Former
President Barack Obama (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
Did you enjoy all that time between the announcement of Secretary of Defense James Mattis’s resignation and the
Democrats’ politicization of it? I believe it was about five seconds. The news
is certainly disappointing.
Thanks to the leadership of President Trump and Secretary
Mattis, tremendous progress has been made in cleaning up the mess left behind
by Barack Obama—most notably against ISIS. In fact, the success in “defeating”
ISIS was cited as Trump’s reason for announcing the United States’ withdrawal from Syria.
…
Unlike his predecessor, Trump has deferred much of his military strategy to the advice of his
generals, but Mattis’s disagreement over this withdrawal and the reduction
of troops in Afghanistan was a major reason for his decision to resign.
This latest high-profile departure quickly had Democrats
running to the cameras to attack Trump. They’re not alone though. Several
Republicans have already expressed concern over the resignation—citing Trump’s
disagreements with Mattis in particular.
Let’s be honest here: The departure of a secretary of
defense over foreign policy and military strategy differences is hardly a new
thing.
Obama’s first secretary of defense, Robert Gates,
resigned without incident in 2011, but would later criticize Obama’s role as commander in chief in his memoir
published a few years later. It revealed a troubled relationship between
Obama and the Pentagon.
Gates – who was first appointed to his post by former
President George W Bush – revealed, in a series of swipes that are surprisingly
combative coming from such a senior former official, problems between the White
House and the Pentagon that made for troubling relations at the very highest
levels.
“All too early in the administration,” Gates wrote,
“suspicion and distrust of senior military officers by senior White House
officials – including the president and vice-president – became a big problem
for me as I tried to manage the relationship between the commander in chief and
his military leaders.”
Perhaps most damagingly, he also alleged that Obama did
not believe in his own strategy for ending the war in Afghanistan, which he was
“skeptical if not outright convinced ... would fail,” and that he was skeptical
at best about the leadership of the country’s president, Hamid Karzai.
“The president doesn’t trust his commander, can’t stand
Karzai, doesn’t believe in his own strategy, and doesn’t consider the war to be
his. For him, it’s all about getting out,” wrote Gates.
In 2013, Obama’s second secretary of defense, Leon
Panetta, resigned after less than two years on the job over frustrations
with Obama.
Panetta also wrote a memoir revealing disturbing details about his time in
the Obama administration, and told of Obama’s repeated decisions to ignore
his advice, citing specifically “the withdrawal of all troops from Iraq in
2011, the failure to intervene in Syria’s civil war by arming rebels and the
abrupt reversal of Mr. Obama’s decision to strike Syria in retaliation for
using chemical weapons on civilians.”
In 2014, shortly after the midterm elections that saw
Republicans take control of the U.S. Senate, Barack Obama fired Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel over, you guessed
it, policy and strategy disagreements. Hagel said in an interview a year later that the Obama White
House tried to “destroy” him and that they had no strategy for fixing Syria.
More disturbing than anything that has come out thus far
regarding Mattis’s resignation is that Obama’s fiercest critics of his foreign policy and military strategy
have been his secretaries of defense.
In April 2016, all three of Obama’s
former secretaries of defense at the time—Gates, Panetta, and Hagel—blasted Obama in interviews for a Fox News special called
“Rising Threats, Shrinking Military.”
These are stunning comments coming from three of
Obama’s former secretaries of defense, and they are incredibly insightful
regarding what was going on behind the scenes during Obama’s presidency.
Unlike
Trump’s presidency, which has seen repeated military victories and
advancements, Obama’s tenure as commander in chief was full of military
missteps and setbacks.
Where was the concern over the period of several years
when Obama’s former defense secretaries were revealing the incompetence,
mismanagement, and politicization of the military by Barack Obama?
Remember, Obama’s military failures were front and center
for all to see, yet we never saw the panic from Democrats about Obama’s
leadership, our dwindling military readiness, the lack of strategy, etc., that
they have now over the resignation of Mattis—even as Gates, Panetta, and Hagel
were sounding the alarm over Obama's inexperience and leadership failures.
The Trump-Mattis military strategy, in contrast, was
clearly an effective one, and I hope that despite the disagreements that led to
Mattis resigning, Trump is making his decisions based on advice from other
generals who believe these moves are the right thing to do.
Obama spent years politicizing the military at the cost
of readiness, effectiveness, and victory.
Mattis’s shoes will be tough to fill,
but hopefully, Trump will nominate someone who will have as much success with
him as Mattis did.
_____
Matt Margolis is the author of The Scandalous Presidency of Barack Obama and the
bestselling The Worst President in History: The Legacy of Barack Obama.
His new book, Trumping
Obama: How President Trump Saved Us From Barack Obama's Legacy, will
be published in 2019. You can follow Matt on Twitter @MattMargolis
