Obama’s Wars was published by Simon & Schuster in September 2010. The book covers the first eighteen months of the Obama presidency, focusing on the prolonged deliberation over Afghanistan strategy that consumed the fall of 2009. Obama inherited a war that had been neglected during the Bush administration’s focus on Iraq, and his generals — led by General Stanley McChrystal and supported by General David Petraeus and Admiral Mike Mullen — wanted a major troop surge of 40,000 additional soldiers, with no fixed timeline for withdrawal.
Obama was skeptical. He had campaigned on ending wars, not expanding them, and he distrusted the military’s institutional tendency to request more troops and more time. The book depicts a president who conducted the policy review with the rigor of a law professor — demanding data, questioning assumptions, rejecting the generals’ initial options and forcing them to produce alternatives. The result was a compromise: 30,000 additional troops with an eighteen-month timeline, after which withdrawals would begin regardless of conditions on the ground.
Woodward’s portrait of the civil-military tension is the book’s most valuable contribution. The generals believed that the timeline undermined the strategy by telling the Taliban when to wait for American withdrawal. Obama believed that an open-ended commitment was exactly what the military wanted — a war without limits — and that the timeline was the only way to force accountability. The disagreement was never fully resolved, and the subsequent history of the Afghan war suggests that both sides were partly right.
Collecting Obama’s Wars
First edition (Simon & Schuster, New York, 2010): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $10–$25
- Very good: $5–$15
- Signed: $30–$80