The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War in Afghanistan Read Online Free Page A

in Kabul. Then he heads to Baghdad, stopping at the U.S. embassy in Saddam’s old palace. Embassy officials and military officials in Iraq are wary—they think he’s using this as a campaign stop. The Baghdad embassy—this is still Bush country, this is John McCain territory. This isn’t, necessarily, Obama’s base.
    At the embassy, he gives a talk in the main palace hall, where there’s a Green Beans Coffee stand. The hall is packed, one of the biggest turnouts State Department officials can remember. After the talk, out of earshot of the soldiers and diplomats, he starts to complain. He starts to act very un-Obama-like, according to a U.S. embassy official who helped organize the trip in Baghdad. He’s asked to go out to take a few more pictures with soldiers and embassy staffers. He’s asked to sign copies of his book. “He didn’t want to take pictures with any more soldiers; he was complaining about it,” a State Department official tells me. “Look, I was excited to meet him. I wanted to like him. Let’s just say the scales fell from my eyes after I did. These are people over here who’ve been fighting the war, or working every day for the war effort, and he didn’t want to take fucking pictures with them?”
    I push back: Look, it’s a brutal schedule. I’m sure he was tired, stressed out, venting.
    The embassy official isn’t buying it: For the one day he’s in Baghdad, no matter how tired, how stressed, Obama should suck it up. He shouldn’thave bitched about taking a photo. Obama is the “crankiest CODEL”—short for “congressional delegation”—that he’s had visit Baghdad, says this State Department official. And he has handled dozens of them. Embassy staffers gather afterward: Is it me, or were you all not impressed with Obama? The staffers agree: I thought I was the only one! The State Department official votes for Obama anyway. On the same trip, Obama meets with General Petraeus, and the presidential candidate tries to pin the general down on how fast he can get the troops out of Iraq.
    These are the kinds of stories that fuel the suspicions high-ranking officials in the military have about Obama: He’s one of the most talented and natural politicians in a generation, but he doesn’t really understand them. Doesn’t get their culture, doesn’t get their wars. The wars, to Obama, are campaign issues. His primary relationship to the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan is how they affect his electoral fortunes—his opposition to the Iraq War gave his candidacy the spark that set it off, allowing him to separate himself from the other two Democratic candidates who had supported Iraq. He wants to firm up his national security credentials, so he says he’ll focus on Afghanistan, the “right war.” Promising to focus on that war makes a good line on the campaign trail. He didn’t serve—so what that Reagan didn’t, so what that Bush didn’t really? They played the part. They are hooah, and the troops love hooah. Bush gave the generals what they wanted, and the generals like to get what they want.
    Obama’s aware of the vulnerability, writing in his second memoir how “Republicans increasingly portrayed Democrats as weak on defense.” That decades-old problem for Democrats, allegedly soft on national security ever since Truman was accused of “losing China.” Bullshit, naturally, and historically self-destructive, but it has had major consequences, as three generations of Democratic leaders have fallen over themselves to prove that they can play tough. Truman can’t run for reelection because he’s not winning in Korea (Truman had to go into Korea because we couldn’t lose Korea!); Kennedy has to out–Cold Warrior Richard Nixon to get the job.Johnson has to prove he won’t “lose Vietnam,” so he digs an even deeper hole, destroying his presidency. (“I don’t think it’s worth fighting and I don’t think we can get out. It’s the biggest damn mess I ever saw,”