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Looking for something good to read this summer? TED Talks speakers Elizabeth Gilbert, Melinda Gates, Bill Gates, Rashida Jones, Clay Shirky, Uzoamaka Maduka, Amanda Palmer, Stanley McChrystal and Blood Orange have put together their lists of recommended reads. Check it out: "Summer: the season for cracking open a good book under the shade of a tree. Below, we’ve compiled about 70 stellar book recommendations from members of the TED community. Warning: not all of these books can be classified as beach reads. And we think that is a good thing."

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Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. See Lim’s previous OUPblogs here.

Gallup reported last week that President Obama’s job approval among Independent voters dipped to 38 percent, the lowest support he has ever received from this group of voters.

It would be too easy for Democrats to blame these numbers on the Tea Party movement. Some Independents are Tea Partiers – and those the President has forever lost – but not all Independents are Tea Partiers.

To understand why Obama has lost so many other Independents, we need to understand that Independents are a curious bunch. They don’t believe in partisan loyalty, yet they are notoriously fickle. They may be fairer than Fox and more balanced than MSNBC, and yet because they are beholden neither to personalities nor parties, but to issues, their love for a politician can be vanquished as quickly as s/he fails to perform.

Politicians love to chase Independents, but they best remember that when push comes to shove, Independents cut to the chase. Independents have determined that on too many of Obama’s campaign promises – the closing of Guantanamo Bay, the public (health-care) option, comprehensive energy and immigration reform, ending Don’t Ask Don’t Tell – the President is either foot-dragging or has simply failed to deliver. Part of this, to be sure, is systemic. Most presidents suffer from lower approval ratings in their second year in office because they become victims of the (required) big talk in the year before which had gotten them elected in the first place. But Obama must also take especial responsibility for so unrestrainedly tantalizing his base during the 2008 campaign and then so abruptly disenchanting them when the realities of governance stepped in. When even the Liberal faith in Obama falters, Independents can hardly be expected to hold the fort.

In recent days, the president’s firing of General McChrystal and his handling of the Gulf oil-spill has only confirmed the Independent voter’s growing conviction that Obama is not displaying the perspicacity of a president in charge. There is a sense of chaos, that “something is rotten in the state of Denmark,” or, as Jimmy Carter fatefully put in the potentially analogous summer of 1979, that the nation is suffering “a crisis of confidence.”

The White House is in full-scale damage-control, dispatching both the President and the Vice President on the campaign road, and sending David Axelrod on the Sunday talk-shows to talk their way out of this one. This is completely counter-productive.

Independents voted for Obama because he was not a Washington insider, believing that because he was not obligated or loyal to Democratic apparatchiks as the Clinton machine presumably was, he would be able get things done. More talk is only going to

David Kilcullen is a former Senior Counterinsurgency Advisor to General David Patraeus in Iraq as well as a former advisor to General Stanley McChrystal, the U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan. Kilcullen is also Adjunct Professor of Security Studies, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, a Fellow at the Center for a New American Security, and the author of The Accidental Guerrilla (2009). His new book, Counterinsurgency, is a no-nonsense picture of modern warfare informed by his experiences on the ground in some of today’s worst trouble spots–including Iraq and Afghanistan. In this excerpt, Kilcullen shares a few insights as to how progress in the Afghan campaign can be properly tracked and assessed.

WHY METRICS MATTER
In 2009 in Afghanistan, ISAF seems to be in an adaptation battle against a rapidly evolving insurgency that has repeatedly absorbed and adapted to past efforts to defeat it, including at least two previous troop surges and three changes of strategy. To end this insurgency and achieve peace, we may need more than just extra troops, new resources, and a new campaign plan: as General Stanley McChrystal has emphasized, we need a new operational culture. Organizations manage what they measure, and they measure what their leaders tell them to report on. Thus, one key way for a leadership team to shift an organization’s focus is to change reporting requirements and the associated measures of performance and effectiveness.

As important, and more urgent, we need to track our progress against the ISAF campaign plan, the Afghan people’s expectations, and the newly announced strategy for the war. The U.S. Congress , in particular, needs measures to track progress in the “surge” against the President Obama’s self-imposed eighteen-month timetable. To be effective, these measures must track three distinct but closely related elements:

1.   Trends in the war (i.e., how the environment, the enemy, the population, and the Afghan government are changing)

2.   ISAF’s progress against the campaign plan and the overall strategy including validation (whether we are doing the right things) and evaluation (how well we are doing them)

3.   Performance of individuals and organizations against best-practice norms for counterinsurgency, reconstruction, and stability operations

Metrics must also be meaningful to multiple audiences, including NATO commanders, intelligence and operations staffs, political leaders, members of the legislature in troop-contributing nations, academic analysts, journalists, and–most important–ordinary Afghans and people around the world.

We should also note that if metrics are widely published, then they become known to the enemy, who can “game” them in order to undermine public confidence and perpetuate the conflict. Thus, we must strike a balance between clarity and openness on the one hand and adaptability and security on the other.

SHARED DIAGNOSIS
Because

Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. See Lim’s previous OUPblogs here.

In September 2009, General Stanley McChrystal stood before an audience in London and advocated for an increase of troop levels in Afghanistan. He was out of line then, and he was out of line last week, when he mocked a number of key Obama administration officials on Rolling Stone magazine. But if the President insists on being the Commander in Chief, he should have known that his generals’ insubordination is encouraged if not guaranteed, and there was little to be gained by so publicly dismissing McChrystal.

General McChrystal’s firing brings into sharp relief the martial sub-culture in American politics–our deference to things and persons military. What is less often admitted, even by the President himself, is that this culture begins with three specific words in the Constitution–”Commander in Chief”–an anachronism in our age of republican self-government.

The first thing a soldier learns as a recruit in the military is that s/he does not think. An effective war machine enlists the complete obedience of nameless and dog-tagged soldiers, not the reflective judgment of citizens. The military is a good fit with monarchy like that (as it is said, war is the sport of kings). At every rung of the rank ladder, there is total obedience from subordinate to superior. All authority culminates in the King–the only person who does any thinking.

By this account, General McChrystal has been a bad soldier, for he dared to think, and worse still he dare to think aloud. The General did not understand that no good could be done for America’s effort in Afghanistan if he or his aides publicized their differences with Vice President Joe Biden, Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, and Special Representative to Afghanistan Richard Holbrooke. For all his talk about winning the hearts and minds of the Afghan people, it is almost as if the General wanted to ensure, by his indiscretion, that there would be no diplomatic solution to the problems in Afghanistan, so that we will forever be seeking a military one.

But I think the problem is rather deeper than one soldier’s insubordination or indiscretion. It is about a militaristic political culture intertwined with our democratic outlook–for we do not have a King doing the thinking, but a Congress of the People–and there is an uneasy juxtaposition formalized in our constitution which President Obama failed, perhaps understandably, to effectively navigate last week.

Our constitution is quite conventional in accepting the norm that soldiers should not think. What is less noted is that this principle applies to the Commander in Chief as well. The Constitution states that it is Congress who declares war and who controls the purse strings. That is to say, even the President, designated the Commander in Chief, is in the end, only a executor to whom is delegated the job of implementing the legislative will.

Of course, this has not transpired in practice. And the framers of our Constitution are not guilt-less despite t

Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he looks at General Stanley McChrystal. See his previous OUPblogs here.

Sarah Palin is not the only person going rogue these days. In a speech to the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London last Thursday, General Stanley McChrystal advocated for an increase in American troop levels in Afghanistan by 40,000, while rumors that the General would resign his command if his request was not honored remain unquashed. A week before, McChrystal appeared on CBS’s “60 minutes” to spread the word that help is needed in Afghanistan. And before that, he, or one of the supporters of his proposal, leaked a confidential report of his petition to the president to Bob Woodward of The Washington Post, which published a redacted version of it. These are the political maneuverings of a General who understands that wars abroad must also be waged at home.

But, the General fails to understand that the political war at home is not his to fight, and his actions in recent weeks have been out of line. No new command has been issued yet about Afghanistan, but General McChrystal has taken it upon himself to let the British and American public know how he would prefer to be commanded. As it is a slippery and imperceptible slope from preemptive defiance to actual insubordination, as President Harry Truman quickly came to realize about General Douglas MacArthur, President Obama needs to assert and restore the chain of command swiftly and categorically.

As Commander of Special Operations in Afghanistan and Iraq from 2003 to 2008, McCrystal was given free reign to bypass the chain of command. This leeway allowed McCrystal’s team to capture, most illustriously, Saddam Hussein during the Iraq war. But it may have gotten into his head that the discretion Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney granted to him has carried over to his command in Afghanistan. No doubt, McCrystal has been emboldened by supporters of a troop increase in Afghanistan, who have recently chastized President Obama for not having had more meetings with McChrystal. Others, like Senator John Kyl (R-AZ) have on CNN accused the “people in the White House … (as) armchair generals.”

Those who assault the principle of civilian control of the military typically and disingenuously do so obliquely under the cover of generals and the flag, for they dare not confront the fact that the constitution unapologetically anoints an armchair general to lead the military. It is worth noting, further, that in the same sentence in which the President is designated “Commander-in-Chief,” the Constitution states, “he may require the Opinion, in writing, of the principal Officer in each of the executive Departments.” The President may require the opinion of any cabinet secretary should he so choose to do so, but he isn’t even constitutionally obligated to seek the opinion of the Secretary of Defense, to whom General McChrystal’s superior, General David Petraeus, reports via the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. General McChrystal has spoken out of turn even though his chain of command goes up quite a few more rings before it culminates in the person seated on an armchair in the Oval Office, and yet I doubt he would take kindly to a one-star general speechifying against his proposal for troop increases in Afghanistan.

Dwight Eisenhower, when he occupied the armchair in the Oval Office, wisely warned of the “Military Industrial Complex” because he understood that it was as much an organized interest as was the Liberal Welfare State, Wall Street, or what would become the Healthcare Industrial Complex. No “commander on the ground” will come to the President of the United States and not ask for more manpower and resources, and Eisenhower understood that the job of the armchair general was to keep that in mind.

Let us not rally around military generals and fail to rally around the Constitution. Inspiring as the Star Spangled Banner may appear flying over Fort McHenry, we will do better to stand firm on the principles etched on an older piece of parchment. As Truman wrote in his statement firing General Douglas MacArthur,
“Full and vigorous debate on matters of national policy is a vital element in the constitutional system of our free democracy. It is fundamental, however, that military commanders must be governed by the policies and directives issued to them in the manner provided by our laws and Constitution.”