This excerpt from Woodward’s (sigh) new book is precisely the sort of thing I was talking about earlier:
In Woodward’s account, even after Obama decided to send 30,000 more troops, the Pentagon kept coming back with plans involving 40,000. Even after he decided not to pursue an all-out counterinsurgency campaign, the Pentagon kept coming back with plans involving just that.
Obama also kept asking his generals for more options to consider. They were playing the old trick of giving the president three pseudo-options — two that were clearly unacceptable (in this case, 80,000 more troops for full counterinsurgency and 10,000 troops just to train Afghan soldiers) and the one in the middle that they wanted (40,000 more troops). They never gave him another option. When Gen. James “Hoss” Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, drew up a compromise plan involving 20,000 troops (believing the president had a right to see a wide span of options, even if the military didn’t agree with them), Mullen forbade him from taking it outside the Pentagon. Obama never saw it.
In the end, Woodward reveals, Obama devised his own alternative strategy and personally wrote out its terms in a six-page, single-spaced memo that he made his top civilian and military advisers read and sign on to.
Recall that this same group of generals and their proxies were simultaneously waging a press-based war using damaging leaks against the President in the hopes of forcing his hand towards their preferred outcome(s).
Now flip that to an entity that you can’t engage publicly in any way. That only the smallest subset of your advisers can even know about. And that issues you memos each and every day telling you “They’re coming!”, any one of which may turn out to be your “bin Laden determined to strike in US,” so you can’t just shut these folks out, distrustful though you may be of both them and their data, spiteful as you are of their heavy handed and blowback-inducing approaches: they own your ass. That’s what it is to be President. Even when you’re one who knows his Constitution well enough to recoil at the thought of the very extra-judicial extermination of inconvenient citizens these folks are pitching.
The only real option seems to be to contain this apparatus everywhere you can, wait for the excess and overuse to explode, and then try to ratchet this thing down. Or another large-scale attack occurs that ratchets it up even further. Or a military coup when the economy utterly collapses. Whichever.
Lemkin 