In Defense of Thinking

President Obama may be smart and honest, but he’s also indecisive, controlling, weak-principled, and, frankly, a bit paranoid. At least that’s what former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta—and much of the nation’s top military brass—would have us believe.

In a memoir released last week, titled “Worthy Fights,” Panetta criticizes the commander-in-chief for flip-flopping on Syria—imposing a “red line” on the use of chemical weapons by President Bashar al-Assad, then backing down when the dictator dropped chlorine on his own people. He blames the rise of the Islamic State on Obama’s failure to convince Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to allow a residual American military force to remain in the country. He feels betrayed by the president’s reluctance to defend the Pentagon from across-the-board budget cuts imposed by Congress.

Panetta also gripes about being cut out of important decisions, such as Obama’s release of documens about waterboarding under the Bush administration. And though Panetta lauds the president’s intellect, he contends that Obama lacks a certain red-blooded chutzpah that worthy leaders possess.

“Too often,” Panetta writes, “the president relies on the logic of a law professor rather than the passion of a leader.”

Panetta, of course, is not alone in writing a critical inside memoir of the Obama administration. He follows in the footsteps of Robert Gates, Obama’s first secretary of defense, who leveled similar—though even more pointed—criticisms at the president in his January 2014 tell-all titled “Duty.”

In that memoir, the elder statesman laments Obama’s distrust of top military leaders, from former CIA director David Petraeus to former Joint Chiefs Chairman Mike Mullen.

Gates dresses Obama down for his supposed ambivalence toward the war in Afghanistan, which the president doubted was winnable, and for that absence of gusto which Panetta observed.

Interestingly, that last bit—that lack of chutzpah and red-bloodedness, lamented by both works—is a relatively common complaint, even outside the military, as commentators everywhere are demanding Obama be more a firebrand than a professor.

Take David Brooks, the New York Times’ dangerously suave neoconservative, who recently wrote that President Obama is a pragmatist—a kind of law school intellectual logician. But apparently that’s a bad thing.

“Pragmatists…have trouble rousing themselves to action,” he writes. “They try to get rid of emotions when making decisions because emotions might lead them astray. But, in making themselves passionless, they always make themselves tepid and anesthetized.”

Only those with impulsive “literary sensibilities” will “react with a heart brimming with moral emotion,” he writes.

Earlier, Charles Krauthammer lambasted the president for failing to “rally the nation” around a “cause.”

These words weren’t aberrations. Critiques of the restrained Obama Doctrine often rely on abstract concepts—like leadership, toughness, and passion—with policy disagreements sometimes thrown in for good measure

But haven’t we had enough policies based on passion and toughness and overblown anger and patriotism? Shouldn’t the path of our nation be laid out by well-educated persons who think logically about policy decisions, rather than by World War I-redux, war sentimentalists à la Cheney or Rumsfeld? I mean, haven’t we learned anything over the past decade?

A little over 10 years ago, Thomas Friedman, another Times neocon, said to Charlie Rose that the purpose of the Iraq War was to say “Suck. On. This.” to Muslims in the Middle East. No thought there. I don’t even know what “This” is. Just passion. Perfect!

The clip has gained some infamy in retrospect, but back then, it was no big deal. We had just completed the invasion of Iraq, Bush’s approval rating hovered around 70 percent, and we were on our way to dumping $5 trillion and just under 7,000 American lives into a series of failed conflicts.

Stories of how Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld manipulated Bush abound, but Bush was naturally no dove himself. “Somebody has got to be risk averse in this process … because I’m sure not,” he said to a group of advisors in 2007.

With the current administration, we no longer have a top brass that relies on career military men and Dick Cheney to provide restraint—and yes, we have someone who may draw on his intellectual experiences as a law professor, rather than just his “literary sensibilities,” however adept they may be.

Often this has meant moderate, sage decisions to preserve American life and money—opening limited diplomatic channels in the process—rather than re-plunging our nation into unwinnable conflicts, in which we attempt to confront social problems with military force. Often it’s meant refraining from what President Obama calls the “whack-a-mole” strategy of military intervention.

“The Pentagon was used to getting what it wanted,” the president recently said to the New Yorker. Now, Americans have a source of pushback.

Apparently, that’s a cause of irritation for Brooks, Petraeus, Mullen, Gates, Krauthammer, and a slew of pundits and military men keen to forget the past decade.

But as for me, I’m pretty thankful for it.

J. Gram Slattery ’15, a Crimson editorial writer, is a social studies concentrator. His column appears on alternate Wednesdays. Follow him on Twitter @G_Slattery.