Question for Obama: Why is arming a "moderate" Syrian opposition no longer a "fantasy"?

Back in January Obama suggested to David Remnick that trying to arm and shape a "moderate" opposition to Assad was futile:

... I asked Obama if he was haunted by Syria, and, though the mask of his equipoise rarely slips, an indignant expression crossed his face. “I am haunted by what’s happened,” he said. “I am not haunted by my decision not to engage in another Middle Eastern war. It is very difficult to imagine a scenario in which our involvement in Syria would have led to a better outcome, short of us being willing to undertake an effort in size and scope similar to what we did in Iraq. And when I hear people suggesting that somehow if we had just financed and armed the opposition earlier, that somehow Assad would be gone by now and we’d have a peaceful transition, it’s magical thinking.

“It’s not as if we didn’t discuss this extensively down in the Situation Room. It’s not as if we did not solicit—and continue to solicit—opinions from a wide range of folks. Very early in this process, I actually asked the C.I.A. to analyze examples of America financing and supplying arms to an insurgency in a country that actually worked out well. And they couldn’t come up with much. We have looked at this from every angle. 

More recently, he told members of Congress that the notion that the U.S. could have conjured an effective moderate opposition was "a fantasy."  Now, though, as he told Chuck Todd in an interview airing today, his nascent strategy in Syria depends on building such an opposition. When Todd challenged him as to how ISIS could be defeated in Syria without U.S. troops, here was his response:

Where Obama's placation ended

In honor of the ACA's end-of-open season rush, a repost. 

Sunday, April 18, 2010

Garry Wills, summing up David Remnick's portrayal of Obama in The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama, is close to right, and yet so very wrong, as he segues to his own judgment:

Obama’s strategy everywhere before entering the White House was one of omnidirectional placation. It had always worked. Why should he abandon, at this point, a method of such proved effectiveness? Yet success at winning acceptance may not be what is called for in a leader moving through a time of peril. To disarm fears of change (the first African-­American presidency is, in itself, a big jolt of change), Obama has stressed continuity. Though he first became known as a critic of the war in Iraq, he has kept aspects or offshoots of Bush’s war on terror — possible future “renditions” (kidnappings on foreign soil), trials of suspected terrorists in military tribunals, no investigations of torture, an expanded Afghan commitment, though he promised to avoid “a dumb war.” He appointed as his vice president and secretary of state people who voted for the Iraq war, and as secretary of defense and presiding generals people who conducted or defended that war.

Obama's pre-k advocacy: agenda-setting vs. polarization

When President Obama boasted during the State of the Union address that 30 states had started preschool initiatives, I mentally gave him some credit for agenda-setting. But some contiguous corner of the mind added that there's got to be caveats to that.  A Times article today by Richard Perez-Pena and Motoko Rich about the national drive toward state-funded preschool brings the caveats into focus.

First, while momentum in the last year has been impressive,  with new initiatives in Alabama, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, and San Antonio, the movement has been picking up steam for at least a decade, with the number of children in state-funded preschool more than doubling since 2002.  And as this year's initiatives illustrate, the effort has been bipartisan. Perez-Pena and Rich outline the political imperatives:

Few government programs have broader appeal than preschool. A telephone poll conducted in July for the First Five Years Fund, a nonprofit group that advocates early education programs, found that 60 percent of registered Republicans and 84 percent of Democrats supported a proposal to expand public preschool by raising the federal tobacco tax.

“Preschool is, generally speaking, a crowd pleaser,” said Chester E. Finn Jr., president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative-leaning education policy group.

Obama's permission structures

Steve Rosen, "a former AIPAC foreign policy chief known for his hawkishness on Iran," gave the Obama administration a backhanded compliment that sheds some interesting light on complaints that "no one fears" Obama.  Regarding AIPAC's heavy-handed backing of the Kirk-Menendez Iran sanctions bill that the administration is dead-set against, JTA's Ron Kampeas reports:

“AIPAC puts a premium on bipartisan consensus and maintaining communication with the White House,” said Rosen, who was fired by AIPAC in 2005 after being investigated in a government leak probe, though the resulting charges were dismissed and he later sued AIPAC unsuccessfully for damages.

Rosen noted AIPAC’s forthcoming policy conference in March; such conferences routinely feature a top administration official — the president or  vice president, the secretary of state or defense. At least one of these failing to appear “would be devastating to AIPAC’s image of bipartisanship,” he said.

Toward the end, Obama still seeking beginnings

Much as I admire both David Remnick and Barack Obama, I did not find Remnick's new 17,000-word profile of the president particularly illuminating [update: not so for the outtakes Remnick published a few days later].  Remnick asked some tough questions but did not push back much on the answers. That allowed Obama to be Obama, splitting differences, embracing complexities and balancing opposites, without really enabling him to defend his record with much vigor.

On the other hand, Obama being Obama is always interesting to me, and I did find a couple of his dicta revealing in the way they reiterated and updated old habits of mind and speech. Here's one:

I will measure myself at the end of my Presidency in large part by whether I began the process of rebuilding the middle class and the ladders into the middle class, and reversing the trend toward economic bifurcation in this society.”

"Began to" is Obama's signature way of hedging his goals, which he has always cast in terms of new beginnings rather than completed revolutions.  It's his vaunted "long game" from the other end of the telescope. Not for the first time, I'm driven back to his in his 100th-day press conference:

Boehner's whining is finding an audience

John Boehner, with an assist from Bob Woodward, is doing a nice job spinning the interpersonal side of his failed negotiations with Obama. While it's natural for right-wing media to take up his narrative, his spin is trickling into the mainstream, too.

On the right, the new image of Obama the Negotiator is oddly flattering, at least to the ears of a liberal accustomed to fretting about the president's accommodating style.. The personalized corollary of the right's current view of Obama as a legislative juggernaut is Obama as an imperious, arrogant, my-way-or-the-highway stonewaller. Here's Peggy Noonan:

He didn't deepen any relationships or begin any potential alliances with Republicans, who still, actually, hold the House. The old animosity was aggravated. Some Republicans were mildly hopeful a second term might moderate those presidential attitudes that didn't quite work the first time, such as holding himself aloof from the position and predicaments of those who oppose him, while betraying an air of disdain for their arguments. He is not quick to assume good faith. Some thought his election victory might liberate him, make his approach more expansive. That didn't happen.

Where Obama's "placation" ended

Garry Wills, summing up David Remnick's portrayal of Obama in The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama, is close to right, and yet so very wrong, as he segues to his own judgment:

Obama’s strategy everywhere before entering the White House was one of omnidirectional placation. It had always worked. Why should he abandon, at this point, a method of such proved effectiveness? Yet success at winning acceptance may not be what is called for in a leader moving through a time of peril. To disarm fears of change (the first African-­American presidency is, in itself, a big jolt of change), Obama has stressed continuity. Though he first became known as a critic of the war in Iraq, he has kept aspects or offshoots of Bush’s war on terror — possible future “renditions” (kidnappings on foreign soil), trials of suspected terrorists in military tribunals, no investigations of torture, an expanded Afghan commitment, though he promised to avoid “a dumb war.” He appointed as his vice president and secretary of state people who voted for the Iraq war, and as secretary of defense and presiding generals people who conducted or defended that war.

To cope with the financial crisis, he turned to Messrs. Geithner, Summers and Bernanke, who were involved in fomenting the crisis. To launch reform of medical care, he huddled with the American Medical Association, big pharmaceutical companies and insurance firms, and announced that his effort had their backing (the best position to be in for stabbing purposes, which they did month after month). All these things speak to Obama’s concern with continuity and placation. But continuity easily turns into inertia, as we found when Obama wasted the first year of his term, the optimum time for getting things done. He may have drunk his own Kool-Aid — believing that his election could of itself usher in a post-racial, post-partisan, post-red-state and blue-state era. That is a change no one should ever have believed in. The price of winningness can be losing; and that, in this scary time, is enough to break the heart of hope. 

It is true that Obama sets tremendous stock in his ability to win buy-in from potential adversaries, to disarm them by acknowledging what he regards (or presents) as the legitimate points in their argument, to find common ground and therefore assent. Remnick captures this.  Recounting Obama's reaction to Robert Caro's portrayal of the old hard-core segregationist bull of the Senate Richard Russell, Reminick writes:

Much of Obama's self-confidence resided in his belief that he could walk into any room, with any sort of people, and forge a relationship and even persuade those people of the rightness of his positions. Jim Cauley, Obama's Senate campaign manager, said he thought Obama believed that he could win over a room of skinheads. "All of us are a mixture of noble and ignoble impulses, and I guess that's part of what I mean when I say I don't go into meetings with people presuming bad faith," Obama has said. Now he seemed to think that he would have had a fighting chance with Russell: "Had I been around at all in the early sixties and had the opportunity to meet with Richard Russell, it would have been fascinating to talk to somebody like that.  Even if you understood that this enormous talent would prevent me from ever being sworn in to the Senate"(426).

But placation is only weakness if it has no end point. Obama did persist too long in trying to win Republican cooperation. But his faith in his ability to win assent was not weakness but hubris.  According to George Packer, the title of whose long chronicle Obama's Lost Year gave Wills his keynote above:

Obama's quest for bipartisanship, in the face of exceedingly discouraging facts, has been so relentless that it suggests less a strategy than a core conviction: reasonable people can be civil, exchange ideas, and eventually find points of agreement.

The Ann Dunham Presidency

Ann Dunham, Barack Obama's mother, emerges pretty clearly in David Remnick's The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama as a secular saint. I say that without cyncism, knowing that such people exist because I've been married to one for 27 years -- a person of deep empathy, zero malice, all benevolence, naturally cheerful and optimistic. At least that is how Dunham's daughter Maya sees her:

Ann started to roam the markets of Jakarta and make trips around the country, learning more about Indonesian culture and handicrafts. "She loved batik and Indonesian art and music and all of the human creation that in her estimation elevated the spirit," Maya said. "She saw the beauty of community and kinship, the power of cultural collision and connection. She thought that all of her encounters were delightful--in Indonesia and elsewhere. She was just happy. She enjoyed herself immensely. Although she was aware of struggle and grappled with it, she did so cheerfully and with great optimism and belief that things could get better. Why mourn reality? (70)

Along with that great endowment of temperament came people skills that her not-quite-so-sunny son seems to have inherited:

Never let a noncrisis go to waste

David Remnick has posed a fundamental question about Netanyahu that is resonating through the internets:

The essential question for Israel is not whether it has the friendship of the White House—it does—but whether Netanyahu remains the arrogant rejectionist that he was in the nineteen-nineties, the loyal son of a radical believer in Greater Israel, forever settling scores with the old Labor élites and making minimal concessions to ward off criticism from Washington and retain the affections of his far-right coalition partners. Is he capable of engaging with the moderate and constructive West Bank leadership of Mahmoud Abbas and Salam Fayyad, and making history? Does there exist a Netanyahu 2.0, a Nixon Goes to China figure who will act with an awareness that demographic realities—the growth not only of the Palestinian population in the territories but also of the Arab and right-wing Jewish populations in Israel proper—make the status quo untenable as well as unjust?

Remnick is not alone in posing this question.  In Israel, on 3/17 Haaretz columnist Carlo Strenger framed the challenge at greater length, with greater intimacy, and with Israeli as opposed to an American model (also noting that Netanayu's  character "has been analyzed time and again"). I'm excerpting at length, because the  capsule political bio here is of a piece.

Netanyahu is coming toward the end of his midlife. Presumably he knows that his place in history will be carved in stone by the present term. He may not get another chance to be prime minister, even in Israel's unfortunately very static political landscape. Hence he faces the one big question: will he continue his pattern of basically stalling, or will he muster the courage for a bold move?