Confront and Conceal: Obama's Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power - Hardcover

Sanger, David E.

 
9780307718020: Confront and Conceal: Obama's Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0307718026 ISBN 13: 9780307718020
Verlag: Random House LCC US, 2012

Inhaltsangabe

"Stunning revelations...This is an account that long will be consulted by anyone trying to understand not just Iran but warfare in the 21st century...an important book." –Tom Ricks, New York Times

FROM THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF THE INHERITANCE , A REVEALING AND NEWS-BREAKING ACCOUNT OF OBAMA'S AGGRESSIVE USE OF INNOVATIVE WEAPONS AND NEW TOOLS OF AMERICAN POWER TO MANAGE A RAPIDLY SHIFTING WORLD OF GLOBAL THREATS AND CHALLENGES

Inside the White House Situation Room, the newly elected Barack Obama immerses himself in the details of a remark-able new American capability to launch cyberwar against Iran - and escalates covert operations to delay the day when the mullahs could obtain a nuclear weapon. Over the next three years Obama accelerates drone attacks as an alter-native to putting troops on the ground in Pakistan, and becomes increasingly reliant on the Special Forces, whose hunting of al-Qaeda illuminates the path out of an unwin-nable war in Afghanistan.

Confront and Conceal provides readers with a picture of an administration that came to office with the world on fire. It takes them into the Situation Room debate over how to undermine Iran's program while simultaneously trying to prevent Israel from taking military action that could plunge the region into another war. It dissects how the bin Laden raid worsened the dysfunctional relationship with Pakistan. And it traces how Obama's early idealism about fighting "a war of necessity" in Afghanistan quickly turned to fatigue and frustration.

One of the most trusted and acclaimed national security correspondents in the country, David Sanger of the New York Times takes readers deep inside the Obama adminis-tration's most perilous decisions: The president dispatch-es an emergency search team to the Gulf when the White House briefly fears the Taliban may have obtained the Bomb, but he rejects a plan in late 2011 to send in Special Forces to recover a stealth drone that went down in Iran. Obama overrules his advisers and takes the riskiest path in killing Osama bin Laden, and ignores their advice when he helps oust Hosni Mubarak from the presidency of Egypt.

"The surprise is his aggressiveness," a key ambassador who works closely with Obama reports.

Yet the president has also pivoted American foreign policy away from the attritional wars of the past decade, attempting to preserve America's influence with a lighter, defter touch - all while focusing on a new era of diplomacy in Asia and reconfiguring America's role during a time of economic turmoil and austerity.

As the world seeks to understand whether there is an Obama Doctrine, Confront and Conceal is a fascinating, unflinching account of these complex years, in which the president and his administration have found themselves struggling to stay ahead in a world where power is diffuse and America's ability to exert control grows ever more elusive.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

DAVID E. SANGER is the chief Washington correspondent for the New York Times and bestselling author ofThe Inheritance. He has been a member of two teams that won the Pulitzer Prize and has received numerous awards for coverage of the presidency and national security policy. He also teaches national security policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

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Chapter 1

Blowing Smoke

secret islamabad 002295

Money alone will not solve the problem of al-Qaeda or the Taliban operating in Pakistan. A grand bargain that promises development or military assistance in exchange for severing ties will be insufficient to wean Pakistan from policies that reflect accurately its most deep-seated fears. The Pakistani establishment, as we saw in 1998 with the nuclear test, does not view assistance - even sizable assistance to their own entities - as a trade-off for national security.

- Anne Patterson, then US ambassador to Pakistan, in a secret cable to the National Security Council, September 23, 2009, disclosed by WikiLeaks

On a Sunday morning in early October 2011, President Obama's national security adviser, Tom Donilon, was driven through a wealthy suburb of Abu Dhabi. It was the kind of backdoor, no-photos diplomatic mission he enjoyed most: the quiet delivery of an urgent message directly from the president of the United States. A decade after 9/11, Donilon was overseeing the Obama administration's effort to end what he called the messiest "unfinished business" of the Bush years: Iraq and Afghanistan. Iraq was in its final chapter: in just a few months, the last American troops would drive out of the country on the same road they had driven in on, eight years before. Extracting Washington from Afghanistan - the "war of necessity" as Obama used to put it, before he reconsidered the phrase - was far more difficult. A promising-sounding game plan, to train the Afghan troops to defend their own country, was sputtering along. But precious few of the gains American troops had fought for seemed permanent. Obama's aides feared that the American withdrawal could lead to economic crisis and a Taliban resurgence.

Meanwhile, the relationship with the truly vital player in the region, Pakistan, had entered into such a death spiral there was a real possibility that American troops would be sent into the territory of an ostensible ally to hunt down insurgents targeting Americans.

At fifty-six, his hair thinning a bit, Donilon looked like a slightly disheveled version of the consummate Washington lawyer that he was. He had risen through the ranks of the Democratic party as a superb political operator. In his early twenties, he managed the convention floor for Jimmy Carter; later he gained a reputation for getting presidential candidates through their debates.

Most of Washington knew Donilon as a canny political strategist, and political combat certainly made him tick. But the political world and the foreign-policy world in Washington often operate in different orbits, and what many missed about Donilon was his determination to live in both simultaneously. He dates that decision back to one day when he was in his third year of law school and had lunch with Warren Christopher, the deputy secretary of state, whom he had gotten to know in the Carter administration.

"He came to lunch with this book, and he pushed it across the table to me," Donilon recalled. "He said, 'Politics is the easiest and most lucrative path for you. But you might consider another path.'" The book was an old copy of Present at the Creation, an account of the remaking of American national security after World War II, by Harry Truman's secretary of state, Dean Acheson. Donilon took it home and read it several times. (That copy is still on his bookshelf.)

He was hooked. For years, he could be seen carrying a battered L.L. Bean tote bag home, overflowing with ponderous articles on foreign policy and national security. When Christopher became Bill Clinton's first secretary of state, he installed Donilon down the hall as his chief of staff. And while Donilon returned to politics and law practice during the Bush years, he was clearly itching to get back into

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Verlag
Random House LCC US
Erscheinungsdatum
2012
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0307718026
ISBN 13 
9780307718020
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
476
Kontakt zum Hersteller
CROWN
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/

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