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The Golf War
By Maj. Gen. Jerry R. Curry (ret'd)
curryforamerica.com
Since November of 2008 – nearly a whole year – President Barack Obama and his advisors have been mulling over what the war strategy in Afghanistan should be. The Bush Administration carefully reviewed the situation in Afghanistan and in January passed on to Obama its best estimate as to what it would take to win the war in Afghanistan. At Obama’s request, they did not make their recommendations public.
Next, Obama hand picked his own man to lead the war, General Stanley A. McChrystal, and asked him to review the Bush team’s conclusions and to do his own review and evaluation. In the meantime, supposedly, Obama would do his own review and by August -- when McChrystal returned with his recommendations -- would be ready to make and implement a decision so the war could be brought to a favorable conclusion.
Unfortunately, the sad truth is that Mr. Obama isn’t accustomed to making timely decisions, especially those that have to do with life and death. And our soldiers, who are risking their lives on the battlefields of Afghanistan, are beginning to suspect that something’s amiss. They know that professionals make decisions while amateurs strategize and deliberate.
In war soldiers maintain high morale only if they are convinced that their leaders know what they are doing. Dithering over decisions does not breed trust. For a year American soldiers on the battlefields of Afghanistan have had to hold down the pause button while listening to a grown man whine about what a lousy job his predecessor did and how difficult his inherited challenges and decisions are.
Now the soldiers feel that it’s time for the new president to show what he’s got. Sadly, they are beginning to recognize that the president doesn’t so much need more time to revise strategy as he needs the determination to implement it and that Afghanistan is not a quagmire of war, only a quagmire of indecision at the White House level.
Freedom isn’t free. It is purchased with the blood of those in the military who stand their ground and face death for their country. Someone once said that when men die, and in war some must, you cannot strategize them to their death you must lead them there. The ability or inability to make difficult and timely decisions is the cornerstone of leadership and indicative of the caliber and quality of any administration. Now is the time for Mr. Obama to show that he can be a war time leader and a trustworthy Commander-in-Chief.
According to a journalist who keeps track of such things, Barack Obama has played more golf – 24 times -- in his ten months as president than President Bush did in his eight years. It takes about 3 hours to play 18 holes of golf at Fort Belvoir – Obama’s favorite Sunday afternoon pastime -- with the Secret Service clearing the way. So far Obama has dedicated about 72 hours to his golf game.
During this time he, supposedly, has met about a half dozen times with members of his national security team to discuss, strategize and shape Afghan War policy. As best it can be determined, the shortest national security meeting he had was for about a half hour with General McChrystal. Meetings since then have lasted between an hour and two hours. Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and say that all six of his national security meetings regarding Afghanistan have lasted for at least three hours each.
This means that in his ten months as president, he has spent fewer than twenty hours working on Afghanistan War strategy. Let’s see, 72 hours versus twenty. That spells out fairly well the focus of Obama’s priorities as president, does it not? So it is understandable why some of our soldiers and diplomats are beginning to question his lack of a sense of urgency and his reasons for making Afghanistan his war of necessity.
In wartime the president’s first responsibility is to protect the military under his command, not to improve his golf score. Does anyone really wonder why Obama hasn’t been able to nail down a strategy for the war in Afghanistan? If it took his sergeants and lieutenants as long to make their decisions as it does Obama to make his, we would have long since lost the wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
Does his strange sense of priorities engender
confidence in the families of and in the military forces who are daily risking
their lives for our country in Iran and Afghanistan or does it, rather, only
embolden and encourage our enemies?