Some reaction to Obama's long and fascinating interview with Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic:
David Frum is vigorously critical:
The Disappointment of Barack Obama
He admits one major mistake: not making sufficient allowances for how unreasonable other people are.
We let Barack down, probably not for the last time. The Big Finish:
Politics is a realm of paradox. The Obama foreign policy is especially rich in them. A president who professes multilateralism has left the country’s alliances in disarray. A president who justly criticized his predecessor for poor postwar planning in Iraq launched his own war in Libya with no postwar plan at all. A president who rejects religious extremism and authoritarianism has built his Middle East policy on visions of cooperation with extremist and authoritarian Iran. A president who sought to teach America the wisdom of humility never learned that lesson himself.
Of all the paradoxes, maybe the most important will be this: A president who came to office so deeply uneasy about American leadership has—over almost eight years of not providing it—reminded the rest of the world why that leadership is so badly needed.
By way of contrast, Shadi Hamid is respectfully critical:
How Iraq Warped Obama’s Worldview
The president is certain he’s right. Is that what we want in a leader?
His theme:
On October 2, 2002, Barack Obama gave a speech opposing war in Iraq—perhaps, in retrospect, the most important speech he ever gave. He was right, of course, and the foreign-policy establishment was largely wrong. The problem is that politicians who were right about Iraq tend to overestimate what that says about their foreign-policy judgment. For Obama, the effects of being right are magnified. He became president, in part, because of Iraq and the considerable damage the conflict had done to the country. Obama offered the promise of a decisive correction and, for true believers, a kind of spiritual atonement.
Well, on another day I might push back a bit - the planning for the post-invasion occupation was deplorable, but if Iraq was so damn unwinnable how is it that by 2011 Obama could be withdrawing the last of the US troops and declaring it to be "sovereign, stable, and self-reliant"? Since I ask, here is the lefty response - Obama didn't lose because we still hadn't won. And anyway, blame Bush for that timetable.
Uh huh - hence my use of the word "unwinnable", not "won". As to blaming Bush for the withdrawal timetable, everyone expected that to be renegotiated, as Michael Gordon of the NY Times explained. Peter Beinart, not exactly a Bush-man, has more.
But let's move on to the respectful, regretful criticism:
The tragedy of Iraq, if you weren’t careful, was likely to distort your perception of everything that followed, for wholly understandable reasons.
Iraq’s dark shadow seems to be everywhere in Jeffrey Goldberg’s fascinating yet unsettling exchanges with Obama. “Multilateralism regulates hubris,” Obama says. And he is right: It does. What is left unsaid is why, exactly, regulating hubris should, seven years after the conclusion of the Bush era, remain a primary preoccupation. It is hard to imagine any world leader citing the hubris of overextension as the problem that the United States, today, must take extra care to correct for or guard against. Obama has already corrected for it, many times over.
Elsewhere, there are straw men to be built. “Every time there is a problem, we send in our military to impose order,” Obama says, except that no one favoring intervention in Syria has called for Iraq-style military action. Obama says that “there are going to be times where the best that we can do is to shine a spotlight on something that’s terrible, but not believe that we can automatically solve it,” except that I’m not aware of a single critic of Obama’s Syria policy who believes intervening against Bashar al-Assad would “automatically solve” anything. The stated goal was always rather different: to diminish the Assad regime’s ability to kill and to provide clear incentives for Russia, Iran, and Assad to change their calculus and begin negotiating in something resembling good faith with Syrian rebel forces. Meanwhile, comments like “there is no way we should commit to governing the Middle East and North Africa” again present a wildly false choice.
Obama’s tendency to distort beyond recognition the positions of his critics goes hand in hand with an apparent disdain for those critics and, perhaps more worryingly, an unwillingness to even so much as question his own decisions after he’s made them.
Ouch. That last bit - lack of curiosity, introspection and reflection - was a prime knock on Bush.
Elsewhere, he faults himself for underappreciating “the value of theater in political communications.” Of course, what Obama is faulting himself for is not clearly appreciating the faults of others.
As David Frum also observed. And now, in the cruelest stroke, praise for Bush!
It is jarring to hear, in such measured words, a president so confident in his own abilities (George W. Bush, contrary to popular perception, was willing to reassess his policies, shift direction, and accept outside counsel during his second term). The colorfully rendered Obama doctrine of “don’t do stupid shit,” itself a phrase dripping with disdain, is little more than a reaction to critics who Obama thinks, presumably, support doing stupid shit.
Unsurprisingly, Muslim have disappointed Obama:
In Goldberg’s article, Obama repeatedly imposes a deeply problematic framework—and a rather patronizing one—on Muslims as well as “Islam.” Obama speaks of the need for Muslims to “undergo a vigorous discussion within their community about how Islam works as part of a peaceful, modern society.” He speaks of a “reformation that would help people adapt their religious doctrines to modernity.” That Islam—a completely different religion with a completely different founding and evolution—should follow a path similar to Christianity’s is an odd presumption. Why, exactly, should Christianity and its eventual secularization in the West be the standard by which other religions are judged? The Reformation was a response to clerical despotism. The modern Middle East’s curse, if anything, has more often than not been secular despotism. In the pre-modern era, meanwhile, it was a self-regulating clerical class that, as keepers of God-given law, provided a check on the sultan’s executive power and authority, as Harvard’s Noah Feldman has argued.
Perhaps these are understandable oversights, but they recur in Goldberg’s article, suggesting that these aren’t oversights at all, but rather features of Obama’s evolving framework for understanding the region.
And the Big Finish:
President Obama styles himself a cool, modern technocrat, whose most valued trait is his ability to withstand the passions of political life. He is prudent where others are impetuous. He is rational where others—especially Russian presidents and Arab autocrats—insist on acting against their own self-interest. Looked at another way, however, Obama has proved to be an ideological president, one with a developed, even philosophically coherent worldview. If there was one thing I became even more persuaded of after reading Goldberg’s account, it was that Obama is not just an intelligent man, but a brilliant one. He is also a president who believes, with something resembling passion, that he is doing the right thing. This, I have come to realize, is precisely what worries me the most.
Obama is presumably waiting for the Muslim fever to break as he waits for the Republican fever to break. Why is universal enlightenment taking so long?
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