i nheriting a b ad h and 327American combat role in Iraq was clearly winding down. Afghanistan
claimed most of his attention.
Th e Nixon parallel suggests that when a president takes over a war
he enjoys a limited and short-lived revival of fl exibility. Nixon could
not pursue all-out war or immediate disengagement, but the American
people gave him more time than they would have granted Johnson,
and he felt less bound by the self-imposed military restrictions that
had governed the conduct of the war up to 1969. So it was with
Obama: he had more options than did Bush, though all were unat-
tractive. As an added complication, Obama, unlike Nixon, had com-
mitted himself while running for offi ce in ways that foreclosed some
possibilities.
I treat Obama’s leadership of the Afghanistan War more briefl y than
the other presidents I have discussed. This more limited treatment
reflects two considerations. First, Obama did not face some of the
important tasks that confront presidents at the start of a military
confl ict. He did not have to decide whether war was necessary; nor did
he need to prepare the American people for it, defi ne an initial set of
war aims, or create the military means to carry the war to the enemy.
Second, since the war continues at full fury as this is written, I do not
have the advantage of complete historical evidence or the perspective
gained in hindsight to off er a fully developed account. But I think it
important to off er a partial analysis that places Obama in the frame-
work I have developed. His experience clearly confi rms how diffi cult it
is for presidents to control what happens in war.
Beyond that, Obama’s Afghanistan policy lets us consider another
argument about wartime presidential decision making—that the
process by which a president reaches his decisions infl uences the results
he will achieve. In the belief that poor decision processes had led
Johnson into the Vietnam quagmire and contributed to Bush’s prob-
lems in Iraq, Obama and his close advisors took pains to make his
policy review deliberate, structured, and highly rational. Th e president
also harbored suspicions about the military advice he received, so he
subjected it to unusually close scrutiny. Despite the attention to process,
however, he found himself with only one real option—for a troop surge
of the same magnitude as the one Bush had ordered in Iraq. Process
awareness may have value, but it cannot give a president freedom of