The Obama-First Foreign Policy

Roger Cohen hammers Barack Obama for surrounding himself with sycophants and comes pretty close to saying his foreign policy is a failure:

In the end the trust of a cool man who had sublimated abandonment into a singular willfulness was limited. The sense of a controlling leader, unable to provide connective tissue to fire the economy, lies behind the fact that many Obama voters will cast their ballot in November with more grudging respect than enthusiasm.

Nixon, like Obama, was a loner, but he had Kissinger generating ideas. Carter had Brzezinski. Reagan had Shultz. The first Bush had Baker. Obama has Tom Donilon as national security adviser. Donilon is an affable pro who has been described as a one-client lawyer. It is clear who the client is.

Then there is Hillary Clinton, a superb secretary of state. But for various reasons (her future is very much ahead of her), she has generally acquiesced to the White House being the locus of major foreign-policy decisions (salvaging things where necessary, as in Pakistan.)

The Obama inner circle remains a group of tough political tacticians: David Axelrod, David Plouffe and Valerie Jarrett. The White House national security team does not boast a single name of strategic stature. Anyone outside Washington would be hard pressed to name one.

The policy upshot has been predictable: cerebral, cool, and with one big exception, cautious. Obama has corrected big mistakes — abandoning the unwinnable global war on terror and pulling out of Iraq. To his immense credit he took a big gamble on killing Osama Bin Laden. But elsewhere he has been cautious to a fault, eyeing the political calendar.

He held out a hand to Iran but promptly reverted to tired old carrots and sticks; his response to the great popular uprising of 2009 was slow. He took half-steps on Israel and Palestine — criticizing Israeli settlements, saying the pre-1967 lines were the basis for a two-state peace — only to offer zero follow-through. Nothing changed.

On Egypt, he toyed with preserving Mubarak ad interim before the tide became irreversible. On Syria, he has in essence dithered. On Afghanistan, domestic politics dictated the agenda, at a cost in American lives.

Two Crises

Noting that the Romney campaign has not yet disseminated a "crisis narrative" as part of the process of humanizing its somewhat mysterious candidate, Sheryl Gay Stolberg obliges with an article describing his reaction to an auto accident in France in 1968, when he was serving as an LDS missionary, and Ann Romney's MS diagnosis 14 yeas ago. Age 21 at the time of the accident, in which a friend was killed, Romney was already cultivating cool:

“Mitt was deeply enmeshed in thinking about leadership,” said Douglas D. Anderson, a friend who is dean of the business school at Utah State University. “He developed a very early set of core beliefs and values that had to do with being cool under pressure, that had to do with looking for opportunities where others saw threats, that had to do with being analytical and somewhat detached in order to look at reality the way it is, rather than how it is being perceived by people who are driven by the hysteria of the moment.

“And out of that,” Dr. Anderson went on, “came a pattern of living that was reinforced by events like that critical accident in France.”

How Nixonian. Otherwise uninterested in introspection, 37 eagerly plumbed his crisis narrative and even wrote a book about it, Six Crises. He was acutely aware of his reactions to political and even mortal emergencies, bragging that he stayed calm and rational when others panicked. He applied the same discipline to a president's loneliest work -- making life-and-death decisions when his smartest advisers wildly disagreed with one another. Long before George W. Bush called himself "the decider," Nixon talked about "the April 30 decision" and "the May 8 decision," when he announced that he was sending troops into Cambodia in 1970 and B-52s to attack Hanoi and Haiphong in 1972.

Once he'd given himself enough time to decide, undecide, and redecide, as his aide and friend Ray Price called it, he rarely second-guessed himself. Soon after I'd joined Nixon's former president's staff, one morning in 1981 he wandered down the hall from his office in 26 Federal Plaza in New York, without a word handed me a copy of his memoirs with one of his business cards marking the May 8 section, and disappeared again. Media reports suggest that while making decisions about how to battle al-Qaeda and whether to send a team to find and kill Osama bin Laden, Barack Obama has brought the same steely qualities to bear.

Nixon didn't always keep his passions under control. He often felt far more deeply than he let on, and he came to regret some of the decisions he made when he was feeling angry or resentful. It would have been better if he'd occasionally delved deeper, according to the theory that the feelings we fully own are less apt to control us. But in addition to his severe introversion and shyness, Nixon had that World War II-Great Depression generation reticence going on.

Stolberg describes Romney as rarely bringing up personal matters and as having a charitable if not an empathetic temperament. "Mitt Romney will never disgrace the office," Anderson told her. "He will set an example of moral rectitude. But don't expect him to sit down and feel your pain." People do want a president who cares, especially in a country where everyone isn't white, male, straight, and rich. But a leader's inner process, including the ability to be unemotional and occasionally ruthless, is even more important.

For Campaigns The Candidates (And We) Deserve

Does anyone else think that Barack Obama and Mitt Romney are being trivial with their commercials and comments about who's tougher, the Osama-killer or the would-be one? On NPR this morning, Michael O'Hanlon, author of Bending History, a new book about Obama's foreign policy, had this to say:

I tend to think we have two outstanding candidates, two honorable men who are pragmatic and fairly centrist in a lot of their views of the world. But their campaigns are already in overdrive, even on an issue that you would consider to be relatively non-divisive, like the death of Osama bin Laden. And I think both campaigns need to look in the mirror a little bit and ask just where they want to take the country these next six months.

Bin There, Done That

At the National Interest, published by the former Nixon Center, Paul Pillar discusses documents seized in the Abbottabad raid that reveal Osama bin Laden's Palestine preoccupation:

The Palestinian issue has the power it does not because individual terrorist leaders like bin Laden necessarily make it their first personal priority but instead because it has tremendous resonance among the Muslim populations to which they appeal. The reason that supporters and rank-and-file practitioners of anti-U.S. terrorism cite most frequently for their hatred of the United States is U.S. condoning of Israeli occupation of Palestinian-inhabited land and of other Israeli actions that involve the killing or subjugation of Muslims.

There are many good reasons not to let the Israeli-Palestinian issue fester. Its role as a readily exploitable extremist cause is one of them.

Pillar and others believe this is why Israel and the U.S. should do more. It's probably also one of the reasons the Palestinians keep doing less, because they think the support of fellow Muslims (not that all Palestinians are Muslim) will leverage a better settlement with Israel. But they're wrong. With each passing year, and each Israeli offer Palestinians spurn, the Israelis build more settlements, and the parameters of a future Palestine get smaller. Bin Laden was a tactical and political adviser the Palestinians are infinitely better off without, especially if it increases the chances they'll just say yes.

Pauline Faultline

In the middle of the first century, within about 20 years of the death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, the great apostle Paul of Tarsus wrote these words to a community of Christians living in Rome [Rom. 12:14-21, NRSV]:

Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them. Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. Live in harmony with one another; do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly; do not claim to be wiser than you are. Do not repay anyone evil for evil, but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all. If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God; for it is written, "Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord." No, "if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads." Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

I remember how overcome by evil I felt that morning, and those weeks, and all those months. Almost all of us remember. The smoke and fire. The faces of the missing, lost, and fallen. The anxiety about what might come next. Many people felt a parchedness of the spirit, even the temptation to perceive God’s silence, indifference, or absence.

Then there was the rage. Do you remember feeling the rage?

Imagine St. Paul coming to town in the weeks after Sept. 11, preaching his bold sermons about blessing those who persecute us. A considerable number would have stood up in church and assured Paul that that vengeance wouldn’t be God’s anywhere near as soon as it would be ours.

If we feel more secure on this anniversary than we did five years ago or nine years ago, it’s because of the methodical, bloody work undertaken by United States military and intelligence services against al-Qaeda and the Taliban. They haven’t eliminated the threat, but they’ve reduced it.

We may not call this vengeance. We may call it a just and proportionate response to the evil our enemies have done.

Yet I will tell you – I’m not proud, but it’s true -- that my heart leaped with satisfaction at the news, which came not long after the joy of Easter, that Osama bin Laden had been killed by an American who pulled the trigger in that compound in Abbottabad and shouted, “For God and country.”

We pause to thank all the men and women who protect us – those who by their diligence and valor have purchased the blessing we enjoy this afternoon of remembering and reflecting in freedom and in relative security.

Yet we Christians still have to contend with St. Paul. Pacifism may be your witness. Perhaps it should be mine, but it isn’t.

But how do the faithful do violence?

Can we love and kill our enemies at the same time?

Are we too prone to mistaking our neighbor for our enemy?

What risks do we run by insisting that we are wise and holy enough ever to extend the arm of God’s own justice?

In Rome during the Emperor Claudius’s time, when Paul wrote his letter, observant Jews were arguing with Christians. Jewish Christians were arguing with non-Jewish Christians. Rome was persecuting both Jews and Christians.

Can you imagine what it was like back in the day -- the fear and mutual suspicion, the scapegoating and the name-calling?

As a matter of fact, you probably can – if you remember the aftermath of Sept. 11.

If we are to achieve justice without vengeance – if we are to act as God would have us act so far as it depends on us – then the call of the gospel is to a relentless discipline of humility and forgiveness. Angry and hurt as we may be, whether in our national life or our daily lives, these virtues are supposed be our default settings.

Paul went so far as to imagine an improbable Roman paradise in which Jews, Christians, and pagans set aside their enmity for the sake of their humanity – a paradise he understood would be populated one proud, reluctant soul at a time.

Today, Paul might well promote harmony among Jews, Christians, Muslims, and all believers – even harmony between Democrats and Republicans.

My wife, Kathy, and I have attorney friends named Harry Waizer and Karen Walsh. Harry grew up in Brooklyn as an orthodox Jew. Karen grew up Roman Catholic in Westchester County. Many of their family members boycotted their wedding. Their Jewish and Catholic mothers shunned one another.

Harry worked for Cantor Fitzgerald in the World Trade Center and was burned by jet fuel over most of his body after the terrorists attacked. He was in a coma for weeks. Doctors gave him a 5% chance, but he beat those odds, and he’s back at work.

A few weeks ago, Karen told us about the night in late September 2001 when she arrived at the hospital after a long day of working and caring for their children. Walking down the darkened hall toward Harry’s room, she saw two small figures walking ahead, hand in hand.

If you knew instinctively that the two figures were Harry and Karen’s mothers, then you already have a profound understanding of the glory of which humanity is capable, the fellowship, joy, and peace to which we are all called by our Creator.

Karen said that she worried that if Harry had awakened as his two mothers leaned over him, their worried faces looming side by side, he would have assumed that he was dead.

Harry didn’t have to wait that long. Neither do we.

I made these remarks at an interfaith service at St. John's Episcopal Church and School in Rancho Santa Margarita on the afternoon of Sunday, Sept. 11.

What We Did

The president began to tighten the noose around Osama bin Laden's neck in August. He managed the operation personally in a series of secret meetings. Nothing leaked. According to CNN, it was during last Friday's royal wedding that he gave the order for today's breathtaking raid. As he and his family were wandering around the Kennedy Space Center, young American volunteers under his command in Afghanistan were preparing to extend and flex the arm of justice.

Last week, it briefly appeared that Barack Obama had permitted Donald Trump a moment of parity by appearing in the White House to talk about his birth certificate as the bumptious tycoon gave a press conference in New Hampshire. How wrong I was. Tonight, as grateful crowds gathered at the White House and ground zero, as CNN replayed Obama's carefully nuanced address, words we'll remember every May Day for many years, Trump was starring with Meat Loaf on "Celebrity Apprentice."

Great live-blogging here by Andrew Sullivan.

Well done, Mr. President.

Bin Laden Alone

Peter Bergen argues that al-Qaeda is being strangled by its own fanaticism:

[T]he jihadist militants are incapable of turning themselves into a genuine mass political movement because their ideology prevents them from making the kind of real-world compromises that would allow them to engage in normal politics. Indeed, rather than cut deals with new friends, bin Laden has kept adding to his list of enemies, including any Muslim who doesn't precisely share his ultra-fundamentalist worldview. The enemies list grows and grows. Al-Qaeda has said it is opposed to all Middle Eastern regimes; the Shia; most Western countries; Jews and Christians; the governments of India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Russia; most news organizations; most humanitarian organizations; and the United Nations. This is no way to increase market share.

End The "Diabolization" Of Imam Rauf

The peerless Leon Wieseltier on the lower Manhattan community center and mosque:

In matters of principle...polling is beside the point, or an alibi for the tyranny of the majority, or an invitation to demagogues to make divisiveness into a strategy, so that their targets come to seem like they are the ones standing in the way of social peace, and the “decent” thing is for them to fold. Why doesn’t Rauf just move the mosque? That would bring the ugliness to an end. But why don’t Palin and Gingrich just shut up? That, too, would bring the ugliness to an end. Certainly the diabolization of Rauf, an imam who has publicly recited the Shema as an act of solidarity and argued that the Declaration of Independence “embodies and restates the core values of the Abrahamic, and thus also the Islamic, ethic,” must cease. In a time when an alarming number of Muslims wish to imitate Osama bin Laden, here is a Muslim who wishes to imitate Mordecai Kaplan.

Read the whole column.

Bibi Aisha's Rule

Charles Krauthammer makes a vigorous argument against the mosque and cultural center being proposed for a site near the World Trade Center. His strongest point --

Pope John Paul II ordered the Carmelite nuns to leave the convent they had established at Auschwitz. He was in no way devaluing their heartfelt mission to pray for the souls of the dead. He was teaching them a lesson in respect: This is not your place; it belongs to others. However pure your voice, better to let silence reign.

-- doesn't persuade me to affirm any government agency in the United States denying a building permit on the basis that there is an atmospheric problem with people observing a certain religion there. Nazis killed Jews expressly because they were Jews, and as a matter of fact, they had appropriated enough elements of the German church and of the energy of post-Reformation European Christian anti-Semitism that displaying a cross near a death camp could clearly be seen as objectionable.

Besides, the property in and around Auschwitz isn't governed by the Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution. Osama bin Laden murdered people on Sept. 11 not because they were Christians, Jews, and Muslims, which they happened to be, but because they were mostly Americans. He wanted to hurt America, and we hurt America more by compromising a core First Amendment principle.

And yet there's another uniquely western principle that may well be at stake in this debate. I've seen stories about the mosque planners' questionable views on the root causes of Sept. 11. I've read and heard wild speculation about whether this or any other mosque will spawn terrorists. But I haven't yet read of anyone asking if girls and young women in the lower Manhattan cultural center will be treated exactly the same as the males -- empowered, encouraged, and educated in the same way and taught that Muslim women in the United States are guaranteed the same rights and opportunities as men. Call it the Bibi Aisha rule. Give the wrong answer, and maybe you get your building permit but lose your tax-exempt status.

It Sure Beats A Fatwa

Osama bin Laden endorses President Carter's book about the Middle East.