The Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor for Iraq and Afghanistan, also known by the informal expression War Czar, is a position the George W. Bush administration created to oversee the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with authority to issue directions to the Pentagon, the State Department, and other agencies.
Previous to the creation of the 'war czar' position, Deputy National Security Advisor Meghan O'Sullivan was primarily responsible for White House programs related to the war, under the direction of the National Security Advisor, Stephen J. Hadley and without authority to issue interagency orders. O'Sullivan's resignation allowed the administration the opportunity to reorganize. The position was offered to three retired generals, John J. Sheehan, Jack Keane, and Joseph Ralston, before the appointment of Lieutenant General Douglas Lute in May 2007; Lute was confirmed by the Senate on June 28, 2007, and reported both to the President and the National Security Advisor with the rank of full "Assistant to the President." He has continued to hold this position in the Barack Obama administration. Under President Obama, he now answers to new National Security Advisor Thomas E. Donilon.
Famous quotes containing the words president, deputy, national and/or security:
“The President has paid dear for his White House. It has commonly cost him all his peace, and the best of his manly attributes. To preserve for a short time so conspicuous an appearance before the world, he is content to eat dust before the real masters who stand erect behind the throne.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The only law was that enforced by the Creek Lighthorsemen and the U.S. deputy marshals who paid rare and brief visits; or the “two volumes of common law” that every man carried strapped to his thighs.”
—State of Oklahoma, U.S. relief program (1935-1943)
“Ignorance, forgetfulness, or contempt of the rights of man are the only causes of public misfortunes and of the corruption of governments.”
—French National Assembly. Declaration of the Rights of Man (drafted and discussed Aug. 1789, published Sept. 1791)
“Those words freedom and opportunity do not mean a license to climb upwards by pushing other people down. Any paternalistic system that tries to provide for security for everyone from above only calls for an impossible task and a regimentation utterly uncongenial to the spirit of our people.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)