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Obama's Wars
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Obama's Wars (2010) (edit title/settings)

by Bob Woodward (Author) (edit contributors)

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Bob Woodward, a reporter and editor at The Washington Post since 1971, has authored or coauthored ten New York Times #1 bestsellers, including Plan of Attack, Bush at War, Shadow, The Agenda, The Commanders, Veil, Wired, The Brethren, The Final Days, and All the President's Men.

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  • “The president hasn't made any decisions and I want tht to be absolutely clear. General, I appreciate you're doing your job, but I didn't hear the president of the United States give that order. <Page 81>”
    Rahm I. Emanuel (White House Chief of Staff)
  • “You may be technically right and long-term stupid. <Page 151>”
    General Stanley A. McChrystal
  • “Yeah, it's on my desk. <Page 175>”
    Unnamed White House Staffer who made an unthorized copy of the McChrystal classified assessment for the author
  • “30,000 plus 4,500 plus 10 percent of 30,000 is 37,500. I am at 30,000. I will give some latitude within your 10 percentage points, things that you might need in the future, but I'm not getting to 37,500. I might as well go to 40,000. Can you support this? Because if the answer is no, I understand it and I'll be happy to just authorize another 10,000 troops and we can continue to go as we are and train the Afghan national force and just hope for the best. <Page 308-9>”
    POTUS Barack Obama to SECDEV Robert Gates
  • “Mr. President, I don't see how you can defy your military chain here. We kind of are where we are. Because if you tell General McChrystal, I got all this, I got you assessment, got your resource constructs, but I've chosen to do something else, you're going to probably have to replace him. You can't tell him, just do it my way, thanks for your hard work, do it my way. And then where does that stop? <Page 319>”
    COL John Tien (NSC Staff)
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  • The great lesson of World War II and Vietnam was that attacks from the air, even massive bombings, can’t win a war.
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  • One of the closest held secrets of President Bush’s inner circle was that the president had lost his appetite for military contingency planning. The tough-talking, saber-rattling Bush administration had not prepared for some of the worst-case scenarios the country might face.
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  • “The instruments of war do have a role to play in preserving the peace. And yet this truth must coexist with another—that no matter how justified, war promises human tragedy. The soldier’s courage and sacrifice is full of glory, expressing devotion to country, to cause, to comrades in arms. But war itself is never glorious, and we must never trumpet it as such. So part of our challenge is reconciling these two seemingly irreconcilable truths—that war is sometimes necessary and war at some level is an expression of human folly.”
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  • “Bruce has done the classic Henry Kissinger model,” Gates said, referring to the military options. “You have three options, two of which are ridiculous, so you accept the one in the middle.”
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  • Podesta was not sure that Obama felt anything, especially in his gut. He intellectualized and then charted the path forward, essentially picking up the emotions of others and translating them into ideas. He had thus created a different kind of politics, seizing the moment of 2008 and driving it to a political victory. But, Podesta thought, sometimes a person’s great strength, in this case Obama’s capacity to intellectualize, was also an Achilles’ heel.
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  • Petraeus had almost redefined the notion of warfare, authoring the new Counterinsurgency Field Manual and implementing it in Iraq. His primary insight was that the U.S. could not kill its way out of the war. It had to protect and win over the population, living among them, providing security so that a stable and competent government could thrive. A new kind of soldier in the Petraeus mold had to be a social worker, urban planner, anthropologist and psychologist.
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First Sentence edit see section history

On Thursday, November 6, 2008, two days after he was elected president of the United States, Senator Barack Obama arranged to meet in Chicago with Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence (DNS).

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

  1. Bob Woodward (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Original Language: English
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Country: USA
Publication Date: 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4391-7249-0
Page Count: 441

Classification edit see section history

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