Obama’s ‘Team Of Rivals’ Share Big-Picture Views, USA Today, Pg. 10, Dec 2, 2008.
As for specific trouble spots:
*Come Jan. 20, Obama will own the Iraq war just as surely as Richard Nixon owned the Vietnam War in 1969. If progress turns into defeat, his presidency will surely be undermined. The entire team will recognize the political and international implications of this, but Obama has given Gates, who oversaw the successful strategy of surging more troops into Iraq, the new mission of bringing them home.
Obama campaigned on a pledge to remove U.S. troops within 16 months, but at his news conference Monday, he repeated a Bush line that he would listen to commanders on the ground, a wise step. The Bush administration has already signed an agreement for U.S. troops to be out of cities by June 30 and out of Iraq by the end of 2011, but the uneven progress in training Iraqis to take over will make the first deadline particularly difficult to attain, with huge implications.
*Afghanistan will continue on the present military path, with several thousand extra U.S. troops already scheduled to deploy there. The Bush administration attempted to win Afghan hearts and minds but was not very deft. Gates and Jones have advocated different kinds of outreach and more effective reconstruction.
*Candidate Obama pushed vigorous, high-level diplomacy to halt Iran’s nuclear program even as Clinton suggested that it would be naive. As his top diplomat, Clinton’s past dismissiveness could give any talks more credibility, while the more hawkish Clinton, Gates and Jones would keep the military option credible. None of this answers the hard question of what happens if diplomacy reaches a dead end.
Whether to attack Iran — or give Israel the green light to do so — would undoubtedly generate the sort of “vigorous debate” and “strong opinions” within the White House that Obama says he welcomes.
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