Reflections by Comrade Fidel
THE EMPIRE FROM INSIDE
(PART FIVE)
CHAPTERS 28 and 29
Obama came down
from the residence and saw Biden. Biden advised him: “What you’re about to do is a
presidential order; it is no longer an issue of continuing a discussion. This
is not what you think. This is an order. Without them, we’re locked
into in
Obama
answered: “I’m not signing on to a failure. If what I propose is not
working, I’m not going to be like these other
presidents and stick to it based on my ego or my politics, my political
security. This is what I’m going to announce”, and he distributed copies of his
six-page terms sheet.
“There’s going to
be a 30,000-troop surge. In December of 2010, there would be an assessment to
see what’s working and was not. In July 2011
we’re going to begin to thin out.”
“In 2010 we will
not be having a conversation of how to do more. There would be no repeat
of what had happened that year… This is neither counterinsurgency nor
nation building. The costs are prohibitive”, Obama stated.
The military had
gotten almost everything they were asking for.
Petraeus and Mullen
ratified their support for the president. Emmanuel was concerned about the cost
of the operation–more than 30 billion dollars.
Biden acknowledged that
that wasn’t a negotiation; it was an order by the
commander in chief. It was a mission change, and if that wasn’t how it was perceived, the months of work spent on
this job couldn’t be justified.
The president
informed Eikenberry and McChrystal
of his decision via a video-conference. Both
agreed.
Biden was convinced
that the president had hammered a stake into the heart of the expanded
counterinsurgent offensive.
Petraeus said in private: “You have to recognize also that I don’t think you
win this war. I think you keep fighting. It’s a
little bit like
Obama gave his
speech at the Eisenhower Auditorium at
The next day,
Clinton and Gates appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee to speak
about the new plan.
Many Republicans
were troubled by the deadline of July 2011 when supposedly the troops would
begin to transfer out of
Petraeus later said that
strategy progress could take many forms, that all he needed was to show that
there had been advances and that would be sufficient to add time to the clock
and get what they needed.
Lute advised him
that that was a dramatic misreading of the president, that Obama was opposed to
the idea of long-term commitment.
CHAPTERS 30 and 31
On April 3rd, Petraeus met with Derek Harvey, his confidential
intelligence adviser.
He said that
election results had strengthened Karzai and that he
was now getting everything he wanted.
McChrystal’s troops hadn’t succeeded in clearing out the key areas. “The
enemy is just beginning to adapt”, added
On April 16th the president meets with the National Security Council
to analyze the up-dated information on
The president
began by asking about the situation in specific areas; in all of them, the
troops were seen to be resisting and in none of them
had responsibility been transferred to the local forces.
The pattern being established was clear. To resist, resist for
years without advancing or transfers.
Nobody at the
meeting dared to ask when the transfer would begin.
Donilon and Lute had
prepared some questions so that the president could concentrate on the
situation in Khandahar.
The president
recommended that McChrystal think about how we were
going to know if we were being successful and when we would know
that.
The result of the
meeting was the first strike for the general.
Brigadier General
Lawrence Nicholson visited Jones and Lute at the White House. Nicholson was reminded of the 12-month term he had to show progress
attained and to begin the transfer. When would the Marines be ready to do
something more, for example, enter Khandahar, or
return home and be part of those who would be returning in 2011?
Nicholson said he
needed at least another 12 months, and that was for the districts that were in
better shape. Lute reminded him that that hadn’t
been the commitment, that they still hadn’t entered the suburbs of Khandahar, the place where the Taliban were to establish
themselves. What was important was Khandahar.
Nicholson said
that maybe they could get there in 24 months if they eliminated the problem of
the poppy fields since that was what was feeding the insurgency.
Lute wondered how
they were going to achieve that. Despite the fact that a plague had wiped
out 33 percent of the crops, the outlook for a reduced funding for the
insurgents was remote. In spite of the Afghan conspiracy theories, the
CIA had not yet developed an insect that would attack the poppy.
McChrystal was reporting
some advances, but when Lute got into the figures, the reality was quite
different.
CHAPTERS 32 and 33
Sixteen very rough
months had gone by for Dennis Blair. He had failed in his efforts to name
the chief intelligence officer in each of the capitals. The CIA had won
and the feud had become public. In his opinion, the CIA was using the
President’s Daily Brief so that Obama could learn about their triumphs.
Blair was feeling
so frustrated that on one occasion he said: “I think the CIA is fundamentally
an organization that’s like a really finely train not very smart, dangerous
animal that needs to be controlled very closely by adults”.
In May of 2010,
Obama had asked Jones and others if it wasn’t already
time to get rid of Blair. There had been many discussions with the CIA and
Blair had put on a lot of pressure for the signing of a no-spying agreement
with the French, something that was opposed by Obama
and the rest of the cabinet.
Obama phoned him
and let him know of his decision to fire him. That he should present some
personal excuse.
Blair was deeply
offended. He wasn’t ill, his family was fine,
and he had been telling people that he would stay as DNI for four years,
because part of the problem with the office was the constant turnover at the
top.
On June 21, Gates
informs Jones about the article printed about McChrystal in Rolling Stone magazine. McChrystal was saying that Jones was a “clown” who had been
stuck in the year 1985; that Obama’s strategy wanted
to sell an unsellable position.
McChrystal called Biden and acknowledged that he had jeopardized the
mission. He apologized to Holbrooke and
presented his resignation to Gates.
Gates proposed to
Obama that he criticize McChrystal in the first two
paragraphs of his statement saying “I think that
the general committed a significant mistake and exercised poor judgement”.
Obama accepted McChrystal’s resignation and proposed Petraeus
for that position.
Obama met with Petraeus for 40 minutes.
On Wednesday June
23rd, the president announced the changes. He acknowledged McChrystal’s long service record and said that he was
saddened to lose a soldier whom he had gotten to respect and admire. He
added that Petraeus “is setting an extraordinary
example of service and patriotism by assuming this difficult post”. And he concluded saying: “I welcome debate among my
team, but I won’t tolerate division”
At the interview
Obama had with the author of the book, the president spoke of his ideas
regarding the nature of the war and his efforts to limit and eventually end the
American´s combat role in
He was asked about which scene he would start a book or a movie
on how he had handled the
Obama agreed that
the nature of the war was the cost, the time and the undetermined consequences,
and he quoted a famous American who had said on one occasion: “War is
hell”. He was referring to the phrase uttered by the Union Civil War
General, William Tecumseh Sherman, when he said: “…And
once the dogs of war are unleashed, you don’t know where it’s going to
lead”.
“When I entered
into office, we had two wars taking place”, said Obama. I tried to clear up the
chaos.
“It is very easy
to imagine a situation in which in the absence of a clear strategy, we ended up
staying in
At the end of the
interview, the president realized that almost the entire article was hinging on
relations between civilian and military leaders, and he thought he ought to
express his own opinions.
“I am probably the
first president who is young enough that the Vietnam War wasn’t at the core of
my development”. He was
“So I grew up with
none of the baggage that arouse out of the dispute of the Vietnam War. I
was also had a lot of confidence, I guess, coming in that the way our system of
government works civilians have to make political decisions. And
the military carries them out…I also don’t see it as a hawk/dove kind of thing...So a lot of the
political frames through which these debates are being viewed don’t really connect
with me generationally. I’m neither intimidated by our military, nor
am I thinking that they’re somehow trying to undermine my role as commander in
chief”.
In this final
paragraph of Obama’s conversation with Woodward, the
president of the
There are moments
when the pressure of the military is strong, persistent and repetitive.
We can perceive the image of a president who is being
resisted and challenged, as it happened in ancient
But in ancient Roman
times, the planet was totally unknown in its dimensions, physical
characteristics and spatial location. At that time they
lacked firearms; there was no trade or global investment, military bases, naval
and air forces on a planetary level, hundreds of satellites, instantaneous
communications, tens of thousands of nuclear weapons along with radioelectric, electromagnetic and cybernetic weapons;
mighty rivalries between powers with nuclear weapons, whose deployment, by
those who have less, would be sufficient to put an end to human life; and
almost seven billion people who need planet Earth’s natural resources.
It is quite a
dramatic picture. On the one hand, Barack Obama, a
successful lawyer, highly educated and a consummate speaker, and on the other
hand, highly professionalized soldiers, trained all their lives in the use of
force and the arts of war, endowed with weapons that can put an end to the
human beings living on this planet in just a matter of hours.
What hope for
humankind can we derive from this picture?
I remember Bush’s
speech at
In two of those
dark corners,
At the meetings of
the National Security Council with Obama, the fear of difficulties that are
even more serious, coming from a third country, Pakistan were being expressed.
Relations between
the CIA and Bin Laden, the leader of the “Arab group”, were going on right up
to the very day of the attack on the
What did the
Pakistani intelligence service, the ISI, inform the American CBS radio and TV
broadcasting network? That on September 10, Osama Bin Laden was
undergoing kidney dialysis treatment in the
That information was revealed in Dan Rather’s
superb program on
Knowing this
facilitates our comprehension of the reason why, in the dialogues with Obama in
the White House, it is stated that the most difficult
problem could come from
The person who
conversed with Obama most respectfully was General Colin Powell who belongs to
the Republican Party that opposed his election as the president of the
I hope that the
summary of the book “Obama’s Wars” has been useful to
the readers of my Reflections.
Fidel Castro Ruz