Tuesday on Fox News Channel’s “Fox and Friends,” former top advisor to President George W. Bush, Karl Rove said the current national security advisor Susan Rice is “playing general ” by actually “picking targets” and micromanaging the military.
Rove said, “We’ve had Secretary Gates, Secretary Panetta, now General Flynn, and others say that the White House is essentially tone deaf and unresponsive to their requests. I thought two interesting things this weekend. General Flynn’s statement that nobody is in charge. Nobody wants to be in charge because if you have to report to Valerie Jarrett and Susan Rice as the commander of the military effort in the region, you’re not in charge. And so nobody wants to be in charge.”
In discussing Susan Rices role, Rove said, “She’s playing Lyndon Johnson 1968 and literally picking the targets, according to Woodward, that our air strikes will hit. You don’t want that in the White House. You want that left in the hands of the military commanders. Now, they say, ‘We have had over 1,000 air strikes,’ well that operational tempo, if you put it in the context of months and months we’ve been there, is very small and the reason is, it’s all landing on her desk and she’s trying to play general. They ought to leave that in the hands of the people who know how to do it. The White House should set the goal. It should not try and manage the war.”
Rove said the Bush administration never bypassed the Pentagon and “no political people,” ever talked to the military commanders, “but the president would talk to the field commanders and say, what do you need?”
Rove concluded, “Look, the President Obama’s predecessor was a leader. This man is not a leader. And he is ironically enough, demonstrating his lack of leadership by taking on tasks that should not be done within the White House. You should not micromanage the war from the White House.”