General Jim Jones will go down in history as the least
successful national security advisor since Admiral John Poindexter was forced
out of office during the Reagan
administration. This fact alone illuminates just one of the many miscalculations
that were made in hiring Jones. He was a military man went the conventional
wisdom; military men do well in such jobs. After all, the most successful
national security advisor in history was Gen. Brent Scowcroft. And Scowcroft was
clearly the model President Barack Obama had in mind when he selected Jones.
The problem was -- as Poindexter demonstrated -- that military
experience is no guarantee of success in the job. Poindexter's predecessor
Robert MacFarlane also had an extensive military background and he was another
disaster. (And who was the free-lancing go-to guy in the Reagan NSC? Col. Oliver North. 'Nuff
said.)
But Jones was no Scowcroft in so many ways. Scowcroft came
into office with a deep, personal relationship with the president. Jones and
Obama, aloofness squared, never got there. Scowcroft came to the job with a
well-defined world-view, cultivated over a life of intensive and thoughtful study
of international affairs. One diplomat who worked with Jones when he was supreme allied commander in Europe
said "he never had the slightest interest in foreign policy." He was just
interested in military affairs and even in that respect he was not particularly
creative or intellectually curious.
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