By Peter Feaver
President
Obama has said that he is very angry about the leaks coming out of Afghan Strategy Review 2.0:
"I think I'm angrier
than Bob Gates about it," Mr. Obama replied. "We have deliberations
in the situation room for a reason; we're making life and death decisions that
affect how our troops are able to operate in a theater of war. For people to be
releasing info in the course of deliberations is not appropriate."
"A firing offense?" Reid inquired.
"Absolutely," Mr. Obama responded.
His anger is understandable, and I have some sympathy for it. It is hard enough to decide what to do without having these
internal deliberations play out on the front pages of the papers.
Frustration over leaks is an occupational hazard of working in any administration. Every member of Shadow Government can cite multiple times
when the president or other principals expressed similar anger during the Bush
years.
Still, my sympathies are not unqualified. The longer the review drags on,
the more unrealistic it is to expect that the process can continue to be
leak-free. The president is right to want to deliberate leak-free, and
the president has the right to extend the process as long as he wants, but at
some point -- and I don't know when that point is, but now that we are around
day 92 82 since McChrystal initially filed his report, we can safely say we are
past that point -- the blame for the leaks must be a shared matter. (Editor's Note: It is 82 days as of today and won't be 92 days until after the Monday after the Thanksgiving holiday, which is when the White House hints it will announce a decision ... unless they decide to spring the announcement on the ultimate of late-Friday dumps, Black Friday, in which case it would only be slightly less than 92 days.)
And speaking of assessing blame, with the exception of the original leak of the
McChrystal report (the provenance of which is still debatable and I am losing
confidence in my own hunch that it was Holbrooke or someone connected to him),
it is not too hard to tell who is doing most of the leaking: very senior White House folks (I am thinking assistant-to-the-president-level, and higher). The most informative stories have outlined in some detail
the objections raised by VP Biden and Chief of Staff Emanuel to the bigger
footprint options. Those stories frame the Biden/Emanuel objections in
very favorable terms. Most of the leaks (again with the exception of the
initial McChrystal report leak) have had the effect of making it slightly more
difficult for Obama to pick the option most favored by McChrystal and
the other senior military brass.
I suspect that the president, the vice president, and the White House chief of staff have a pretty good idea who are the unnamed SAO's (senior administration officials) in many of the more detailed stories. And I am very confident
that the more junior level officials on the Obama national security team
believe that the top rank folks (who have the widest latitude for talking to
the press) know who are those SAO's.
So my bottom line is that I expect that the Obama SAO's will not be deterred
from leaking, despite the president's strongly expressed outrage.
Pete Souza/White House via Getty Images
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