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thedrifter
03-23-09, 05:08 AM
White House Memo
Leading Military at Time of War, but Not as a ‘War President’

By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
Published: March 22, 2009

WASHINGTON — President Obama rarely, if ever, uses the phrase “war on terror.” Like presidents before him, Mr. Obama has a top-secret intelligence briefing every day, yet it is not necessarily first on his schedule. And when he sent 17,000 troops to Afghanistan, he announced the news in a written statement, not a public address.

As he heads toward his next big decision as commander in chief — a new strategy for Afghanistan, to be announced as early as this week — Mr. Obama, by necessity and temperament, is wearing the role in ways distinctly different from former President George W. Bush.

Mr. Obama, of course, leads in very different times. Mr. Bush forged his identity as commander in chief during the crucible of the Sept. 11 attacks. Mr. Obama faces not only two wars but also a crumbling world economy that his homeland security secretary, Janet Napolitano, has described as a threat to the nation.

But while Mr. Bush often called himself “a war president,” that phrase seems to be missing from Mr. Obama’s lexicon.

The shift is evident in their schedules.

The first person Mr. Bush saw in the Oval Office each morning was his national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, for a discussion, among other things, about what had happened overnight in Iraq and Afghanistan. And the top-secret intelligence briefing, the “president’s daily brief,” had a sacrosanct place in the presidential schedule: 8 a.m.

By contrast, Mr. Obama has added a briefing on the economy, and the timing of his Oval Office intelligence sessions varies each morning. Occasionally, the economics briefing comes first; one day early in his presidency, he visited his daughters’ school and held a bill-signing event first. He has also discontinued Mr. Bush’s practice of weekly videoconferences with ground commanders in Iraq — a sign that conditions have improved, but also a stylistic change.

And while Mr. Bush had routine secure video exchanges with Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki of Iraq and President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, Mr. Obama has less personal contact with those heads of state, his aides say.

“The president believes that we’ve got multiple means of communication,” said his senior adviser, David Axelrod.

Mr. Obama’s style of decision-making is also different. He “is somewhat more analytical, and he makes sure he hears from everybody in the room on an issue,” Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, who has worked for both presidents, said this month on “Meet the Press” on NBC.

Mr. Gates added that Mr. Bush “was interested in hearing different points of view but didn’t go out of his way to make sure everybody spoke.”

Mr. Bush often said he relied on his military commanders to determine troop levels; his last step before making such decisions was typically to meet with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a process set up by Mr. Gates. But Mr. Obama has made clear he wants to hear from his entire national security team, including his secretary of state, before making major military decisions.

Thus, Mr. Obama’s first visit to “the tank,” the secure Pentagon conference room, did not focus exclusively on Iraq and Afghanistan. “This was less a meeting about the wars than it was an opportunity for the new commander in chief to get to know his top generals,” said Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon press secretary, who was there. “It was a very energetic, sophisticated conversation about global threats.”

The weight of military leadership has hardly disappeared. In an interview broadcast Sunday on “60 Minutes” on CBS, Mr. Obama said that sending the additional troops to Afghanistan had been the hardest decision of his young presidency. And he has followed some patterns set by Mr. Bush.

Like Mr. Bush, Mr. Obama sends letters to the families of those killed in combat; he signs them, simply, “Barack.”

Mr. Axelrod said the deaths took a toll on the ordinarily even-keeled president. “He doesn’t get too high or too low,” Mr. Axelrod said, “but to the extent that he does become reflective, it is after the notification of a soldier’s loss.”

And like Mr. Bush, Mr. Obama tries to meet privately with wounded soldiers, as he did at Camp Lejeune, in North Carolina. In his speech there last month, he also took pains to praise the success of the military in a war he opposed, saying, “We sent our troops to Iraq to do away with Saddam Hussein’s regime, and you got the job done.”

Now Afghanistan is high on Mr. Obama’s agenda, and his new strategy for the war could define his presidency the way Iraq defined Mr. Bush’s.

Top Obama aides said last week that they were still deciding how he would make the announcement — whether in a speech, a White House ceremony or some other setting. If the past two months are any guide, the president, who never served in the military and campaigned as an antiwar candidate, will use the occasion to try to reach out to troops, all while forging a different path from his predecessor.

“After the attacks on 9/11, George Bush talked about the global war on terror as a kind of central theme of his thinking,” said Lee H. Hamilton, a Democratic former congressman who was co-chairman of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group and occasionally advises Mr. Obama. “And he viewed all of his actions, including the accumulation of executive power, even the phrase ‘enemy combatants,’ as flowing from the commander in chief’s powers.

“With President Obama, conceptually it is very different.”

Mr. Obama’s critics accuse him of trying to minimize the role of commander in chief. Several former Bush advisers said they were shocked that he had sent troops to Afghanistan without a formal public explanation.

“The contrast to Bush could hardly be more striking,” said Thomas Donnelly, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, calling it “L.B.J. and Vietnam-type behavior.”

Mr. Obama is too young to have faced the draft and is unencumbered by the ghosts of the Vietnam War — an accident of birth that his advisers believe gives him a certain freedom in cultivating relationships with the military, a core constituency for Mr. Bush. “He’s been able to shift the paradigm a little bit,” said Mark Lippert, a top foreign policy adviser.

Mr. Obama’s words of praise for the troops at Camp Lejeune were part of that presidential courtship. Soldiers who knew how critical he had been of the Iraq war were surprised.

“Marines are a tough crowd, and he is our new commander in chief,” said Sgt. Maj. Joel Collins, who served in Iraq and is now stationed at Camp Lejeune with a battalion that cares for wounded soldiers. “That went a long way toward telling us that the president does have our back.”

Aides said the language was included at Mr. Obama’s direction. “He wanted to acknowledge that, from a military standpoint, the troops in Iraq have succeeded in their mission,” said Ben Rhodes, his foreign policy speechwriter. “He wanted to be very clear about that, from his standpoint as commander in chief.”

Ellie