re: "The right to be wrong, but not the right to lie"

Peter Feaver at Shadow Government ("Notes From The Loyal Opposition") walks us through the action.

Money quote(s):

"At issue is the extent to which the senior commanders endorsed the option that President Obama selected: truncating the surge and rushing the withdrawal in a fashion that interrupts the 2012 fighting season (but dove-tails with the 2012 presidential campaign season)."

The president is the commander-in-chief. He gets to decide these things and, within the legal and Constitutional limits of their oaths of office, the generals and admirals have to salute smartly and carry out his instructions.

"(T)he White House sought to depict the president's decision as one well within a range of options developed by the military."

Quite possible, depending upon the meaning of the word "within."

"(T)he option Obama picked was not on the menu. Obama's plan -- presumably the arbitrary summer 2012 deadline and perhaps also the numbers involved -- was apparently devised elsewhere, perhaps by White House advisors."

So. Perhaps "within" means something like dates-and-figures-not-matching-anything-on-the-menu-but-somewhere-inside-the-outlying-dates-and-figures.

"Hayes emphasizes that President Obama over-ruled Petraeus's advice, which is true but, as I have argued, he was well within his rights as commander-in-chief. On this, I point to no less an authority than General Petraeus himself. From a civil-military point of view, it is important to know whether or not the military refused to even present this as an option: it would have been inappropriate if they had tried to tie the hands of the president in that fashion. But if they did in fact present a range of options that included ones they thought too risky, and then President Obama chose yet another still-riskier option, that would not constitute a civil-military foul by either side. It is worth knowing whether the military endorsed the option, but that should not be viewed as the dispositive factor.

To me, the most important part of the Hayes story is that, if accurate and complete, it means the White House did not tell the truth about the military advice it received. Rather than admit that the president listened carefully to his generals and then chose something that they did not recommend, someone at the White House tried to pretend that the president simply chose among a range of options endorsed by the military. This is a subtle difference, but in civil-military terms it is a profound one. Civilians do not owe the military prerogatives over policy choices; they do owe the military a decision-making process in which the military voice can be heard and in which military views will be faithfully described to those authorized to hold the president accountable on these decisions, namely us.

If the president wants to elicit from the military an option and an endorsement of an option that the military does not initially prefer, as President Bush did with his Iraq surge, then he must engage in the lengthy back-and-forth that President Bush engaged in, cajoling the military into something resembling a consensus. The president does not have to do that -- he can simply decide, as President Obama did -- but he owes the military (and the voter) to tell the truth about what he did."

Dealing with policy-level decision-makers is touchy business, exacerbated by the tyranny of PowerPoint (TM), which can force briefers into limiting the range of options to that which can be displayed (and explained) on a single briefing slide.

I'm not actually suggesting this is what happened, but the phenomenon extends well beyond actual PowerPoint (TM) briefings as it seems to have measurably reduced the capacity for those being briefed to hold onto things like facts and figures.

"(T)he White House has just replicated the Johnson-McNamara error that was at the heart of H.R. McMaster's influential Dereliction of Duty account of the Vietnam War. Although many read McMaster's book as accusing the senior generals of dereliction for going along with Johnson's decision to escalate the war more gradually than they thought prudent, in fact McMaster's primary point was that the generals were derelict in going along with Johnson and McNamara's willful misrepresentation to Congress and the American people about the content of the military advice. What McMaster wanted the generals to do was simply tell Congress what their advice had been, correcting the record that Johnson and McNamara had muddied by pretending that their Vietnam decisions were consonant with military counsel."

Read the whole thing here.