Jim Jones now President Obama's insurance with military

Our Afghan Ambassador: The Man in the Middle

First it was GEN Jones having trouble as National Security Advisor, now apparently LTG Eikenberry is having trouble as ambassador. I am convinced that their "trouble" is based on a leadership style that the politicos can't quite grasp and the politicos inferiority complex when it comes to the generals' deep knowledge of a military establishment they will never come close to matching no matter how many Bob Woodward books they read. The generals probably just want things done by a certain time with little debate whereas the politicos want to analyze everything for days on end and talk about (their feelings) how exhausted they are from working long hours. I think GEN Jones had it right when he said if you don't haven all of your work done by 7 p.m. there is something wrong...

The bottom line is that Mr. Eikenberry is the perfect man for this job. I wish he had been promoted to four-star general before he retired so GEN Petraeus and GEN McChrystal didn't have buried in their respective "das Es" that they "outrank" him. Ambassador Eikenberry, with his education and military hands-on and diplomatic experience, bridges the gap between the over-educated, under-practical experienced, armchair generals/diplomats filling top posts in the State Department, and the Army, who suffers from the opposite (too much practical policy implementation experience, often not as educated as the State Dept. politicos).

In Obama's Fast-Paced West Wing, the Odd Man Settles In

James Jones, sporting his new shaggy-haired Obama White House haircut

This is exactly why James Jones was needed in the White House. I love the "bottom-up" approach and how the Pentagon added extra combat support troops to the Afghanistan surge and Jones caught it:

"I'm not only an outsider, but I'm a 20-years-older-than-anybody-around outsider," Jones said. "I'm a former general. And it took me a while to get the president to call me by my first name. Now, I'm 'Hey, you,' " he said with a laugh.

"But there is a generational thing here. There is a process thing here. I'm used to staffs, and I'm used to a certain order. I'm used to people having certain roles. And so there's a very natural adjustment period."

"My calculus was that it would take six months," Jones said. "We're about halfway there, and I think every week gets a little better..."

Although the administration is barely more than 100 days old, Jones has launched an ambitious restructuring of the White House national security apparatus so it can focus on modern issues such as energy and climate change. He has emphasized the "bottom up" approach to decision-making that both he and Obama favor, Jones said, in which issues are first discussed in working groups, then brought to the "deputies committee" of representatives from Cabinet departments.

"If you want things to go beyond your tenure," Jones said, "you'd better get a lot of buy-in into the big things."

Jones said he feels no hesitation in differing with Cabinet members and offering both solicited and unsolicited advice, with others and privately, to the president.

As Obama was mulling his first major foreign policy decision in February -- whether to increase U.S. military deployments to Afghanistan this year -- Jones said he intervened with questions about the information supplied by the Pentagon.

The numbers were "out of whack," Jones recalled. Beyond the requested 17,000-strong combat force, the military had included additional "enablers" that it said were required for logistical and other support functions. "I understand these ratios and what they ought to look like, and when they seemed a little high, I pushed back on it," he said. The numbers were reduced.

Toby Keith thinks...

...that James Jones would be a good president. Just in case you were wondering.

Zinni v. Hill

Hopefully, this will be the last of the Obama administration's rookie mistakes. Bad vetting processes for appointees and then bad etiquette in appointing ambassadorships first telling retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni he was the choice to be Iraq's ambassador and then appointing Christopher Hill without notifying Zinni that he was no longer the choice. Hill is a skilled diplomat; hopefully he can apply the lessons he has learned in East Asia to Iraq.

Man in the Mirror

Good article about retired General James Jones, the Obama administration's pick for national security advisor. Jones, who went to school at Georgetown and held numerous Pentagon assignments, is no stranger to taking the middle road and navigating the phoniness of Washington, DC. This article suggests it is a rare skill; rather I would argue that it is an essential skill to any military officer hoping to make it to four-star rank. This is one reason why the majority of military officers, who are careerists by heart, cannot be trusted to speak their minds all of the time.

Here is an excerpt:

How does Jones pull it off? Much of the explanation is that no one can pin down his worldview enough to find fault with it. Jones is "pretty much a black box," says one Democratic foreign policy staffer on Capitol Hill. "He doesn't have a personal agenda," says Fred Graefe, a Washington lobbyist who has been a close friend of Jones since they served in Vietnam 40 years ago and claims not to know even whether he is a Democrat or Republican. "He's a little bit of a mystery," adds another Democrat who closely watches foreign policy for a special-interest group.

Jones, to be sure, is not a complete mystery: He is an internationalist by nature--though he is also less dovish, particularly on Iraq, than some people may understand. But it's true that his record suggests someone more interested in management than in grand vision--and someone who, unencumbered by strong ideological leanings, can evaluate ideas dispassionately whether they come from left or right. This probably helps explain why Obama picked him. With a foreign policy team dominated by strong figures like Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice, and Robert Gates, Obama does not need a national security adviser with big ideas; he needs someone smooth as a diplomat and tough as a Marine. Which just happens to describe Jim Jones.