Soccer Dad

The gates memo

A week and a half ago President Obama said:

"I really have no response to that. The last I checked, Sarah Palin is not much of an expert on nuclear issues," Obama said in an interview with ABC News. Pressed further on Republican criticism that his strategy restricts the use of nuclear weapons too much, Obama added: "What I would say to them is, is that if the secretary of defense and the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff are comfortable with it, I'm probably going to take my advice from them and not from Sarah Palin."

I agreed with Don Surber's comment at the time that the President's complaint had the quality of playground taunt.

Now it appears that the Secretary of Defense isn't necessarily comfortable with President Obama's nuclear strategy (via memeorandum).

But in his memo, Mr. Gates wrote of a variety of concerns, including the absence of an effective strategy should Iran choose the course that many government and outside analysts consider likely: Iran could assemble all the major parts it needs for a nuclear weapon -- fuel, designs and detonators -- but stop just short of assembling a fully operational weapon.

In that case, Iran could remain a signatory of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty while becoming what strategists call a "virtual" nuclear weapons state.

(Yes this memo reportedly was written three months ago, but has the President's strategy has changed since then?)

Allahpundit comments on the revelations (h/t Instapundit):

Of course they didn't prepare alternatives. How could they possibly fathom that diplomacy might fail? The core plank of "smart power," such as it is, has always been the Obama charm offensive. Simply by being the anti-Bush and offering an open hand to Iran, he would convince Tehran to unclench its fist and open a dialogue. Bush was the problem (he always is!) and once the problem was removed, solutions would inevitably follow. So why bother developing a Plan B? The result: Iran's now enriching uranium to 20 percent purity and rolling out advanced centrifuges, which means nuclear "breakout" capacity, i.e. the ability to build a bomb quickly even if they haven't yet done so, won't be long in coming.

Now perhaps you could convince me that the President does have a plan as does Walter Russell Mead:

This fact of life is good news for American diplomacy, and President Obama is right to press home the advantage. We can sincerely argue for the abolition of nuclear weapons; Henry Kissinger has done as much. It's not a bluff, because with the right kind of verification -- difficult as that might be to do -- we could happily sign a treaty banning nukes and as long as nobody else cheated, we wouldn't either. And in any case, it is perfectly safe: some of the other nuclear states need the ugly things much more than we do, so it is very unlikely that all our talk about nuclear disarmament will ever force us to give anything up. Russia and China are unlikely to put us to the test by agreeing to abolish their nuclear arsenals and submitting to intense inspections to make sure they stay in compliance.

In the meantime, talking about our sincere anti-nuclear vision is excellent politics. Public opinion around the world hates and fears nuclear weapons; why not harvest goodwill by coming out against them? More, the NPT (non-proliferation treaty) requires nuclear states to move toward disarmament. It also emphasizes the right of all states to the peaceful development of nuclear energy. If we want to strengthen the enforcement mechanisms in that treaty to help us deal with countries like Iran and North Korea in the future, it helps to show that we as a nuclear state are finally serious about the goal of nuclear disarmament -- and sensitive to the needs of more countries to develop civilian nuclear programs. And it makes us look peaceful, reasonable and creative as we gear up for to put more pressure on Iran.

But Jim Hoagland makes me suspicious.

President Obama has turned the once utopian-sounding idea of global nuclear disarmament into a useful tool for U.S. foreign policy. His well-conceived, confidently executed three-part movement in statecraft this month should banish the notion that Obama's ambitious nuclear goals spring from naiveté or inexperience.

In the space of two weeks, the president put his own stamp on the Nuclear Posture Review released by the Pentagon on April 6, closed the deal on a modest but necessary strategic-arms treaty with Russia and then hosted a 47-nation summit that adopted his view that nuclear terrorism poses the biggest single threat to global stability.

Hoagland's column is amazingly uncritical. Everything Obama did was brilliant. But here's the giveaway, that the column is less Hoagland the columnist than Hoagland the cheerleader.

He set an important example for his peers by taking control of the drafting of the Nuclear Posture Review -- a document few if any of his predecessors bothered even to read fully, experts tell me. He has accepted presidential responsibility and authority for shaping the nuclear weapons and strategies that the United States will now develop or abandon.

"President Obama was making editing changes in the Nuclear Posture Review right up to the last minutes before it was to go to press," says William J. Perry, defense secretary in the Clinton administration and a member of a quartet of elder statesmen whose advocacy of nuclear disarmament has informed and influenced Obama's thinking.

Yikes. I would assume that the Nuclear Posture review is supposed to be a "professional" document, written by military and strategic professionals. By inserting himself into the document, President Obama has made it a political document. Think about how Hoagland or other columnists would have reacted if President Bush had done the same thing. Hoagland's praising President Obama for being engaged, but I think the praise has exposed President for interfering too much in the making of policy.

Again I'll turn to Walter Russell Mead who wrote this about President Bush and Iraq:

Looking back, it now seems to me that I was wrong on two points. First, the Iraqi WMD program was moribund. I believe Bush, Blair and Powell were all sincerely convinced that Iraq was actively pursuing WMD. But with the advantage of 20/20 hindsight it is clear that Iraq's WMD program was in a shambles, and that the decision-makers in the US and the UK did not look hard enough or skeptically enough at the evidence they had.

Remember how all the second guessers were talking about how Cheney was pressuring the CIA to give the administration the intelligence it wanted? Mead's criticism seems fair, but it doesn't represent the bulk of the criticism aimed at Bush.

Now President Obama appears to have gone way beyond the scope of his job to change the country's nuclear doctrine. Are Bush's critics going to complain? Or is the issue really results not process?

Given the uncritical nature of Hoagland's column it seems like it's administration spin intended to deflect the questions that Secretary Gates raised. This is the way politics is played. Defend your record by enlisting the aid of a friendly columnist. Still I think that Hoagland told us a bit too much.

Are Gates's days as Secretary of Defense now numbered?