Thomas P.M. Barnett -- 10 Things to Know About the Petraeus-McChrystal Switch

By John Ballard

From the Esquire Politics Blog. Looks right to me, mostly.

1. There won't be a policy shift.
   
   
   Unlike the Fallon saga, this time it was the president who spoke on camera and the general who was restricted to a press statement. That's because this time the Pentagon-White House flap was an issue of perception (Obama: "undermining civilian authority") � not any fundamental differences on how to fight the war at hand.


2. But the Pentagon now holds the keys to the castle.
   
   
   Obama may have put his foot down, but he's making a serious gamble in anointing Petraeus, much like Bush did after Fallon's resignation. The president needed to make McChrystal's sacking seem like an upgrade in gravitas, which it is when the upgrade is to the boss of Central Command. Just don't forget that Petraeus is the only general capable of making Afghanistan his war, and not Obama's.


3. Petraeus is truly untouchable.
   
   
   Understand this, too: Whatever the general wants, the general will get. After firing his Afghanistan commander twice in just thirteen months, Obama has no choice. Petraeus now outranks every administration player on Afghanistan. Save Obama � officially, at least.


4. Friends of Dave just became a lot more important.
   
   
   Frankly, the new sheriff's strong personal relationships with the Pakistani military and security forces will matter a helluva lot more than which of McChrystal's lieutenants he keeps on or gets rid of. Hamid Karzai made his bid to keep McChrystal onboard, and was clearly ignored � as he should be � so now Obama's Af-Pak strategy will place the most eggs in Islamabad's basket.


5. The administration's review of Af-Pak begins now.
   
   
   Originally scheduled for public release in December, any White House-led effort at a war report will inevitably take its cues from General Petraeus's own review of the situation as he assumes command in the coming weeks and months. Expect to hear the general outline at Petraeus's confirmation hearing next week, along with previews of the GOP's national-security campaign slogans for November.


6. Obama's 2012 campaign could be all about war.
   
   
   If Petraeus says the strategy needs more time, then Obama's running for re-election as a wartime president. Period. There's just no way that Obama can overrule Petraeus on this one without wounding himself politically. McChrystal had been signaling that Obama's summer 2011 deadline to begin withdrawing combat troops was too optimistic. Expect Petraeus to press that case � however subtly � from day one.


7. Two jobs? One job? Same thing.
   
   
   No matter what anyone says in the confirmation hearings, it won't matter if Petraeus steps down from CENTCOM or becomes The General with Two Hats. Nobody who would step in at CENTCOM could overshadow Petraeus, so that kind of a choice is unimportant in many respects. But given the general's recent health issues, it's hard to believe a replacement won't be picked. I'm betting on General James Mattis, whom I profiled in detail a couple years ago.


8. The counterinsurgency lives on.
   
   
   "King David" has no peers when it comes to counterinsurgency credentials, having overseen the creation of the Army-Marine Corps's seminal field manual and commanded its first successful application in Iraq. If anything, Obama has now doubled-down on the COIN path in Af-Pak, so the COINdistas haven't taken any sort of hit.


9. The "Draft Dave" presidential run could live on, too.
   
   
   Can Petraeus pull off his second COIN miracle? If he does, and if it's perceived as such prior to the GOP convention in the summer of 2012, then I guarantee you there will be a groundswell of delegate support to make him the Republican candidate � assuming he gets out of uniform in time.


10. There is one big winner from this hoopla.
    
    
    And her name is Elena Kagan, whose confirmation hearings also happen to begin next week.

Number Nine is a stretch. I think he added that and the Kagan item in for grins and to make the list come out to ten.

Americans love military heroes almost as much as entertainers, and this guy's as clean as a pin. Think Colin Powell fifteen years younger. But he has two strikes against him, cancer and academic credentials. Prostate cancer is not typically one of the bad ones, but he did feint last week during a Congressional hearing and his health was mentioned in #7.  Also, many voters now regard an earned PhD. from Princeton to be almost as disagreeable as a background from Chicago Law School, especially in this year of Tea Party Insurgency. Petraeus is way too smart to appeal to that crowd.

But I do like the idea that he might try to get unstuck from the mud in time for the next election. Best way to do that is to declare "Victory" and GTFO.

Don't skip the James Mattis profile. I'm as ill-informed about military personalities as sports, but I really enjoy a good sketch like this. Great story here at the conclusion, originally published in March 2006.

...Mattis's staff is full of officers just back from Iraq, and they're all eager to make the Marines the shortest flash-to-bang learning organization there is. "All I have to do is create the expectation that it will happen," he says. "It's commander's intent. They understand my intent is we don't sit here and admire this and say, `Let's hold our breath and get through this, then we get back to proper soldiering by planning for China twenty years from now.' Fuck that. If we fight China in the future, we will also find IEDs and people using the Internet. If we go to Pyongyang and we're fighting there six months from now against a mechanized unit, one hundred thousand Special Forces would be running around doing what they're doing to our rear area now. So guess what? This is the best training ground in the world. For the German troops it was Spain, right? Well, Iraq is ours."

So that's the intellectual struggle Mattis is now waging from his desk at Quantico, institutionalizing his flash-to-bang mentality, with this as his mantra: Anything our enemies can dream up, we can counter faster.

To wit: While doing stability operations in the Shiite-heavy south immediately following Saddam's fall, Mattis was confronted with fiery Muslim cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's rapid trajectory toward insurgency kingpin. One day when al-Sadr was trying to pull together a mass meeting of his followers for another of his stem-winders, the kind that eventually launched his bloody uprising, Mattis cut him off at the pass, or, more specifically, at the bus station. Knowing that the cleric would use buses to bring followers into his urban stronghold from outside, Mattis hired as many buses in the region as he could get his hands on. "So when he went to contract his buses, they were gone," Mattis says. "Didn't have to shoot a single person. We sent the buses out for a trip--empty there, empty back. A waste of money? It was the best money I ever spent."