.

Watch What You Say Mr. Obama

The Perspective: It's Back....

Now that President Obama has taken the “Harry Truman pledge” about the economy by saying “The buck stops with me,” it also seems appropriate for him to take the “Colin Powell pledge” by acknowledging of himself, “Once you break it, you are going to own it.”

The first quote is a paraphrase of the sign on former President Truman’s desk reading, “The buck stops here” and the second is what former Secretary of State Powell says he told President Bush in 2002 about the danger of invading Iraq. Powell told The Atlantic magazine:

…what I did say was…once you break it, you are going to own it, and we’re going to be responsible for 26 million people standing there looking at us…And it’s going to take all the oxygen out of the political environment …

The real problem with Obama and the sentiments expressed in the two quotes above is that while the president would pay a political price by failing to turn around the economy, the buck actually stops with taxpayers and if the economy becomes even more broken we, the taxpayers, will own the consequences.

The total tab for taxpayers is already mind-boggling. So far, it includes the $410-billion omnibus spending bill (with more than 8,500 earmarks) that Obama signed on March 11. Then there’s the $787-billion economic stimulus bill which passed with no Republican support in the House and only three Republican votes in the Senate. On Friday, the Congressional Budget Office predicted that the president’s proposed budget would produce a $9.3-trillion deficit during the period from 2010-19. That’s $2.3 trillion worse than the White House predicted in its budget and, if accurate, would make the deficit unsustainable, according to the president’s own budget director!

Further raising the stakes is a new program announced on Monday by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner that would partner the Federal Reserve, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Treasury Department with private investors to buy from banks at a discount up to $1 trillion in deeply distressed (aka “toxic”) assets—mostly from soured mortgage loans—with the goal of finally properly pricing the assets and then, hopefully, selling them at a profit in the future. Hopefully.

According to The Wall Street Journal this past weekend:

“To encourage investors to buy those assets, the U.S. government will offer lucrative subsidies and shoulder much of the risk.”

That risk and other unknowns in all of this are staggering. Not since the Great Depression have we bet “the house”— “the house” being the economy—to this extent.

Both the danger and the opportunity of the situation take on additional meaning when you look into the origin of Truman’s phrase. “The buck stops here” derives from the expression “pass the buck.” In frontier days, during poker games, a knife with a buckhorn handle was placed in front of the person meant to deal next and if they didn’t want to, they “passed the buck.”

We’ve let Obama do the dealing and the stack of chips he’s gambling with is huge. — After all it’s our money and our nest eggs! The president could bankrupt our country (as New Hampshire Republican Senator Judd Gregg warned recently) or his plans could help it rebound, as Christina Romer, head of the White House Council of Economic Advisors has predicted.

How capable a player is Obama? What does he have in his hand? Does he “know when to hold ‘em and know when to fold ‘em”? Is he truly a poker playing champion or a cocky card sharp? Basically, will he turn out to be safe bet or a terrible risk?

There’s no doubt, if you review the period since his election last November, his moves since becoming president, his most recent book advance and his future earnings as a celebrity, Obama certainly has a talent for getting and using other people’s money. That’s a fist bump for him. But what will it be for us?

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman claims credit for labeling the idea behind Powell’s as the “Pottery Barn rule” in a February 12, 2003 column and says he also referred to it as the Pottery Barn Rule in speeches. Pottery Barn is a chain of home furnishing stores which denies having a “you break it, you own it” rule, but rather (like many retailers) writes off merchandise broken by customers as a loss.

Perhaps Pottery Barn can afford to write off those losses. Can we? When it comes to the economic crisis and Obama’s other plans in areas including health care, education, energy and the environment, will the president end up being as destructive as “a bull in a china shop” or as nimble as a cat treading quietly through a Pottery Barn store?

Speaking about the AIG bonuses that have caused such an uproar Obama said, “Ultimately, I’m responsible, I’m the president of the United States.” Then he said, “We’ve got a big mess that we’re having to clean up.”

The question is, will Obama clean up the mess or add to it? Our fortunes—in every sense of the word—are riding on the outcome of that gamble.