He’s In Love With Jim Jones Whoah
Clearly, the most noteworthy thing about General Jim Jones, apparently Barack Obama’s choice to be National Security Adviser, is that for someone about to get such an important post very little is known about him. But due to some weird conventions of newspapering, Helene Cooper can’t make that the lede of her Jones profile. A daily newspaper reporter needs to file her stories when she needs to file them, and she needs to project understanding of the situation.
But the truth is that her reporting seems to have revealed essentially nothing about Jones’ view of the major issues of the day, nothing about Jones’ views of Robert Gates and Hillary Clinton, nothing about Jones’ conception of the role of National Security Adviser, and strikingly little about how Obama ever came to be in the position of considering Jones for such high-level post. And this is through no fault of hers. Nobody knows anything! He’s a career military guy who wasn’t known during that time for doing much “off the record” sharing of his views on policy issues — he followed orders, impressed people enough to keep getting promoted, and either kept his views to himself or else only shared them with people who are extremely tight-lipped.
34 Responses to “He’s In Love With Jim Jones Whoah”
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November 29th, 2008 at 10:43 am
He has a great name. How could someone named “Jim Jones” not be a good guy?
November 29th, 2008 at 11:02 am
I read somewhere he was against the Iraq War and told Bush to his face not to go. Also he’s a marine. Those two are good enough for me.
November 29th, 2008 at 11:08 am
Matt:
Um…
Seems to me that that in itself is the highest qualification.
November 29th, 2008 at 11:26 am
Exactly, jfx. The tight-lipped thing in particular seems to be a key qualification for Obama when it comes to anything to do with sensitive information.
It’s also a very interesting reinterpretation of the NSA’s role. No longer the high profile neocon or war-hawk academic. Instead, someone who is used to operating in a much more pragmatic paradigm. A more modest role, overall.
November 29th, 2008 at 11:33 am
what, no mention of the fact that he bikes to work?
though the toby keith thing is unfortunate
November 29th, 2008 at 11:38 am
Read the Iraq report that the Jones group produced in early Sept. 2007. It was slightly less sanguine than what Petraeus laid on Congress a few days later, but it clearly was as much a political operation in its own way. The report purported to be “independent”, a laughable claim given the group’s personnel, their dependence on Pentagon information, and their obvious determination to boost the president’s policies.
For example, as I pointed out at the time, the Jones report pretended that the Iraqi Air Force and Navy were making good progress - when in fact both were (and are) virtually non-existent. Without either, of course, Iraq will never be able to wean itself of American support. And surely that’s the purpose of delaying the rebuilding of those two services.
So I think we can safely conclude that Gen. Jones is highly political. Whether he tells presidents in private the unpleasant truths he won’t speak in public is anybody’s guess.
November 29th, 2008 at 12:01 pm
Most forced and unsuccessful Clash reference ever. That is all.
November 29th, 2008 at 12:14 pm
this sheds a bit more light:
http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=37a35a8f-5582-47fc-867c-03e8a211122f
November 29th, 2008 at 12:15 pm
I for one was impressed by the Clash reference and found it highly successful.
November 29th, 2008 at 12:44 pm
FWIW, I’m with Spencer on this. If there is such a thing as an unsuccessful Clash reference, this aint it.
November 29th, 2008 at 2:31 pm
I dunno, from Obama’s campaign statement objecting to counterproductive air strikes, I suspect he’s a Bill Lind fan. Besides being Colonel John Boyd’s Boswell, Lind once worked as a Senate defense advisor to Robert Taft, Jr. and then Gary Hart.
http://d-n-i.net/lind/lind_10_03_06.htm
http://books.google.com/books?id=_1WOIVqk3Z8C&pg=RA1-PA111&lpg=RA1-PA111&dq=%22james+jones%22+marine+%22Lind%22&source=bl&ots=1vvjFw08hR&sig=qbgP2tmuCRpd0Oo3DWPbStE7pNg&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=5&ct=result#PRA1-PA111,M1
November 29th, 2008 at 3:56 pm
This is from the Times coverage in Sept 2007 of Jones’ Senate testimony about the report on the readiness of Iraqi security forces:
I guess Helene Cooper couldn’t find that. Nor could she find mention of Jones’ campaign appearance with McCain.
November 29th, 2008 at 4:36 pm
“I dunno, from Obama’s campaign statement objecting to counterproductive air strikes, I suspect he’s a Bill Lind fan.”
If Obama was a William Lind “fan”, he wouldn’t have said anything he said about Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan, because Lind is against all that crap.
Lind predicted that if the US attacked Iran, we could conceivably lose our entire military force in Iraq. And he’s right, although the probability is low.
And Lind would never support a “surge” in Afghanistan.
Oh, but Matt Yglesias is in favor - and he’s got a degree in philosophy from Harvard!
Three Experts Warn Obama About Escalating in Afghanistan
By Greg Mitchell
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/columns/pressingissues_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003896090
Out of the frying pan into the fire? In today’s New York Times, three columnists — including a guy named Rumsfeld — warn that a “surge” in Afghanistan could last decades and/or not even be worth it or make matters worse, while our economy collapses.
(November 23, 2008) — Out of the frying pan into the fire? In his race for the White House, Barack Obama called long and often for sending many more troops to Afghanistan (even before we withdraw quite a few from Iraq). It was a required thing to say on the campaign trail to show toughness and also to make the politically winning point that President Bush had fought the wrong war, in Iraq, when we had not yet cleaned out
Afghanistan.
Did he really mean it? If so, is it really the right thing to do, especially with our chief national security threat now coming from within – in the form of our economic crisis?
The New York Times today presents a host of op-eds on Iraq and
Afghanistan, including one from a guy named Rumsfeld and another from someone called Chalabi. The ones related to the Afghan conflict should raise questions for readers, and I hope, the Obama team. Just this morning, the Karzai government revealed that Obama had called the nation’s leader and pledged to increase U.S. support. The NATO commander wants to nearly double troop strength there.
This past August, I devoted a column here to this subject after a brief flurry of front-page articles on Afghanistan arrived to mark U.S. deaths there finally hitting the 500 mark. The war in Afghanistan, long overlooked, is now getting more notice, I observed, before asking: “But does that mean the U.S., finally starting (perhaps) to dig out of Iraq,
should now commit to another open-ended war, even for a good cause, not so far away?”
Nearly everyone in the media, and on the political stage, still calls this the “good war.” Obama has even said “we must win” there. But it’s the same question we have faced in Iraq: What does he define as “winning”? How much are we willing to expend (in lives lost and money) at a time of a severe budget crunch and overstretched military?
Shouldn’t the native forces — and NATO — be doing more? And what about Pakistan? And so on.
We’ve been fighting there even longer than in Iraq, if that seems possible. Now do want to jump out of a frying pan into that fire in an open-ended way?
Few voices in the mainstream media – and even in the liberal blogosphere – have tackled this subject, partly because of long arguing for the need to fight the “good war” as opposed to the “bad war.” But now some very respected commentators – with impeccable pro-military credentials – are starting to sound off on the dangers.
Back in August, I was reduced to quoting Thomas Friedman from a recent New York Times column: “The main reason we are losing in Afghanistan is not because there are too few American soldiers, but because there are not enough Afghans ready to fight and die for the kind of government we want….Obama needs to ask himself honestly: ‘Am I for sending more troops to Afghanistan because I really think we can win there, because I really think that that will bring an end to terrorism, or am I just doing it because to get elected in America, post-9/11, I have to be for winning some war?’”
And I reprinted at length comments from Joseph L. Galloway, the legendary war reporter, based largely on a recent paper written by Gen. Barry McCaffrey after his tour of the war zone. McCaffrey had said “we can’t shoot our way out of Afghanistan, and the two or three or more American combat brigades proposed by the two putative nominees for president are irrelevant.” Galloway noted sardonically: “We can’t afford
to fail in Afghanistan, the general says, but he doesn’t address the question of whether we can afford to succeed there, either.”
Now the New York Times today presents several cautionary views. Here are three of them, hardly a group of lefty peaceniks.
*Anthony Cordesman, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic And International Studies:
“[N]o one involved believes that the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan’s northern territories can be fully won, or even transferred to Afghan and Pakistani hands, by even the end of President Obama’s first term. For at least the next two to three years, the war will intensify, and virtually all of the additional burden will be borne by the United States.
“Leaks of a new National Intelligence Estimate have shown that we are now losing the war for several reasons: a lack of Afghan competence; a half-hearted Pakistani commitment to the fight; a shortage of American, NATO and International Security Assistance Force troops; too few aid workers; and nation-building programs that were designed for peacetime
and are rife with inefficiency and fraud….As things stand, it will almost certainly take until 2011 to bring enough military advisers into Afghanistan to train its army and police forces to the level where locals can replace international troops. And with increasing terrorist attacks on non-governmental groups, many aid workers are being forced to leave the country.”
Rory Slaughter, former British Foreign Service officer:
“Afghanistan does not matter as much as Barack Obama thinks. Terrorism is not the key strategic threat facing the United States. America, Britain and our allies have not created a positive stable environment in the Middle East. We have no clear strategy for dealing with China. The financial crisis is a more immediate threat to United States power and to other states; environmental catastrophe is more dangerous for the
world. And even from the perspective of terrorism, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are more lethal.
“President-elect Obama’s emphasis on Afghanistan and his desire to send more troops and money there is misguided. Overestimating its importance distracts us from higher priorities, creates an unhealthy dynamic with the government of Afghanistan and endangers the one thing it needs — the
stability that might come from a patient, limited, long-term
relationship with the international community. ..
“When the decision was made to increase troops in 2005, there was no insurgency. But as NATO became increasingly obsessed with transforming the country and brought in more money and troops to deal with corruption and the judiciary, warlords and criminals, insecurity in rural areas and narcotics, it failed. In fact, things got worse. These new NATO troops encountered a fresh problem — local Taliban resistance — which has drawn
them into a counterinsurgency campaign.”
Donald Rumsfeld, former secretary of defense:
“President Bush’s decision to increase combat troop levels in Iraq in January 2007 sent a clear message that he was determined not to abandon a people to death squads and terrorists. We will need the same commitment to helping the people of Afghanistan succeed, but that does not mean we will achieve it with the same tactics or strategies.
“The way forward in Afghanistan will need to reflect the current circumstances there — not the circumstances in Iraq two years ago. Additional troops in Afghanistan may be necessary, but they will not, by themselves, be sufficient to lead to the results we saw in Iraq. A similar confluence of events that contributed to success in Iraq does not appear to exist in Afghanistan.
“What’s needed in Afghanistan is an Afghan solution, just as Iraqi solutions have contributed so fundamentally to progress in Iraq. And a surge, if it is to be successful, will need to be an Afghan surge.
Left unanswered in the current debate is the critical question of how thousands of additional American troops might actually bring long-term stability to Afghanistan — a country 80,000 square miles larger than Iraq yet with security forces just one-fourth the size of Iraq’s. Afghanistan also lacks Iraq’s oil and other economic advantages. It is plagued by the narcotics trade. Its borders are threatened by terrorist sanctuaries in Pakistan. Fractured groups of Pashtun tribesmen on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border do not yet appear willing to unite and take on the insurgents in their midst, as Arab tribes did in Iraq.
“Further, Afghanistan has a long history of defeating foreign armies that sought strength in numbers. The Soviet Union tried to occupy Afghanistan with hundreds of thousands of troops — and withdrew, defeated and broken. More United States troops could raise tensions, particularly in Afghanistan’s Pashtun south, where the insurgency is strongest…
“In a few weeks, the new commander in chief, Barack Obama, will assume the responsibility of leading a nation at a time of war. Time and flexibility are the two constants of military success. In a struggle with an adaptable, thinking enemy, there is no single template for success. More is not always better. One size does not fit all.”
Greg Mitchell (gmitchell@editorandpublisher.com) is editor. His most recent book, on Iraq and the media, is “So Wrong for So Long.”
November 29th, 2008 at 6:42 pm
I learned about Jim Jones from his Myspace page:
http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=229489777
November 30th, 2008 at 1:05 am
RSH has a point here, though Mitchell misnames Rory Stewart. Stewart’s interview with Chris Lydon, in which he strongly argues against any kind of ’surge’ strategy in Afghanistan, is worth a listen.
November 30th, 2008 at 4:56 am
Here’s a Charlie Rose interview:
http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/8415
November 30th, 2008 at 2:11 pm
The world needs more Clash references right now. Hell, the world needs The Clash right now.
November 30th, 2008 at 9:56 pm
RSH,
Politically, being against the Iraq war means you’re in favor of the Afghanistan war, there’s no political angle being against Iraq and Afghanistan, Lind pointed out (and Obama echoed) that air strikes just make more enemies. An obvious point to be sure, but who else has come out and said that?
December 1st, 2008 at 5:06 am
I read somewhere he was against the Iraq War and told Bush to his face not to go.
Good for him. At least he didn’t drink the Kool-Aid, then.
December 1st, 2008 at 4:44 pm
Expanding on what jfxgillis (#3) said. A general gets where s/he is by being politically astute. This means that OPSEC ain’t just good policy, it’s the way to get ahead.
December 2nd, 2008 at 10:39 am
I was in the Marine Corps when he was commandant and my impression was that his political views were moderate. For the time he was the Commandant of the Marine Corps, everything was running smooth. In 2002 Marines were being sent to Iraq, prior to the official declaration of the war in 2003. Things were good, there was progress being made in the beginning of the war then shortly after Gen. Jones was assigned to a different duty prior to retiring things started going downhill in Iraq and look we’re still there. Obviously if he got to be in charge of the entire Marine Corps he was more than qualified. His leadership is unlike any other and his experiences will make him suceed in his new position. I believe he is more than qualified, although many of you that have never been in the military may not understand what his qualifications are, but trust me, he has the necessary experience.
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The Israelis are nervous about him.
He must be have testicular fortitude then!!
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