Hyping the Islamic State (ISIS or IS) threat risks generating flawed policies. The White House probably is a source of frustration, as its critics claim, but others seem too eager to commit US combat troops. Meanwhile, the administration, under constant pressure regarding the US effort, has not done enough to energize the anti-IS coalition that President Obama worked so hard to assemble. This inclines allies to believe Washington will do the heavy lifting for them. Although addressing IS full-bore (and unilaterally) might seem appealing to some, this urge undermines the patience needed for more sensible courses of action.
The Hagel Affair
The resignation of Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel last month resulted in criticism that the White House is unreceptive to outside views, such as expanding the US military effort against IS. Excessive micromanagement of military related issues by the White House (including the phone line to commanders in Afghanistan that bypassed Hagel) has also been cited.
Past Presidents have done likewise. In overseas crises, many presidents created their own channels, giving White House officials more power than cabinet secretaries. Franklin Roosevelt often relied on Harry Hopkins over Secretary of State Cordell Hull, Richard Nixon used Henry Kissinger in lieu of William Rogers, and Colin Powell found himself outside the Bush administration’s inner circle. Perhaps the most extreme example of presidential micromanagement was Lyndon Johnson’s handling of the Vietnam War.
The Obama White House has long had dicey relations with the Pentagon. This has been, according to the Pentagon’s side of the argument, the source of delays and confusing policy directions on several issues, with the White House accused of falling into “group think.” For his part, Hagel had complained in the early fall to National Security Advisor Susan Rice in a memo about a lack of cohesion in US policy toward IS.
Nonetheless, White House micromanagement or Pentagon-White House difficulties aside, Obama’s reluctance to ramp up the US military effort against IS excessively seems well founded. Of course, Hagel’s position is not entirely clear, but escalation had been advocated by Hagel’s two predecessors: Robert Gates and Leon Panetta.
Costs of US Escalation
IS appears ready to endure lopsided casualties to inflict some on American combat troops. And IS could follow through on this hope. Not only are its combatants fanatics, the radical Sunni militia also employs deadly suicide bombings against foes in close-up urban combat (as we’ve seen in Kobani). Additionally, IS likely hopes to get a hold of at least a few US military prisoners for filmed beheadings. So why hand IS exactly what it wants?
With large urban areas to be cleared just in Iraq—from Fallujah to Mosul—US combat troops would also likely incur casualties in excess of those suffered in 2003-08 against somewhat less fanatical Sunni Arab insurgents and Shi’a militias during the war.
American military difficulties could be further magnified by reduced interest on the part of Iraq’s Shi’a-dominated government in making the political concessions needed to split Sunni Arab tribes and other secular elements away from IS and marshal its own forces more swiftly. After all, why should Baghdad go the extra mile if the US seems willing to take care of Baghdad’s IS problem militarily?
Recently, despite lost ground in and around Ramadi west of Baghdad, Iraqi and Kurdish forces have made gains between Baghdad and Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) territory to the north. Moving up Iraq’s central line of communications, Iraqi forces have driven IS from some important territory. The siege of the vital Baiji refinery complex has been lifted, and gains have been made in the demographically mixed Diyala Governate northeast of Baghdad.
Meanwhile, Iraqi Kurds continue to push IS slowly westward. Baghdad and the KRG reached a temporary oil agreement yesterday that should clear the way for greater cooperation elsewhere, like battling IS. Bitter quarrelling under former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki left Iraqi-KRG relations in shambles.
Struggling to rebound from severe reverses last summer, however, the Iraqi Army is in no position to mount a major offensive deep into IS holdings. However, successful Iraqi and Kurdish attacks demonstrate the vulnerability of IS’s vast perimeter. Strong IS forces cannot be everywhere at once to repel various challenges and adequately support ongoing attacks (such as its effort against Kobani).
In terms of a military threat, IS has been largely contained. It cannot advance northward against Turkey; isolated pro-IS sympathies exist in Jordan, but the highly professional Jordanian Army would be a tough nut to crack; and in Iraq, most all Shi’a and Kurdish areas lie outside IS control and are fighting hard to maintain this status. In Syria, IS could advance against weaker rebel forces like the Free Syrian Army, but it seems obsessed with seizing Kobani despite heavy losses.
Coalition and US Escalation
The anti-IS coalition the White House assembled is contributing relatively little to the overall military effort, despite Secretary of State John Kerry’s glowing rhetoric at today’s coalition conclave in Brussels. The air campaign is mainly an American show. Committing more US assets would make it easier for others already foot-dragging over contributions to continue dithering. Now is not the time to ramp up US military efforts, but rather to pressure allies to increase their own contributions.
The bulk of IS’s reinforcements in the form of foreign fighters flow through NATO ally Turkey. The CIA in September and the UN more recently sharply increased their estimate of the number of foreign fighters reaching the Islamic State. To date, Turkey has been more helpful to IS than the coalition because of its passivity. If it cannot be pressured to vigorously interdict incoming fighters, IS would be able to replace many lost fighters—although with less experienced cadres.
The White House (and other allies) must press Turkey harder. President Obama delayed air support for beleaguered Syrian Kurds for two weeks in deference to Turkish concerns (allowing IS to gain a foothold inside Kobani). Even today’s 60-nation gathering seems short on clear goals, let alone a robust military agenda on contributions.
Admittedly, although the Administration has done too little diplomatic spadework, its leverage overseas probably has been undermined by American politicians, pundits, and many in the media demanding an expanded US effort.
Bottom Line
IS remains a daunting foe, so it will not be defeated easily, soon, or completely. To Americans pressing urgently for quick solutions, this is difficult to accept. But comments like one yesterday by Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Chair of the House Foreign Relations Middle East and North Africa Sub-Committee, suggesting IS could damage everyone’s way of life are typical of exaggerations impeding objective policymaking.
Yet those claiming the air campaign has been ineffective are also naïve. IS has mostly ground to a halt. In some places, like Kobani, IS is hemorrhaging combat casualties. Meanwhile IS’s infrastructure, leadership, training camps, heavy weapons, oil refineries, and lines of communication have been hammered by the ongoing aerial bombardment. This week, assets in IS’s “capital” of Raqqa, Syria were also subjected to a wave of airstrikes.
Many want IS crushed quickly out of fear of IS attacks against the American homeland. Yet, as we saw in Afghanistan in 2001-02 with al-Qaeda, the combatants would not be completely rounded up should substantial US forces be sent in. Many hundreds at the very least would escape to find refuge elsewhere. In that scenario, IS would likely shift toward an international terrorist mode, posing an even greater threat to the United States. Therefore, a more collective effort—forcing IS to truly understand that it faces dozens of foes and not just a few—would be a wiser way forward. It is meanwhile imperative to strip IS of as many of its non-extremist Sunni Arab allies as possible, so they do not have to be dealt with militarily.
Photo: President Obama addresses reporters during a meeting with th anti-IS coalition on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly on Sept. 24, 2014
]]>by Jim Lobe
In light of the chorus of criticism and contempt by neoconservatives and other hawks (like the Washington Post’s editorial board) leveled at President Barack Obama’s West Point speech last week, I found striking the similarities in basic viewpoints between his address and the concluding pages of Robert [...]]]>
by Jim Lobe
In light of the chorus of criticism and contempt by neoconservatives and other hawks (like the Washington Post’s editorial board) leveled at President Barack Obama’s West Point speech last week, I found striking the similarities in basic viewpoints between his address and the concluding pages of Robert Gates’ memoir, Duty. Gates, of course, was the one major hold-over from the Bush administration, and, despite his service under Obama, was very, very rarely criticized by the usual suspects, particularly the neocons and their right-wing allies in Congress. Here he is on pages 591-3 in his book:
My time as secretary of defense reinforced my belief that in recent decades, American presidents, confronted with a tough problem abroad, have too often been too quick to reach for a gun — to use military force, despite all the realities I have been describing. They could have done worse than to follow the example of President Dwight D. Eisenhower. During his presidency, the Soviet Union became a thermonuclear power, China became a nuclear power, and there were calls for preventive war against both; the Joint Chiefs unanimously recommended that he use nuclear weapons to help the French in Vietnam; there were several crises with China related to Taiwan; a war in the Middle East; a revolution in Cuba; and uprisings in East Germany, Poland, and Hungary. And yet after Eisenhower agreed to the armistice in Korea in the summer of 1953, not one American soldier was killed in action during his presidency. [Bear this passage in mind if you read Bob Kagan's most recent treatise on how international peace and stability has depended and should continue to depend on U.S. military power since 1945.]
Too many ideologues call for the use of the American military as the first option rather than a last resort to address problems. On the left, we hear about the “responsibility to protect” as a justification for military intervention in Libya, Syria, the Sudan, and elsewhere. On the right, the failure to use military force in Libya, Syria, or Iran is deemed an abdication of American leadership and a symptom of a ‘soft’ foreign policy. Obama’s “pivot” to Asia was framed almost entirely in military terms as opposed to economic and political priorities. And so the rest of the world sees America, above all else, as a militaristic country too quick to launch planes, cruise missiles, and armed drones deep into sovereign countries or ungoverned spaces. [Emphasis added.]
I strongly believe America must continue to fulfill its global responsibilities. We are the “indispensable nation,” and few international problems can be addressed successfully without our leadership. But we also need to better appreciate that there are limits to what the United States — still by far the strongest and greatest nation on earth — can do in an often cruel and challenging world. The power of our military’s global reach has been an indispensable contributor to peace and stability in many regions and must remain so. But not every outrage, every act of aggression, every oppression, or every crisis can or should elicit an American response.
I wrote in my first book in 1996 that, contrary to conventional wisdom, the biggest doves in Washington wear uniforms. This is because our military leaders have seen the cost of war and its unpredictability, and they have too often sent their troops in harm’s way to execute ill-defined or unrealistic presidential objectives, with thin political support that evaporated when the going got tough or the fight became prolonged. Just as it did in “the necessary war” in Afghanistan.
There is one final lesson about war that we too often forget. We are enamored of technology and what it can do because of advances in precision, sensors, information, and satellite technology. A button is pushed in Nevada, and seconds later a pickup truck explodes in Mosul. A bomb destroys the targeted house on the right, leaving intact the one on the left. War has become for too many — among them defense “experts,” members of Congress, executive branch officials, and the American public as well — a kind of arcade video game or action movie, bloodless, painless, and odorless. But as I told a military audience at the National Defense University in September 2008, war is “inevitably tragic, inefficient, and uncertain.” I warned them to be skeptical of systems analysis, computer models, game theories, or doctrines that suggest otherwise. “Look askance,” I said, “at idealized, triumphalist, or ethnocentric notions of future conflict that aspire to upend the immutable principles of war, where the enemy is killed, but our troops and innocent civilians are spared: where adversaries can be cowed, shocked, or awed into submission, instead of being tracked down, hilltop by hilltop, house by house, block by bloody block.” I quoted General William T. Sherman that “every attempt to make war easy and safe will result in humiliation and disaster.” And I concluded with General “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell’s warning that “no matter how a war starts, it ends in mud. It has to be slugged out — there are no trick solutions or cheap shortcuts.”
We must always be prepared and willing to use our military forces when our security, our vital interests, or those of our allies are threatened or attacked. But I believe the use of military force should always be a last resort and our objectives clearly and realistically defined (as in the Gulf War). And presidents need to be more willing and skillful in using tools in the national security kit other than hammers. Our foreign and national security policy has become too militarized, the use of force too easy for presidents. [Emphasis added.]
It seems to me that, if anything, the principles laid out by Obama in his West Point speech actually makes him more hawkish than Gates. Which makes me wonder once again why the hawks were so reluctant to attack Gates.
Photo: President Barack Obama talks with Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, left, and Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, outside the Oval Office in the White House, June 16, 2009. Credit: Official White House Photo by Pete Souza
]]>by Jim Lobe
I’ve been slowly reading Robert Gates’ Duty over the last week or so and some of it is quite pertinent in light of the recent recommendation by JINSA’s Michael Makovsky and Lt. Gen. David Deptula (ret.) in the Wall Street Journal that the Obama administration provide Israel with Massive Ordinance Penetrator (MOP) [...]]]>
by Jim Lobe
I’ve been slowly reading Robert Gates’ Duty over the last week or so and some of it is quite pertinent in light of the recent recommendation by JINSA’s Michael Makovsky and Lt. Gen. David Deptula (ret.) in the Wall Street Journal that the Obama administration provide Israel with Massive Ordinance Penetrator (MOP) bombs and B-52 bombers to deliver them against Iran’s nuclear facilities. Here’s what they wrote in their article entitled, “Sending a Bunker-Buster Message to Iran”:
By transferring to Israel MOPs and B-52Hs the administration would send a signal that its ally, which already has the will, now has the ability to prevent a nuclear Iran [a very dubious assertion, according to most experts]. Once they are delivered — ideally as the current six-month interim deal is set to expire in July — Iran will be put on notice that its nuclear program will come to an end, one way or another.
While Gates in his book (pp. 190-191] doesn’t say whether Israel requested the same weaponry in 2007, his description of the arguments presented, both pro and con, would certainly apply to Makovksy’s and Deptula’s arguments today. The passage is worth quoting in full, although the main point is summarized at the end when Gates quotes directly from what he told Bush in private. Here’s the passage as a whole:
Debate [about Iran's nuclear program] heated up considerably in May [2007], prompted by several Israeli military requests that, if satisfied, would greatly enhance their ability to strike the Iranian nuclear sites. In a meeting with the Joint Chiefs and me in the Tank on May 10, in the middle of a conversation on Afghanistan, the president suddenly asked if anybody was thinking about military action against Iran. He quickly added that the goal was of course to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapons and that he “just wanted you to be thinking about it — not a call to arms.”
Two days later the national security team met with the president in his private dining room adjacent to the Oval Office. The participants included Cheney, Rice, Mullen, Bolten, Hadley, Hadley’s deputy Jim Jeffrey, and me. We addressed two questions: How do we answer the Israelis and what should we do about the Iranian nuclear program? In many respects, it was a reprise of the debate over the Syrian nuclear reactor the year before. Hadley asked me to lead off. When making my case to the president on a significant issue like this one, I always wrote out in advance the points I wanted to make, because I did not want to omit something important. Given Bush 43′s green light to Olmert on the Syrian reactor, I was very apprehensive as the meeting began.
I recommended saying no to all the Israelis’ requests. Giving them any of the items on their new list would signal U.S. support for them to attack Iran unilaterally: “At that point, we lose our ability to control our fate in the entire region.” I said we would be handing over the initiative regarding U.S. vital national interests to a foreign power, a government that, when we asked them not to attack Syria, did so anyway. We should offer to collaborate more closely with Israel, I continued, doing more on missile defense and other capabilities, “but Olmert should be told in the strongest possible terms not to act unilaterally.” The United States was not reconciled to Iran having nuclear weapons, but we needed a long-term solution, not just a one-to-three-year delay. I went on to say that a strike by the United States or Israel would end divisions in the Iranian government, strengthen the most radical elements, unify the country behind the government in their hatred of us, and demonstrate to all Iranians the need to develop nuclear weapons. I warned that Iran was not Syria — it would retaliate, putting at risk Iraq, Lebanon, oil supplies from the Gulf (which would lead to skyrocketing oil prices), and the end of the peace process, as well as increasing the likelihood of a Hizballah war against Israel. Addressing what I knew to be Cheney’s desire to deal with the Iranian nuclear program before Bush left office, I observed that our current efforts to isolate Iran, significantly increase their economic problems, and delay their nuclear program might not be successful in bringing about a change of policy in Tehran during the Bush presidency, but they would leave his successor a robust array of tools with which to apply pressure. Finally, I pointed out that the president’s own conditions for preemptive war had not been met, our own intelligence estimate would be used against us, and we would be the ones isolated, not Iran.
Cheney spoke next, and I knew what was coming. Matter-of-factly, he said he disagreed with everything I had said. The United States should give Israel everything it wanted. We could not allow Iran to get nuclear weapons. If we weren’t going to act, he said, then we should enable the Israelis. Twenty years on, he argued, if there was a nuclear-armed Iran, people would say the Bush administration could have stopped it. I interjected that twenty years on, people might also say that we not only didn’t stop them from getting nuclear weapons but made it inevitable. I was pretty sure Condi did not favor accommodating Israeli’s requests, but the way she expressed her concerns about not leaving our ally in the lurch or feeling isolated led Mullen and me after the meeting to worry that she might be changing her mind. Mullen talked about the difficulty of carrying out a successful attack. Hadley remained silent. At the end, the president was non-commital, clearly frustrated by the lack of good options for dealing with Iran. He had a lot of company in the room on that score.
That afternoon I flew to Colorado Springs to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the North American Aerospace Defense Command. Aboard the plane, I became increasingly worried that the president might be persuaded by Cheney and Olmert to act or to enable the Israelis to act, especially if Condi’s position was softening. I decided to communicate once again with Bush privately. I said,
“We must not make our vital interests in the entire Middle East, the Persian Gulf, and Southwest Asia hostage to another nation’s decisions — no matter how close an ally. Above all, we ought not risk what we have gained in Iraq or the lives of our soldiers there on an Israeli military gamble in Iran. Olmert has his own agenda, and he will pursue it irrespective of our interests. …We will be bystanders to actions that affect us directly and dramatically. …Most evidence suggests we have some time. …The military option probably remains available for several years. …A military attack by either Israel or the United States will, I believe — having watched these guys since 1979 — guarantee that the Iranians will develop nuclear weapons, and seek revenge. …A surprise attack on Iran risks a further conflict in the Gulf and all its potential consequences, with no consultation with the Congress or foreknowledge on the part of the American people. That strikes me as very dangerous, and not just for sustaining our efforts in the Gulf.”
Most of that should act as a rebuttal to Makovsky’s and Deptula’s dangerous recommendations.
]]>Back in January, academic Matthew Kroenig claimed the United States could militarily strike Iran without causing havoc and catastrophe in the region. His arguments were widely criticized and supported by the usual suspects. Jamie Fly, the neoconservative executive director of the Foreign Policy Initiative, disagreed with Kroenig, but only because [...]]]>
Back in January, academic Matthew Kroenig claimed the United States could militarily strike Iran without causing havoc and catastrophe in the region. His arguments were widely criticized and supported by the usual suspects. Jamie Fly, the neoconservative executive director of the Foreign Policy Initiative, disagreed with Kroenig, but only because Kroenig did not go far enough. Then in May the two penned an op-ed arguing that President Obama had offered Iran too many carrots. This was just days before the talks almost collapsed after the only “relief” the Western-led negotiating team offered Iran was spare parts for aircraft that have suffered tremendously under sanctions. What would assist the negotiation process, according to Fly and Kroenig? More threats of military force, of course.
Although using the military option on Iran hasn’t exactly taken off as a preferred choice here in Washington, Kroenig and like-minded folks working at prominent platforms like the Wall Street Journal continue to beat their drums. That’s likely one reason why the Council on Foreign Relations hosted a debate moderated by Foreign Affairs editor Gideon Rose between Kroenig and Trita Parsi, a prominent US-Iran relations analyst and president of the National Iranian American Council. The entire debate is worth listening to, but in a nutshell, Kroenig reiterates the arguments from his article: out of the 3 potential outcomes with Iran — successful diplomacy, nuclear containment and military conflict, the third is most likely and planning should begin even while the US continues its diplomatic track with Iran. Israel isn’t equipped to do the job, so the US should carry out “limited” strikes and only respond devastatingly if Iran retaliates with more than wimper by, for example, closing the Strait of Hormuz.
Parsi accordingly points out several flaws in Kroenig’s argument: an Iranian nuclear weapon is neither inevitable nor imminent, diplomacy has neither failed nor been whole-heartedly utilized and the experience of the Iraq War, which took the lives of 5,000 Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, shows that a war with Iran is hardly going to be quick and relatively painless as Kroenig suggests. Parsi adds that as with the lead-up to the Iraq War, proponents of the military option with Iran are not from the military or intelligence communities. In fact, neoconservative hawks regularly contest the validity of intelligence and military assessments, which is ironic to say the least. Parsi also notes that as former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has repeatedly emphasized, bombing a country is the best way to convince it that it needs a nuclear deterrent to ward of future attacks…
]]>The Virginian-Pilot reports that former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates restated his opposition to military strikes against Iran last night. The Republican made the comments to an audience of nearly 2,000 in Chrysler Hall as a speaker for the Norfolk Forum:
Neither the United States nor Israel is capable of [...]]]>
The Virginian-Pilot reports that former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates restated his opposition to military strikes against Iran last night. The Republican made the comments to an audience of nearly 2,000 in Chrysler Hall as a speaker for the Norfolk Forum:
Neither the United States nor Israel is capable of wiping out Iran’s nuclear capability, he said, and “such an attack would make a nuclear-armed Iran inevitable. They would just bury the program deeper and make it more covert.”
….”The results of an American or Israeli military strike on Iran could, in my view, prove catastrophic, haunting us for generations in that part of the world.”
….United Nations sanctions aimed at discouraging Iran’s nuclear ambitions are starting to have an impact on the Iranian economy, he said, and “that’s our best chance going forward, to ratchet up the economic pressure and diplomatic isolation to the point where the Iranian leadership concludes that it actually hurts Iranian security and, above all, the security of the regime itself, to continue to pursue nuclear weapons.”
Gates also said the US Government should indicate that Israeli leaders “do not have a blank check to take action that could do grave harm to American vital interests.” Though Gates describes the Islamic Republic as “one of the greatest risks to Middle East stability and global security in our history,” he has repeatedly argued against preemptive war and strongly criticized Netanyahu’s behavior towards President Obama in a private policy forum.
]]>This was one of the most memorable lines from Barack Obama’s 2008 acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention: “the greatest risk we can take is to try the same, old politics with the same, old players and expect a different result.”
Those of us who took him at [...]]]>
This was one of the most memorable lines from Barack Obama’s 2008 acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention: “the greatest risk we can take is to try the same, old politics with the same, old players and expect a different result.”
Those of us who took him at his word hoped that they would apply not only to domestic issues, but to foreign policy too. This author actually had the optimistic temerity to pen a piece imagining what the new president’s “new politics” toward Iran might look like, in an Alternet piece headlined, “What President Obama’s Letter to Iran Should Really Say.” Here is an excerpt from its conclusion:
Your interests and ours do not, and will not, always coincide, nor will we always view the challenges facing the world from the same perspective. Nonetheless, Iranians and Americans need to speak with one another, to share ideas, to work together on issues about which we already agree in principle, and to learn from one another on those with which we are in accord in practice. We can then, with mutual respect, build upon the relationship we have created to approach the more difficult issues — those that have locked our relationship into a confrontational dynamic for the past 30 years.
(An Iranian colleague informed me at the time that my letter, minus its byline, was e-mailed around Iran, sparking speculation as to whether or not Obama had written it himself!).
While my proposed Letter wasn’t exactly the same message that Obama transmitted to the Iranians during his 2009 Nowruz speech, there were sufficient resemblances between the two to offer, at least temporarily, some grounds for optimism:
We have serious differences that have grown over time. My administration is now committed to diplomacy that addresses the full range of issues before us, and to pursuing constructive ties among the United States, Iran and the international community. This process will not be advanced by threats. We seek instead engagement that is honest and grounded in mutual respect.
But the president’s Iran policy was soon channeled toward the “the same old politics with the same old players.” Robert Gates stayed on as Secretary of Defense, minimizing any meaningful change in rhetoric or policy from the previous Bush years. Veterans of the Clinton administration, such as Dennis Ross, were recycled and brought on board to deal with Iran policy. Sanctions continued to be equated with “diplomacy,” and cudgels confused with “carrots.”
Weeks before the 2012 US election, President Obama now finds himself in a situation where Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — who has made no secret of his hope that Obama’s Republican rival will be elected in his stead — is attempting to play Obama’s puppet master. Netanyahu’s ultimatum: either the US issues a “clear red line” for an American attack on Iran that is acceptable to Israel, or the Israelis will strike Iran on their own. And if the Israelis start a war, the US president will have no choice but to back Israel by getting involved. There remains the politically untenable option of Obama declaring openly that the US and Israel are not on the same page and that the US will not back an Israeli strike on Iran, but in the current political environment, that is highly unlikely.
Is there any way out for Obama? According to Akiva Eldar, a senior political correspondent for Haaretz, there is. Obama should buck the hysteria from the right-wing in the US and Israel and go to Iran as Richard Nixon went to China in 1972:
Obama lost the battle long ago for Netanyahu’s fans in the U.S. Jewish community and among the Christian right. If the Iran issue was critical to the U.S. presidential election then Obama should have already started packing. Instead of trying to bring the Iranians to their knees, he can offer them a way up toward restoration of their self-respect. What does Obama have to lose by flying to Tehran to begin a dialogue about ending the nuclear arms race and stopping Iran’s support for terror organizations and for the genocide in Syria?
Eldar, who served as Haaretz’s US Bureau Chief and Washington correspondent from 1993-96, was designated as one of the most prominent and influential commentators in the world in 2006. In 2007 he received the annual “Search for Common Ground” award for Middle East journalism. He regularly appears on major television and radio networks in Israel, the US, Canada, Australia, and Europe, and has appeared on Nightline, the Charlie Rose Show and on CNN and CBS news programs. So it is significant when a seasoned Israeli commentator like Eldar suggests Obama give a reconciliation speech in Tehran that says:
“No single nation should pick and choose which country holds nuclear weapons. And that’s why I strongly reaffirmed America’s commitment to seek a world in which no nations possess nuclear weapons. And any nation – including Iran – should have the right to access peaceful nuclear power if it complies with its responsibilities under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. That commitment is at the core of the treaty, and it must be kept for all who fully abide by it. And I’m hopeful that all countries in the region can share in this goal” (from Obama’s remarks in Cairo on June 4, 2009 ).
Such a move, Eldar suggests, would not just be good policy, it would also be good politics: “after his historic visit to China, Nixon was reelected.”
Eldar’s op-eds appear in The International Herald Tribune, The New York Times, The LA Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer and The New York Jewish Week. Will this one make its way into the American press? It’s a groundbreaking article that deserves more widespread attention than it has thus far received, epecially from President Obama, who really needs a game-changer on Iran to stave off disaster.
As candidate Obama said back in 2008, “the greatest risk we can take is to try the same, old politics with the same, old players and expect a different result.”
]]>
Interviewer Charlie Rose asked Gates about his comment that Iran was the toughest challenge he has faced. Gates suggested, in line with the Obama administration, that a diplomatically negotiated solution to the Iranian nuclear crisis was the sole way to deal with the issues without major drawbacks. Gates said:
GATES: The only good option is putting enough pressure on the Iranian government that they make the decision for themselves that continuing to seek nuclear weapons is actually harming the security of the country and, perhaps more importantly to them, putting the regime itself at risk. And there are signs that those sanctions are beginning to really bite and some much more severe European Union sanctions will come into effect this summer.
ROSE: What if Israel does it on its own?
GATES: That would be worse than us doing it. Because I think that then has lots of regional complications that may end up in a much larger Middle East conflict. So I think that would be worse.
Watch the video:
Gates has offered warnings about attacking Iran before, declaring that even a U.S. strike would be a “catastrophe.” So his statement that an Israeli strike would be “worse” is significant. And a Pentagon wargame reported by the New York Times this year found the U.S. got dragged into the conflict after an Israeli strike.
A top U.S. security thinktank that advises the Pentagon released an article in its journal yesterday advising against a U.S. or Israeli strike against Iran. The article from the RAND Corporation by, among others, top former U.S. diplomat James Dobbins, noted that a strike “would make it more, not less, likely that the Iranian regime would decide to produce and deploy nuclear weapons” — in line with assessements from some top former Israeli officials. The RAND article called for more U.S.-Israeli cooperation and for the U.S. to quietly “support the assessments of former and current Israeli officials who have argued against a military option.” Many former top Israeli security officials have criticized Israel’s hawkish government for an eagerness to attack Iran without dealing with potential consequences of such an attack.
Gates seemed to be using shorthand when discussing Iran’s “continuing to seek nuclear weapons.” While a potential Iranian nuclear weapon is widely considered a threat to both the security of the U.S. and its allies in the region, as well as the nuclear non-proliferation regime, reports on U.S. and Israeli estimates state that these intelligence agencies don’t believe Iran has made a decision to build nuclear weapons. Those estimates give the West time to pursue a dual-track approach of pressure and diplomacy to resolve the crisis. American officials including President Obama vow to keep “all options on the table” to deal with the Iranian nuclear program, but questions about the efficacy and consequences of a strike have led U.S. officials to declare that diplomacy is the “best and most permanent way” to resolve the crisis.
]]>Jeffrey Goldberg’s report on a meeting of National Security Council Principals Committee (NSC/PC), in which Secretary of Defense Robert Gates expressed frustration with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s intransigence on the peace process and the fact that “the U.S. has received nothing in return” for [...]]]>
Jeffrey Goldberg’s report on a meeting of National Security Council Principals Committee (NSC/PC), in which Secretary of Defense Robert Gates expressed frustration with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s intransigence on the peace process and the fact that “the U.S. has received nothing in return” for its security guarantees, might raise more questions than it answers.
What Goldberg didn’t mention is the historical and conceptual context for Gates’ remarks. Indeed, Gates is not the first senior American official to express concern that the protraction of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — and the perception of U.S. favoritism toward Israel on this issue — was offering few, if any, dividends for U.S. security or its own regional interests.
Back in March, 2010, Gen. David Petraeus made waves when he told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict had immediate implications for the U.S.’s ability to pursue its interests in the Middle East. He named some of these problems:
- Insufficient progress toward a comprehensive Middle East peace. The enduring hostilities between Israel and some of its neighbors present distinct challenges to our ability to advance our interests in the AOR. Israeli-Palestinian tensions often flare into violence and large-scale armed confrontations. The conflict foments anti-American sentiment, due to a perception of U.S. favoritism for Israel. Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of U.S. partnerships with governments and peoples in the AOR and weakens the legitimacy of moderate regimes in the Arab world. Meanwhile, al-Qaeda and other militant groups exploit that anger to mobilize support. The conflict also gives Iran influence in the Arab world through its clients, Lebanese Hizballah and Hamas.
Israel hawks quickly denounced Petraeus’ comments and have continued to attack a straw man argument that resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict wouldn’t solve all challenges facing the U.S. in the Middle East.
But Petraeus wasn’t the only senior U.S. official to endorse the concept of “linkage” between resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the longer-term strategic interests of the U.S. in the Middle East. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, CENTCOM commander Gen. James Mattis, and Adm. Michael Mullen — via a WikiLeaks cable — have voiced endorsements of this concept.
While Jeffrey Goldberg — who has a history of rejecting linkage — carefully reports on Gates’ anger with Netanyahu for delivering “nothing in return” for security guarantees, access to weapons, and intelligence sharing, he is careful to sidestep the obvious next question. Why does Gates feel strongly about Netanyahu refusing to “grapple with Israel’s growing isolation and with the demographic challenges it faces if it keeps control of the West Bank”?
Goldberg doesn’t engage that topic. It might be because Gates shares the emerging consensus of the U.S.’s top military and political leadership that Israel’s continued settlement expansion and intransigence at the negotiating table is doing real damage to the Obama administration’s attempts to pursue a wide range of military and political interests in the Middle East.
]]>The Saved and the Sacked
Is it too soon to speak of the Bush-Obama presidency?
The record shows impressive continuities between the two administrations, and nowhere more than in the policy of “force projection” in the Arab world. With one war half-ended [...]]]>
The Saved and the Sacked
Is it too soon to speak of the Bush-Obama presidency?
The record shows impressive continuities between the two administrations, and nowhere more than in the policy of “force projection” in the Arab world. With one war half-ended in Iraq, but another doubled in size and stretching across borders in Afghanistan; with an expanded program of drone killings and black-ops assassinations, the latter glorified in special ceremonies of thanksgiving (as they never were under Bush); with the number of prisoners at Guantanamo having decreased, but some now slated for permanent detention; with the repeated invocation of “state secrets” to protect the government from charges of war crimes; with the Patriot Act renewed and its most dubious provisions left intact — the Bush-Obama presidency has sufficient self-coherence to be considered a historical entity with a life of its own.
The significance of this development has been veiled in recent mainstream coverage of the national security state and our larger and smaller wars. Back in 2005-2006, when the Iraqi insurgency refused to die down and what had been presented as “sectarian feuding” began to look like a war of national liberation against an occupying power, the American press exhibited an uncommon critical acuteness. But Washington’s embrace of “the surge” in Iraq in 2007 took that war off the front page, and it — along with the Afghan War — has returned only occasionally in the four years since.
This disappearance suited the purposes of the long double-presidency. Keep the wars going but normalize them; make them normal by not talking about them much; by not talking about them imply that, while “victory” is not in sight, there is something else, an achievement more realistic and perhaps more grown-up, still available to the United States in the Greater Middle East. This other thing is never defined but has lately been given a name. They call it “success.”
Meanwhile, back at home…
The usual turn from unsatisfying wars abroad to happier domestic conditions, however, no longer seems tenable. In these August days, Americans are rubbing their eyes, still wondering what has befallen us with the president’s “debt deal” — a shifting of tectonic plates beneath the economy of a sort Dick Cheney might have dreamed of, but which Barack Obama and the House Republicans together brought to fruition. A redistribution of wealth and power more than three decades in the making has now been carved into the system and given the stamp of permanence.
Only a Democratic president, and only one associated in the public mind (however wrongly) with the fortunes of the poor, could have accomplished such a reversal with such sickening completeness.
One of the last good times that President Obama enjoyed before the frenzy of debt negotiations began was a chuckle he shared with Jeff Immelt, the CEO of General Electric and now head of the president’s outside panel of economic advisers. At a June 13th meeting of the Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, a questioner said he assumed that President Obama knew about the difficulties caused by the drawn-out process of securing permits for construction jobs. Obama leaned into the microphone and offered a breezy ad-lib: “Shovel ready wasn’t as, uh, shovel-ready as we expected” — and Immelt got off a hearty laugh. An unguarded moment: the president of “hope and change” signifying his solidarity with the big managers whose worldly irony he had adopted.
A certain mystery surrounds Obama’s perpetuation of Bush’s economic policies, in the absence of the reactionary class loyalty that accompanied them, and his expansion of Bush’s war policies in the absence of the crude idea of the enemy and the spirited love of war that drove Bush. But the puzzle has grown tiresome, and the effects of the continuity matter more than its sources.
Bush we knew the meaning of, and the need for resistance was clear. Obama makes resistance harder. During a deep crisis, such a nominal leader, by his contradictory words and conduct and the force of his example (or rather the lack of force in his example), becomes a subtle disaster for all whose hopes once rested with him.
The philosopher William James took as a motto for practical morality: “By their fruits shall ye know them, not by their roots.”
Suppose we test the last two and a half years by the same sensible criterion. Translated into the language of presidential power — the power of a president whose method was to field a “team of rivals” and “lead from behind” — the motto must mean: by their appointments shall ye know them.
Let us examine Obama, then, by the standard of his cabinet members, advisers, and favored influences, and group them by the answers to two questions: Whom has he wanted to stay on longest, in order to profit from their solidity and bask in their influence? Which of them has he discarded fastest or been most eager to shed his association with? Think of them as the saved and the sacked. Obama’s taste in associates at these extremes may tell us something about the moral and political personality in the middle.
The Saved
Advisers whom the president entrusted with power beyond expectation, and sought to keep in his administration for as long as he could prevail on them to stay:
1. Lawrence Summers: Obama’s chief economic adviser, 2009-2010. As Bill Clinton’s secretary of the treasury, 1999-2001, Summers arranged the repeal of the New Deal-era Glass-Steagall Act, which had separated the commercial banks — holders of the savings of ordinary people — from the speculative action of the brokerage houses and money firms. The aim of Glass-Steagall was to protect citizens and the economy from a financial bubble and collapse. Demolition of that wall between savings and finance was a large cause of the 2008 meltdown. In the late 1990s, Summers had also pressed for the deregulation of complex derivatives — a dream fully realized under Bush. In the first months of the Obama era, given a free hand by the president, he commandeered the bank bailouts and advised against major programs for job creation. He won, and we are living with the results.
In 2009-2010, the critical accessory to Summers’s power was Timothy Geithner, Obama’s treasury secretary. Most likely, Geithner was picked for his position by the combined recommendations of Summers and Bush’s treasury secretary Hank Paulson. The latter once described Geithner as “a very unusually talented young man,” and worked with him closely in 2008 when he was still president of the New York Fed. At that time, he concurred with Paulson on the wisdom of bailing out the insurance giant AIG and not rescuing Lehman Brothers. Obama for his part initiated several phone consultations with Paulson during the 2008 campaign — often holding his plane on the tarmac to talk and listen. This chain is unbroken. Any tremors in the president’s closed world caused by Summers’s early departure from the administration have probably been offset by Geithner’s recent reassurance that he will stay at the Treasury beyond 2011.
Postscript: In 2011, Summers has become more reformist than Obama. On The Charlie Rose Show on July 13th, he criticized the president’s dilatoriness in mounting a program to create jobs. Thus he urged the partial abandonment of his own policy, which Obama continues to defend.
2. Robert Gates: A member of the permanent establishment in Washington, Gates raised to the third power the distinction of massive continuity: First as CIA director under George H.W. Bush, second as secretary of defense under George W. Bush, and third as Obama’s secretary of defense. He remained for 28 months and departed against the wishes of the president. Gates sided with General David Petraeus and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen in 2009 to promote a major (called “moderate”) escalation of the Afghan War; yet he did so without rancor or posturing — a style Obama trusted and in the company of which he did not mind losing. In the Bush years, Gates was certainly a moderate in relation to the extravagant war aims of Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and their neoconservative circle. He worked to strengthen U.S. militarism through an ethic of bureaucratic normalization.
His approach has been endorsed and will be continued — though probably with less canniness — by his successor Leon Panetta. Without a career in security to fortify his confidence, Panetta is really a member of a different species: the adaptable choice for “running things” without regard to the nature of the thing or the competence required. Best known as the chief of staff who reduced to a semblance of order the confusion of the Clinton White House, he is associated in the public mind with no set of views or policies.
3. Rahm Emanuel: As Obama’s White House chief of staff, Emanuel performed much of the hands-on work of legislative bargaining that President Obama himself preferred not to engage in. (Vice President Joe Biden also regularly took on this role.) He thereby incurred a cheerless gratitude, but he is a man willing to be disliked. Obama seems to have held Emanuel’s ability in awe; and such was his power that nothing but the chance of becoming mayor of Chicago would have plucked him from the White House. Emanuel is credited, rightly or not, with the Democratic congressional victory of 2006, and one fact about that success, which was never hidden, has been too quickly forgotten. Rahm Emanuel took pains to weed out anti-war candidates.
Obama would have known this, and admired the man who carried it off. Whether Emanuel pursued a similar strategy in the 2010 midterm elections has never been seriously discussed. The fact that the category “anti-war Democrat” hardly exists in 2011 is, however, an achievement jointly creditable to Emanuel and the president.
4. Cass Sunstein: Widely thought to be the president’s most powerful legal adviser. Sunstein defended and may have advised Obama on his breach of his 2008 promise (as senator) to filibuster any new law awarding amnesty to the telecoms that illegally spied on Americans. This was Obama’s first major reversal in the 2008 presidential campaign: he had previously defended the integrity of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) against the secret encroachment of the National Security Agency (NSA).
At that moment, Obama changed from an accuser to a conditional apologist for the surveillance of Americans: the secret policy advocated by Dick Cheney, approved by President Bush, executed by NSA Director Michael Hayden, and supplied with a rationale by Cheney’s legal counsel David Addington. In his awkward public defense of the switch, Obama suggested that scrutiny of telecom records and their uses by the inspectors general in the relevant agencies and departments should be enough to restore the rule of law.
When it comes to national security policy, Sunstein is a particularly strong example of Bush-Obama continuity. Though sometimes identified as a liberal, from early on he defended the expansion of the national security state under Cheney’s Office of the Vice President, and he praised the firm restraint with which the Ashcroft Justice Department shouldered its responsibilities. “By historical standards,” he wrote in the fall of 2004, “the Bush administration has acted with considerable restraint and with commendable respect for political liberty. It has not attempted to restrict speech or the democratic process in any way. The much-reviled and poorly understood Patriot Act, at least as administered, has done little to restrict civil liberty as it stood before its enactment.” This seems to have become Obama’s view.
Charity toward the framers of the Patriot Act has, in the Obama administration, been accompanied by a consistent refusal to initiate or support legal action against the “torture lawyers.” Sunstein described the Bush Justice Department memos by John Yoo and Jay Bybee, which defended the use of the water torture and other extreme methods, in words that stopped short of legal condemnation: “It’s egregiously bad. It’s very low level, it’s very weak, embarrassingly weak, just short of reckless.” Bad lawyering: a professional fault but not an actionable offense.
The Obama policy of declining to hold any high official or even CIA interrogators accountable for violations of the law by the preceding administration would likely not have survived opposition by Sunstein. A promise not to prosecute, however, has been implicit in the findings by the Obama Justice Department — a promise that was made explicit by Leon Panetta in February 2009 when he had just been named President Obama’s new director of the CIA.
As head of the president’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, with an office in the White House, Sunstein adjudicates government policy on issues of worker and consumer safety; yet his title suggests a claim of authority on issues such as the data-mining of information about American citizens and the government’s deployment of a state secrets privilege. He deserves wider attention, too, for his 2008 proposal that the government “cognitively infiltrate” discussion groups on-line and in neighborhoods, paying covert agents to monitor and, if possible, discredit lines of argument which the government judges to be extreme or misleading.
5. Eric Holder: Holder once said that the trial of suspected 9/11 “mastermind” Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a New York City courtroom would be “the defining event of my time as attorney general.” The decision to make KSM’s a civilian trial was, however, scuttled, thanks to incompetent management at the White House: neither the first nor last failure of its kind. The policy of trying suspected terrorists in civilian courts seems to have suffered from never being wholeheartedly embraced by the administration’s inside actors. Local resistance by the New York authorities was the ostensible reason for the failure and the change of venue back to a military tribunal at Guantanamo. No member of the administration besides Holder has been observed to show much regret.
During his 30-month tenure, in keeping with Obama’s willingness to overlook the unpleasant history of CIA renditions and “extreme interrogations,” Holder has made no move to prosecute any upper-level official of any of the big banks and money firms responsible for the financial collapse of 2008. His silence on the subject has been taken as a signal that such prosecutions will never occur. To judge by public statements, the energies of the attorney general, in an administration that arrived under the banner of bringing “sunshine” and “transparency” to Washington, have mainly been dedicated to the prosecution of government whistle-blowers through a uniquely rigorous application of the Espionage Act of 1917. More people have been accused under that law by this attorney general than in the entire preceding 93 years of the law’s existence.
Again, this is a focus that Bush-era attorneys general John Ashcroft, Alberto Gonzales, and Michael Mukasey might have relished, but on which none would have dared to act so boldly. Extraordinary delays in grand jury proceedings on Army Private Bradley Manning, suspected of providing government secrets to WikiLeaks, and Julian Assange, who ran that website, are said to have come from a protracted attempt to secure a legal hold against one or both potential defendants within the limits of a barbarous and almost dormant law.
6. Dennis Ross: Earlier in his career, Obama seems to have cherished an interest in the creation of an independent Palestinian state. In Chicago, he was a friend of the dissident Middle East scholar Rashid Khalidi; during his 2007 primary campaign, he sought and received advice from Robert Malley, former special assistant to President Clinton for Arab-Israeli affairs, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter. Both were “realist” opponents of the expansionist policy of Israel’s right-wing coalition government, which subsidizes and affords military protection to Jewish settlements on the occupied West Bank.
Under pressure from the Israel lobby, however, Obama dissociated himself from all three chosen advisers.
Ross, as surely as Gates, is a member of Washington’s permanent establishment. Recruited for the Carter Defense Department by Paul Wolfowitz, he started out as a Soviet specialist, but his expertise migrated with a commission to undertake a Limited Contingency Study on the need for American defense of the Persian Gulf. An American negotiator at the 2000 Camp David summit, Ross was accused of being an unfair broker, having always “started from the Israeli bottom line.”
He entered the Obama administration as a special adviser to Hillary Clinton on the Persian Gulf, but was moved into the White House on June 25, 2009, and outfitted with an elaborate title and comprehensive duties: Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for the Central Region, including all of the Middle East and the Persian Gulf, Afghanistan, Pakistan and South Asia. Ross has cautioned Obama to be “sensitive” to domestic Israeli concerns.
In retrospect, his installation in the White House looks like the first step in a pattern of concessions to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that undid Obama’s hopes for an agreement in the region. Here, caution precluded all inventiveness. It could have been predicted that the ascendancy of Ross would render void the two-state solution Obama anticipated in his carefully prepared and broadly advertised speech to the Arab world from Cairo University in June 2009.
7. Peter Orszag: Director of the Office of Management and Budget from January 2009 to August 2010, Orszag was charged with bringing in the big health insurers to lay out what it would take for them to support the president’s health-care law. In this way, Orszag — along with the companies — exerted a decisive influence on the final shape of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010. In January 2011, he left the administration to become vice chairman of global banking at Citigroup. A few days out of the White House, he published an op-ed in the New York Times advising the president to extend the Bush-era tax cuts for the top 2% of Americans — adding that Obama should indicate that the cuts would continue in force only through 2012. Obama took the advice.
8. Thomas Donilon: National Security Adviser and (after the departure of Gates) Obama’s closest consultant on foreign policy. Donilon supported the 34,000 troop-escalation order that followed the president’s inconclusive 2009 Afghanistan War review. He encouraged and warmly applauded Obama’s non-binding “final orders” on Afghanistan, which all the participants in the 2009 review were asked formally to approve. (The final orders speak of “a prioritized comprehensive approach” by which the U.S. will “work with [Afghan President Hamid] Karzai when we can” to set “the conditions for an accelerated transition,” to bring about “effective sub-national governance,” and to “transfer” the responsibility for fighting the war while continuing to “degrade” enemy forces.)
Donilon comes from the worlds of business, the law, and government in about equal measure: a versatile career spanning many orthodoxies. His open and unreserved admiration for President Obama seems to have counted more heavily in his appointment than the low opinion of his qualifications apparently held by several associates. As Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs during the Clinton administration, he helped arrange the eastward expansion of NATO after the Cold War: perhaps the most pointless and destructive bipartisan project of the epoch. He was Executive Vice President for Law and Policy at Fannie Mae, 1999-2005.
The Sacked
Advisers and nominees with views that were in line with Obama’s 2008 election campaign or his professed goals in 2009, but who have since been fired, asked to resign or step down, or seen their nominations dropped:
1. General James Jones: Former Marine Corps Commandant and a skeptic of the Afghanistan escalation, Jones became the president’s first National Security Adviser. He was, however, often denied meetings with Obama, who seems to have looked on Gates as a superior technocrat, Petraeus as a more prestigious officer, and Donilon as a more fervent believer in the split-the-difference war and diplomatic policies Obama elected to pursue. Jones resigned in October 2010, under pressure.
A curious point: Obama had spoken to Jones only twice before appointing him to so high a post and seems hardly to have come to know him by the time he resigned.
2. Karl Eikenberry: Commander of Combined Forces in Afghanistan before he was made ambassador, Eikenberry, a retired Lieutenant General, had seniority over both Petraeus and then war commander General Stanley McChrystal when it came to experience in that country and theater of war. He was the author of cables to the State Department in late 2009, which carried a stinging rebuke to the conduct of the war and unconcealed hostility toward any new policy of escalation. The Eikenberry cables were drafted in order to influence the White House review that fall; they advised that the Afghan war was in the process of being lost, that it could never be won, and that nothing good would come from an increased commitment of U.S. troops.
Petraeus, then Centcom commander, and McChrystal were both disturbed by the cables — startled when they arrived unbidden and intimidated by their authority. Obama, astonishingly, chose to ignore them. This may be the single most baffling occasion of the many when fate dealt a winning card to the president and yet he folded. Among other such occasions: the 2008-2009 bank bailouts and the opening for financial regulation; the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and the opportunity for a revised environmental policy; the Fukushima nuclear plant meltdowns and a revised policy toward nuclear energy; the Goldstone Report and the chance for an end to the Gaza blockade. But of all these as well as other cases that might be mentioned, the Eikenberry cables offer the clearest instance of persisting in a discredited policy against the weight of impressive evidence.
Ambassador Eikenberry retired in 2011, and Obama replaced him with Ryan Crocker — the Foreign Service officer brought into Iraq by Bush to help General Petraeus manage the details and publicity around the Iraq surge of 2007-2008.
3. Paul Volcker: Head of the Federal Reserve under Presidents Carter and Reagan, Volker had a record (not necessarily common among upper-echelon workers in finance) entirely free of the reproach of venality. A steady adviser to the 2008 Obama campaign, he lent gravity to the young candidate’s professions of competence in financial matters. He also counseled Obama against the one-sidedness of a recovery policy founded on repayment guarantees to financial outfits such as Citigroup and Bank of America: the policy, that is, favored by Summers and Geithner in preference to massive job creation and a major investment in infrastructure. “If you want to be a bank,” he said, “follow the bank rules. If Goldman Sachs and the others want to do proprietary trading, then they shouldn’t be banks.” His advice — to tighten regulation in order to curb speculative trading — was adopted late and in diluted form. In January 2010, Jeff Immelt, CEO of General Electric, which paid no federal taxes that year, replaced him.
4. Dennis Blair: As Director of National Intelligence, Blair sought to limit the expansion of covert operations by the CIA. In this quest he was defeated by CIA Director Leon Panetta — a seasoned infighter, though without any experience in intelligence, who successfully enlarged the Agency’s prerogatives and limited oversight of its activities during his tenure. Blair refused to resign when Obama asked him to, and demanded to be fired. He finally stepped down on May 21, 2010.
Doubtless Blair hurt his prospects irreparably by making clear to the president his skepticism regarding the usefulness of drone warfare: a form of killing Obama favors as the most politic and antiseptic available to the U.S. Since being sacked, Blair has come out publicly against the broad use of drones in Pakistan and elsewhere.
On his way out, he was retrospectively made a scapegoat for the November 2009 Fort Hood, Texas, killing spree by Army psychiatrist Major Nidal Hasan; for the “underwear” bomber’s attempt to blow up a plane on its way to Detroit on Christmas day 2009; and for the failed Times Square car bombing of May 2010 — all attacks (it was implied) that Blair should have found the missing key to avert, even though the Army, the FBI, and the CIA were unable to do so.
5. James Cartwright: As vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Cartwright passed on to Obama, and interpreted for him, a good deal of information that proved useful in the Afghanistan War review. Their friendship outlasted the process and he came to be known as Obama’s “favorite general,” but Cartwright stirred the resentment of both Petraeus and Mullen for establishing a separate channel of influence with the president. Like Eikenberry, he had been a skeptic on the question of further escalation in Afghanistan. His name was floated by the White House as the front-runner to become chairman of the Joint Chiefs after the retirement of Mullen. Informed of the military opposition to the appointment, Obama reversed field and chose Army Chief of Staff General Martin Dempsey, a figure more agreeable to Petraeus and Mullen.
6. Dawn Johnsen: Obama’s first choice to head the Office of Legal Counsel — a choice generally praised and closely watched by constitutional lawyers and civil libertarians. Her name was withdrawn after a 14-month wait, and she was denied a confirmation process. The cause: Republican objections to her writings and her public statements against the practice of torture and legal justifications for torture.
This reversal falls in with a larger pattern: the putting forward of candidates for government positions whose views are straightforward, publicly available, and consistent with the pre-2009 principles of Barack Obama — followed by Obama’s withdrawal of support for the same candidates. A more recent instance was the naming (after considerable delay) of Elizabeth Warren as a special advisor to organize the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, followed by the decision in July not to nominate her as the first director of the bureau.
Avoidance of a drag-out fight in confirmation hearings seems to be the recurrent motive here. Of course, the advantage of such a fight, given an articulate and willing nominee, is the education of public opinion. But in every possible instance, President Obama has been averse to any public engagement in the clash of ideas. “Bottom line is that it was going to be close,” a Senate Democratic source told the ABC reporter Jake Tapper when Johnsen’s name was withdrawn. “If they wanted to, the White House could have pushed for a vote. But they didn’t want to ’cause they didn’t have the stomach for the debate.”
Where the nomination of an “extreme” candidate has hardened a wrong impression of Obama as an extremist, might not a public hearing help to eradicate the very preconception that every tactical withdrawal tends to confirm? This question is not asked.
7. Greg Craig: For two years special counsel in the Clinton White House, he led the team defending the president in the impeachment proceedings in Congress. Craig’s declaration of support for Obama in March 2007 was vital to the insurgent candidate, because of his well-known loyalty to the Clintons. Obama made him White House Counsel, and his initial task was to draw up plans for the closing of Guantanamo: a promise made by the president on his first day in the Oval Office. But once the paper was signed, Obama showed little interest in the developing plans. Others were more passionate. Dick Cheney worked on a susceptible populace to resurrect old fears. The forces against closure rallied and spread panic, while the president said nothing. Craig was defeated inside the White House by the “realist” Rahm Emanuel, and sacked.
8. Carol Browner: A leading environmentalist in the Clinton administration, Browner was given a second shot by Obama as director of the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy. She found her efforts thwarted within the administration as well as in Congress: in mid-2010 Obama decided that — as a way to deal with global warming — cap-and-trade legislation was a loser for the midterm elections. Pressure on Obama from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to heed business interests served as a strong incitement in forcing Browner’s resignation after the democratic “shellacking” in midterm elections: a result that his abandonment of cap-and-trade had failed to prevent. The White House had no backup plan for addressing the disaster of global warming. After Browner’s resignation in March 2011, her position was abolished. Since then, Obama has seldom spoken of global warming or climate change.
Moral and Political Limbo
The Obama presidency has been characterized by a refined sense of impossibility. A kind of suffocation sets in when a man of power floats carefully clear of all unorthodox stimuli and resorts to official comforters of the sort exemplified by Panetta. As the above partial list of the saved and the sacked shows, the president lives now in a world in which he is certain never to be told he is wrong when he happens to be on the wrong track. It is a world where the unconventionality of an opinion, or the existence of a possible majority opposed to it somewhere, counts as prima facie evidence against its soundness.
So alternative ideas vanish — along with the people who represent them. What, then, does President Obama imagine he is doing as he backs into one weak appointment after another, and purges all signs of thought and independence around him? We have a few dim clues.
A popular book on Abraham Lincoln, Team of Rivals, seems to have prompted Obama to suppose that Lincoln himself “led from behind” and was committed to bipartisanship not only as a tactic but as an always necessary means to the highest good of democracy. A more wishful conceit was never conceived; but Obama has talked of the book easily and often to support a “pragmatic” instinct for constant compromise that he believes himself to share with the American people and with Lincoln.
A larger hint may come from Obama’s recently released National Strategy for Counterterrorism, where a sentence in the president’s own voice asserts: “We face the world as it is, but we will also pursue a strategy for the world we seek.” If the words “I face the world as it is” have a familiar sound, the reason is that they received a trial run in Obama’s 2009 Nobel Prize speech. Those words were the bridge across which an ambivalent peacemaker walked to confront the heritage of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King with the realities of power as experienced by the leader of the only superpower in the world.
Indeed, Obama’s understanding of international morality seems to be largely expressed by the proposition that “there’s serious evil in the world” — a truth he confided in 2007 to the New York Times columnist David Brooks, and attributed to the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr — combined with the assertion that he is ready to “face the world as it is.” The world we seek is, of course, the better world of high morality. But morality, properly understood, is nothing but a framework of ideals. Once you have discharged your duty, by saying the right words for the right policies, you have to accommodate the world.
This has become the ethic of the Bush-Obama administration in a new phase. It explains, as nothing else does, Obama’s enormous appetite for compromise, the growing conventionality of his choices of policy and person, and the legitimacy he has conferred on many radical innovations of the early Bush years by assenting to their logic and often widening their scope. They are, after all, the world as it is.
Obama’s pragmatism comes down to a series of maxims that can be relied on to ratify the existing order — any order, however recent its advent and however repulsive its effects. You must stay in power in order to go on “seeking.” Therefore, in “the world as it is,” you must requite evil with lesser evil. You do so to prevent your replacement by fanatics: people, for example, like those who invented the means you began by deploring but ended by adopting. Their difference from you is that they lack the vision of the seeker. Finally, in the world as it is, to retain your hold on power you must keep in place the sort of people who are normally found in places of power.
David Bromwich writes on civil liberties and America’s wars for the Huffington Post. A TomDispatch regular, as well as contributor to the New York Review of Books, his latest essay, “How Lincoln Explained Democracy,” appeared recently in the Yale Review.
]]>As more and more diplomatic cables become available, and as real analysts review them, it will become increasingly [...]]]>
As more and more diplomatic cables become available, and as real analysts review them, it will become increasingly apparent that many of the early reports on the perspectives of a handful of hawkish Arab leaders are without critical context.
Iran hawks have been gloating that the quotes from a few Arab leaders in the initial cable release vindicate their analysis and discredit skeptics of military action against Iran. It doesn’t. [U.S. Defense Secretary Robert] Gates’ comment about the Saudis needing to “get into the game” came almost two years after [Saudi] King Abdullah’s now-famous “cut off the head of the snake” comment. And another cable from January 2008 shows Abdullah telling [French President Nicolas] Sarkozy that Saudi Arabia “does not want to inflame the situation,” recommends “continued international engagement” with Iran and “is not yet ready to take any action besides diplomacy.” Maybe, just maybe, those private remarks weren’t actually a very reliable guide to what the Saudis will really do in public?
The way the Iran hawks have been leaping at a few juicy quotes while ignoring the entire well-known context only shows the ongoing poverty of their analysis. I would expect better from the serious analysts on the hawkish side, but, well, there you are.
In this post, Lynch expands upon points he made the day before on the media’s emphasis of the hawkish views of regional leaders:
]]>The point here is not to say that the cautious views matter and the hawkish ones don’t. Nor does it say that Arab leaders haven’t been calling for tough measures against Iran, since they have been doing just that for years. It’s to say that Arab leaders are divided and uncertain about how to deal with Iran, and fearful of taking a strong position in public. In other words, it would be a mistake to “make too much of the private remarks of selected Arab regime figures, without considering whether those remarks reflect an internal consensus within their regimes or whether they will be repeated in public in a moment of political crisis.” That’s pretty much still where we are today.