Obama Archives - Richard M. Langworth

Churchill, Obama, and the Sacking of Generals

24 June 2010 Comments 1 Comment

“It is difficult to remove a bad General at the height of a campaign: it is atrocious to remove a good General.” —Churchill

What can we learn by comparing President Obama’s dismissal of General McChrystal to Churchill’s dismissals of Generals Wavell and Auchinleck, two distinguished commanders in World War II? I hope it will not be another reminder of how standards of conduct have deteriorated.

Differences first. Churchill’s generals were removed for not sufficiently opposing Irwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps. McChrystal was not underperforming, and his situation bears more resemblance to that of General Douglas MacArthur, the Korean commander relieved in 1951 by President Truman for insubordination.…

Torture, Obama, Churchill

30 April 2009 Comments 18 Comments

Torture Topics: In his press conference of 29 April 2009, in response to a question on the disclosure of top secret memos on the use of “enhanced interrogation methods,” Mr. Obama said:

I was struck by an article that I was reading the other day talking about the fact that the British during World War II, when London was being bombed to smithereens, had 200 or so detainees. And Churchill said, ‘We don’t torture,’ when the entire British—all of the British people—were being subjected to unimaginable risk and threat….the reason was that Churchill understood — you start taking shortcuts, over time, that corrodes what’s best in a people.…

“This great country…mooing dolefully…”

21 March 2009 Comments 0 Comments

21 March 2009 (Associated Press):

Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, today dismissed overtures to his country from the U.S. president, Barack Obama, saying Teheran did not see any change in policy under the new U.S. administration. “They chant the slogan of change but no change is seen in practice,” Khamenei said in his speech, broadcast live on state television. In his video message, Obama said the US wanted to engage Iran and improve decades of strained relations.

This reminded me of Harold Nicolson’s letter to his wife, Vita Sackville-West, 1 March 1938 (Nicolson Diaries, I, 328):

Winston spoke of “this great country nosing from door to door like a cow that has lost its calf, mooing dolefully now in Berlin and now in Rome—when all the time the tiger and the alligator wait for its undoing.”…