Which is worse: getting mentioned in a comprehensive analysis of what is wrong with the Obama White house or not getting mentioned? I guess it depends on your level of seniority. But I am guessing that National Security Advisor Jim Jones is done no favors by going unmentioned in this Financial Times story.

The FT article claims that President Obama's tight-knit core leadership team, primarily drawn from the campaign and from old Chicago hands, is responsible for the tactical and strategic missteps that have dogged the first-year of the administration. I was drawn to the Financial Times story by Steve Clemons's discussion of it on his blog. Clemons has very good sources within the Democratic Party and is a generally reliable bellwether for the mood of establishment Democrats on foreign policy. By blogging about the FT article and adding dishy tidbits of his own (such as catching Valerie Jarrett bowing out of a public speaking engagement because of "urgent duties" back at the White House only to turn up a few minutes later at a different Washington watering hole), Clemons explicitly endorses the central thesis and calls on President Obama to shake up his staff. If the underlying FT article is truly based on "dozens of interviews," apparently none of which is favorable to the White House team, and if Steve Clemons (and the faction he represents) is piling on, then things are in a bad way.

That's the bigger story. But when I read the underlying FT article, my eye was drawn to a smaller story, one that Clemons does not comment upon: General Jones is not mentioned at all in the FT article, neither favorably nor unfavorably. The article discusses national security -- specifically, the White House team's travails during the Afghan Strategy Review, the botched effort to close Guantanamo Bay, and the big trip to China -- but does not discuss the national security advisor.

In fact, when the article lists the heavy hitters who are big losers because of the undue influence of the Chicago/campaign team, General Jones is not mentioned:

Kathleen Sebelius, Mr. Obama's health secretary and formerly governor of Kansas, almost never appears on television and has been largely excluded both from devising and selling the healthcare bill. Others such as Ken Salazar, the interior secretary who is a former senator for Colorado, and Janet Napolitano, head of the Department for Homeland Security and former governor of Arizona, have virtually disappeared from view.

And again, when the article avoids mentioning Jones in a longer list of key advisors:

Among the broader circle that Mr. Obama also consults are the self-effacing Peter Rouse, who was chief of staff to Tom Daschle in his time as Senate majority leader; Jim Messina, deputy chief of staff; the economics team led by Lawrence Summers and including Peter Orszag, budget director; Joe Biden, the vice-president; and Denis McDonough, deputy national security adviser. But none is part of the inner circle.

By inference, the national security advisor is neither in the inner circle nor the outer circle. Where is he?

Anyone who has served in a White House will know that the reporting for stories such as these can be pretty sketchy. So Jones's absence could be less an indication of a breakdown in the role of the NSA and more an indication of a breakdown in the reporting (or editing) at the Financial Times. But if the article really does reflect the workings of the White House -- or at the very least, the informed view of insiders about the workings of the White House -- then General Jones's extremely low profile is really quite remarkable, and raises questions about whether the national security council staff (now known as the national security staff) is sufficiently empowered to fulfill its traditional role.

On the eve of Groundhog Day, it is worth asking whether President Obama's terrorism policy is facing six more weeks of bitter chill. Obama has been forced to backtrack on several signature initiatives -- the commitment to close Guantanamo by Jan. 19, 2010, the commitment to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a civilian court in lower Manhattan, and the hounding of Department of Justice lawyers from the Bush era over interrogation-related rulings -- and it has gotten so bad that over at Politico.com they are asking whether Obama's entire terrorism policy is unraveling. It does appear that the triangulation at the heart of Obama's terrorism policy is in trouble, but it is not yet clear what will replace it.

Since the earliest days of his administration, Obama has attempted a deft triangulation: he has rhetorically framed his terrorism policy as a bold departure from the Bush era, but he has kept the lion's share of the terrorism policy infrastructure that was operative under the second-term Bush administration. The "change" was dramatized with high-profile moves drenched in symbolism -- the promise to close Guantanamo, the promise to investigate "abuses" from the Bush era, the release of inflammatory material over the objections of his CIA director, or the insistence on talking about terrorism with the language of law enforcement rather than war. The "continuity" was played down with quiet steps, like using Bush era arguments against habeas corpus or defending military commissions, and less quiet steps like a robust Predator drone strike campaign.

The triangulation worked as long as the media played along, letting Obama's caricature of Bush era policies go unchallenged, rebutting the occasional critique from conservatives like Vice President Cheney by listing areas of continuity, and crediting the symbolic changes with all sorts of positive results like the improvement in global polling on America's reputation.

This triangulation survived the nicks of a number of self-inflicted wounds, most notably the early recognition that the Guantanamo promise had been naïve. But it does not look like it will survive the harsh klieg light attention paid to Obama's terrorism policy in the wake of the Underwear Bomber.

The triangulation depended on Obama having found the Goldilocks strategy -- keeping all the good parts of Bush policies and making changes that only improve, without undermining, those policies. Obama, in reversing course on so many issues, is now implicitly conceding that the counter-terrorism porridge he had been serving was most definitely not "just right."  Indeed, the evidence suggests the contrary -- that the promulgation of "treat terrorism as a law enforcement rather than a war problem" produced the very problems Cheney and others worried about.

Former CIA Director Michael Hayden documents several vital errors.  First, the rush to Mirandize the Underwear Bomber, and the decision to do so without any input from responsible authorities, deprived officials of the chance to do a meaningful interrogation of the captured terrorist. Valuable and time-sensitive intelligence was lost, and is likely unrecoverable.  Second, the Obama administration had failed to stand up the new interrogation unit it claimed was needed to replace the "flawed" Bush approach,  and the Obama team had not even anticipated that the unit might be needed to interrogate terrorists caught on U.S. soil.

More remarkably, current NCTC Director Michael Leiter revealed in congressional testimony another vital error: in the days prior to the terrorist attack, the analysis units responsible for "connecting the dots" were distracted by the need to implement a 20 percent reduction-in-force -- cuts so deep that they would disrupt the effectiveness of any bureaucratic organization, at least temporarily.  The Obama administration has quietly rescinded those cuts and is instead beefing up the analytic capability, but not before the damage to triangulation politics has been done.

To my ear, the most telling indication of the collapse of the triangulation comes from the changed tone from congressional "moderates," centrist Democrats and Republicans who form the base for this Goldilocks approach. On the Democratic side, Senator Feinstein has been subtly but insistently messaging a wake-up call in the form of a warning that more terrorist attacks are in the offing.  On the Republican side, Senator Collins issued a blistering attack on Obama's terrorism policy.

If Obama has lost Feinstein and Collins, he has lost the political props of triangulation.  But the overall political damage to the president is not fatal for the simple reason that the national security damage done by the policies is not yet irreversible.  The administration has taken some good remedial steps, such as coming clean on the botched interrogation effort, rescinding the NCTC cuts, and changing the venue for the KSM trial.

Moreover, there is reason to hope that the Obama administration is now more focused on uncovering and preventing the next attack than in scoring partisan points with its witch hunts into Bush administration "missteps."

In this hopeful scenario, the Underwear Bomber is a "bing" moment enabling Obama to avoid the other Groundhog Day curse: repeating the same mistakes over and over again.

The foreign policy headline of the State of the Union speech is how far the president went to avoid generating a national security headline. In one of the longest of recent SOTU's, the president's speechwriters devoted some of the shortest space and least consequential language to national security.

The only national security news item was buried deep in a paragraph, masked with oblique language: the proposal to repeal Don't Ask, Don't Tell. Getting a Congress battered by health care and cap-and-trade to take up this controversial issue in an election year may require a larger expenditure of presidential political capital than Obama allotted in this one speech.

Most telling was the attempt to spin the Iran situation. Obama's Iran strategy has stalled. The diplomatic overtures, spurned. The international coalition, frayed and paralyzed. Even ardent supporters of Obama's Iran gambits are saying enough is enough. Most experts believe that 2010 will be the year of decision on Iran. Nothing in the SOTU speech hints that Obama's advisors are girding to prepare Americans and our partners for that debate.  

This will be a very consequential year for U.S. foreign policy, but little of that is foreshadowed in this speech.

I am looking forward to reading President Obama's National Security Strategy (NSS), which should be released early this year. The NSS is the authoritative account of the president's grand strategy -- how he sees the challenges and opportunities confronting the United States in the world today and what he intends to do about it.

It is important in ways that my FP colleague, Steve Walt, seems not to understand. The NSS is an invaluable window into the thinking of the president; even if early drafts are developed by lower-ranking staff, the president and senior-most presidential aides will scrub it closely, more closely than any other governmental white paper. Because it is not a speech, it can cover terrain and develop the "theory of the case" that no one would inflict upon a listening audience. Precisely because it is a public document, it must authentically reflect the administration's world-view; it is not a fortune cookie prediction of what the administration will do in any particular setting, but it is an authoritative statement of the principles that guide the president.

Read on

By Peter Feaver

The horrible tragedy in Haiti is an opportunity to put the Obama administration's mantra -- "you never want a serious crisis to go to waste" -- to the test. Reasonable people can debate whether the administration has wasted opportunities at home (the domestic economic crisis) or abroad (Iran political crisis). But in Haiti they get a fresh chance to apply that mantra.

Of course, the primary focus should be on getting aid as quickly as possible to the hundreds of thousands of Haitians who are suffering. The Obama administration's initial response has been adequate but hopefully is just a down-payment. More can and should be done and, I expect, will be done. 

But I also expect that there are more opportunities in this crisis than merely rushing in humanitarian aid (as important as that is). While the first-responders in the administration are straining every nerve to ramp up their efforts, I hope the strategic planners in the administration (who do not have operational responsibility for responding) are also busy thinking of ways to have the response to the crisis address more fundamental concerns.

The Bush administration's response to the late 2004 tsunami is instructive in this regard. Beyond meeting the initial humanitarian goals of helping alleviate the suffering, the Bush administration was able to have the U.S. response address three other goals:

(1) to reinforce a powerful counter-narrative to al Qaeda's propaganda that the United States was at war with Muslims. Al Qaeda's charge was never true -- no country has done more to defend and assist Muslims in recent decades than the United States -- but it resonated nonetheless. The irrefutable evidence of the United States taking the lead in helping the tsunami victims, many of whom were Muslim, and of doing more, faster than others were able to do (and doing it with military assets) still stands as the single greatest success in the ongoing war of ideas with what President Obama calls the network of violence and hatred.

(2) to demonstrate the utility of action-based multilateralism rather than deliberation-based multilateralism. Now that the label "coalitions of the willing" has been replaced with a more politically correct label of "minilateralism," the fashionable set of foreign policy pundits has finally embraced it. But, of course, this is precisely the kind of multilateralism that the Bush administration pursued all along, whether the issue was Iraq (the original coalition of the willing), Iran (P5+1), North Korea (6 Party Talks), Middle East Peace (the Quartet), WMD proliferation (Proliferation Security Initiative), or tsunami relief. It must be said, however, that no Bush effort at minilateralism worked as well as did the Regional Core Group, the ad hoc coalition created to lead the tsunami response and especially to provide the early bridge response before the older established agencies could get on the scene to do what they did best. The Regional Core Group is the best example of the action-oriented international cooperation the administration sought, often unsuccessfully, to promulgate.

(3) to help the Indonesian government reestablish responsible governance over regions, especially Aceh, that posed serious security problems before they were devastated by the tsunami. This goal has not been fully met, but the situation is better than what it had been and was an important opportunity that would otherwise not have been available.

I do not know what the similar opportunities are in the Haitian crisis, but I am confident that they exist. Haiti has been the victim of mismanagement and malgovernance for decades, producing misery no less profound than the dramatic pictures that we see today. Perhaps the earthquake has so broken the government that a whole new structure, one that will more closely approximate the goal of effective democracy -- human liberty, protected by democratic institutions -- can be established. Whatever the opportunities are, it should be the urgent priority of the strategic planners in the Obama administration to identify them and to sketch out ways of meeting them in the weeks and months to come.

Let us do everything we can to help Haiti, but let us not waste this serious crisis to do more than just meet the immediate first-aid needs.

UPDATE: Already, President Obama has made a good down-payment on the mantra by asking his two immediate predecessors to lead the bipartisan fundraising efforts for Haitian relief. This takes a page from Bush’s playbook -- he similarly asked his two predecessors (Clinton and Bush 41) to lead the disaster relief fundraising. More importantly, it is an excellent use of the crisis to get past the Anything But Bush syndrome that has afflicted the Obama Team this first year. President Bush’s decision to tap President Clinton for tsunami relief paved the way for the more intensive outreach across the aisle on foreign policy matters that characterized Bush’s second term (compared to the first). Perhaps Obama’s action will likewise pave the way for more intensive outreach to Republicans in Obama’s second year. 

By Peter Feaver

Lawrence Korb has an odd op-ed in today's Washington Post that warrants a quick response.  

Korb's thesis has two parts. Part I is that senior military officers should give their civilian bosses their candid professional opinion, even if it is not what civilians want to hear. I heartily agree. Part II is that the Chairman of the JCS, Admiral Mullen, has violated this precept and deserves public censure.

Part II is the "interesting" part of the argument and it is so interesting it borders on explosive: Korb is charging the chairman of the JCS with a dereliction of duty.  I don't think Korb makes this case and if I were Mullen I would demand a retraction.

Korb claims that Mullen misled the Congress in late 2007 when he was pressed about the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan and the priority then given to Iraq: "In Afghanistan, we do what we can. In Iraq, we do what we must," Mullen said. "There is a limit to what we can apply to Afghanistan."

Mullen's response clearly indicated that in his view, Afghanistan would require additional resources but that given the constraints Iraq had to take priority for now. This is precisely the sort of cross-theater risk analysis that the chairman is supposed to give; there is nothing wrong or surprising if it differs from the view of subordinate battlefield or theater commanders, nor if it happens to conform to the view of civilian superiors. On the face of it, then, the response was not derelict.

It might have been derelict, however, if it was dishonest and did not reflect Mullen's true view -- if, as Korb alleges, it was dictated by a desire to curry favor with President Bush rather than a commitment to provide his own professional opinion. Is there any evidence to support this allegation? Since Korb presents none, I assume there is none. Instead, Korb presents evidence that the Iraq-before-Afghanistan view was not what the Afghan commander General McNeill was telling Mullen, nor what the CENTCOM commander Admiral Fallon was telling Mullen. But he presents no evidence one way or the other that Mullen secretly agreed with them and was bullied into saying otherwise.  

Korb's allegation in the absence of evidence is all the more interesting because we actually have a case in the past year of a senior official apparently instructing a military subordinate to shade his military advice based on what the president wanted to hear. This is not quite a smoking gun for the Korb argument, but it is close enough to count as a whisky, tango, foxtrot moment. Even if it were just a poor choice of words on the part of the senior official, it comes far closer to violating the civil-military principle Korb claims to be interested in upholding than does the incident Korb cites.

Why does Korb ignore a civil-military problem in one case in order to manufacture a civil-military problem in another case?  

President Obama’s national security advisor, retired Gen. Jim Jones, has warned that the initial report on the mistakes made by the administration in the run-up to the Christmas Day terrorist incident will “shock” Americans. Frankly, given the amount of dramatic rhetoric already floating in the public commentary on the issue, it is a bit shocking that the Obama team’s rollout would be itself so alarmist. If they think the American people are going to be shocked at the missteps made on their watch, then the missteps must be quite egregious, indeed.

President Obama signaled that himself on Tuesday when he gave public remarks to denounce finger pointing and then used that opportunity to point the finger so squarely at one segment of the intelligence community: the analysts. He exonerated other parts of the homeland security complex, explicitly the intelligence collectors and implicitly the point-defenders like low-level Transportation Security Agency officers, and laid the blame at the analysts and intelligence integrators whose job it is to take the disparate pieces of information of the jig-saw puzzle and put them together. Without naming the agency, he put the National Counterterrorism Center, the new entity formed after 9/11 to do precisely this function, squarely in his crosshairs.

Until the report (to be released today) has been fully dissected and cross-examined, it is impossible to say whether President Obama is pointing his finger at the right culprit. Of all the parts of the complex system and of all of the post-9/11 reforms, I would have considered the NCTC to be one of the better functioning. From a purely political point of view, it would be in the Obama team’s interest to have the locus of the problem identified at this level, which is primarily run by permanent civil service professionals rather than higher up at a level dominated by political appointees. However, just because it would be in their political interests for something to be so does not mean they are wrong or spinning when they claim it is so.

If the facts in the report back up the accusation leveled by President Obama, then the shock of the report may well be short-lived because, as General Jones indicated, the fixes required may only be “tweaks.” But if the failures at lower levels can be traced to decisions, actions, and paradigms promoted at higher levels, the shock may linger, and the aftershocks will be felt in the White House.

By Peter Feaver

Of all the reporting, commentary, and bombast on the Christmas Day terrorist incident that I have read in recent weeks, I have to think that the stream that is getting the most attention in the White House is trickling out of perhaps the least-likely place: reliably pro-Obama Newsweek. In recent days, Newsweek has posted two well-reported stories that provide an ominous answer to the perennial question: who knew what and when did they know it?  

The first story had the alarming headline: "Exclusive: Obama Got Pre-Christmas Intelligence Briefing About Terror Threats to 'Homeland.'" Even partisan defenders of Obama could not help but notice the similarities to the warning President Bush received in August 2001 about al Qaeda's desire to strike U.S. targets. To be sure, if the Newsweek article is accurate, the warning President Obama received was maddeningly vague, certainly not specific enough to pinpoint the abortive underwear bombing. For that matter, the warning President Bush received was also not precise enough to pinpoint the 9/11 attacks, which is why the intelligence community was primarily focused on possible attacks on U.S. targets overseas (as in the Fall 2000 bombing of the USS Cole). But the August 2001 PDB was hard to explain, and put the Bush administration on the defensive when it was released. The December 2009 warning may similarly wrong-foot the Obama Administration, especially if it is the tip of an iceberg.

Which brings us to the second story, a report that White House counterterrorism czar John Brennan was briefed on the method allegedly used by the Nigerian would-be terrorist: the infamous underwear bomb.  Again, this has echoes to the run-up to the 9/11 attacks and raises just the sort of questions that are awkward for any White House to answer: Who received this briefing? What did they do with that information? Why didn't you do more? What other warnings have you received? And so on.

If the rough treatment Brennan received on the Sunday shows is any indication (see, for instance, Brennan dance through the questions here), the media does not seem inclined to give the Obama administration a pass on this story.

Indeed, my hunch is that there will be more such leaks in the coming days. I base this hunch on no inside information beyond this: the knowledge that ever since 9/11 the warning stream coming out of the intelligence community has been much, much larger than most people realize. There are bound to be many vague warnings that now, with hindsight, seem more portentous than they seemed at the time. Just as assuredly, there were many vague warnings that now, with hindsight, proved to be mere noise. But it is the first set of warnings that reporters are so adept at wresting from the system, especially if they can be traced to the White House.

I will be following the Newsweek thread more closely in the coming days and I would bet that the Obama White House is, too.

JEWEL SAMAD/AFP/Getty Images