In which Clinton slams Obama by articulating his "organizing principle"

A typical account of Hillary Clinton's assessment of Obama's foreign policy in the Goldberg interview ran like this one in the New York Times:

Her blunt public criticism of the president’s foreign policy in The Atlantic this week touched off frustration among Mr. Obama’s advisers and supporters, especially her suggestion that under Mr. Obama, the United States lacked an “organizing principle” in its approach to international relations. “ ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle,” Mrs. Clinton said.

Three things to note about this takeaway:

1. Clinton didn't say that "don't do stupid stuff" is Obama's organizing principle, or that he lacks one. In fact she said the opposite.

2.  The "organizing principle" that Clinton articulated, when pressed, is indistinguishable from Obama's, and, just like Obama's, incorporates "don't do stupid shit" but doesn't end there  (though the particulars of her favored policies on specific issues may quite different, in disturbing ways -- more on this at bottom).

3. Obama has articulated that principle continually since his first year in office.

Hedges, lies and pablum: Clinton to Goldberg

In a prior post, I may have overemphasized the hedge element in Hillary Clinton's interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, published Sunday. Hedging her criticisms of current policy and her interventionist impulses was definitely a part of the performance. But that performance was equal parts hedges, bald-faced lies and pablum in support of an implied general propensity toward more aggressive action that itself may prove illusory.

For the lies, see Peter Beinart. Everything Clinton said about Netanyahu and his dealings with the Palestinians in his two spells as prime minister was untrue. He didn't "move toward a Palestinian state" in the mid-nineties, he didn't agree to a meaningful settlement freeze in 2009, he didn't engage with Assad in 2009-2010, he didn't offer the Palestinians "Barak-like options"--or any concrete proposals -- in the last round of negotiations that collapsed this spring, and he either never relinquished or has recently reaffirmed a determination never to give up security control of the West Bank. As for the assault on Gaza, Clinton simply parroted IDF talking points.

With regard to the hedging, as I argued in the prior post, Clinton did not suggest that jihadism is a threat on the scale of communism, only that containment was an overall strategy that might be adapted to any toxic ideology that poses a threat to global order. Containment-as-framework was further hedged by allusions to the many mistakes the U.S. made in the Cold War, to be improved by "smart power" and "after-action reviews." Clinton's invocations of "smart power" sound a lot like Obama's oft-stated preferences for deploying nonmilitary tools of U.S. influence, as does her acknowledgement of "the limits of our power to spread freedom and democracy."

Read Goldberg's interview with Hillary Clinton before you read Goldberg's account of that interview

I've seen more than one tweet this morning to the effect that Hillary Clinton "threw Obama under an ISIS-driven Humvee" in a long, probing, interview with Jeffrey Goldberg.  I think that's a wrong impression created by Goldberg's introductory overview, which overstates her actual and implied criticisms of Obama.

It's no secret that Clinton advocated for early U.S. support of allegedly moderate factions in the Syrian opposition. And it's necessary and prudent for Hillary to distance herself from Obama, or position herself to do so, in that a) she genuinely is more interventionist, and b) the world could blow up on Obama and doom her chances if she's seen as a continuation. But it's also in Hillary's DNA to hedge, both from a desire to cover both sides and an ability to see complexity (except with regard to Israel, to which she pandered without inhibition). And in at least three instances, Goldberg emphasized just one side of her equation.

First, with regard to the Syrian intervention. Here's Goldberg:

In an interview with me earlier this week, she used her sharpest language yet to describe the "failure" that resulted from the decision to keep the U.S. on the sidelines during the first phase of the Syrian uprising.

“The failure to help build up a credible fighting force of the people who were the originators of the protests against Assad—there were Islamists, there were secularists, there was everything in the middle—the failure to do that left a big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled,” Clinton said.

And here's Hillary, in the interview:

Cognitive dissonance on Passover

I suffer from it, as recounted in this June 2011 post:

Jeffrey Goldberg, Excommunicator

Jeffrey Goldberg has ignited a blog conflagration with an attack on Allison Benedikt's coming-of-age tale of her progressive disillusionment with the gung-ho Zionism she sucked up in summer camp. I found Benedikt's  narrative riveting, and Goldberg's critique smotheringly self-righteous.

Goldberg asks of Benedikt: "Does she ever try to answer for herself why Israel exists? Or is she happy to subcontract out her thinking about the most important questions facing Jews first to her camp counselors, and then to her husband?"  It's true that Benedikt's stances on the issues are barely sketched in, but that in itself suggests neither a lack of thought nor of due diligence. Her focus is on how her changing perceptions registered emotionally, not on the data points that caused them. Hers is not a policy piece; it's a chronicle about how she navigated the family mania for Israel -- and later, her husband's antipathy toward the country -- over the course of a decade and a half or so. Benedikt's response to Goldberg makes this point better than I can.

I want to focus on Goldberg's most poisonous charge -- which he saves for last. I think it reveals more about him than about Benedikt:

And then there is a whole set of other questions:  Does she ask herself whether she has a responsibility to make Israel a better, more humane, place? Does she question herself about the consequences of abandoning Israel? Does she think about the sin of the wicked son in the Passover story, and how that sin might echo in her own life? 

Abandoning Israel? Goldberg seems to have derived that idea from Benedikt's kicker at the close. Let's take a look:

The Obamaiad

Early this month, Obama favored Jeffrey Goldberg for a second time with a deep dive into his thinking about the Middle East. This time (for once) I'm going to keep my precis short.* And dear reader, please help me out of a metrical jam by internally pronouncing "neocon" really fast:

Obama, to clear neocon fog,
unburdens himself to Gold blog.
"Though our power's not puny.
we'd have to be loony
to get between Gog and Magog."

And then we were whipsawed off to another quarter:

Jack Goldsmith's disillusionment

John Podesta, Bill Clinton's former chief of staff, has an op-ed calling on Obama to release the legal memos setting forth the administration's rationale and guidelines for targeted killings. Good for him. As he notes, he has standing to weigh the competing imperatives of national security and public disclosure -- and with respect to the administration's legal deliberations, he comes down firmly on the side of disclosure.

I am more interested, though,  in the thinking of someone with even more standing to address the legal issues arising from the administration's covert operations: Jack Goldsmith, the short-term head of George W. Bush's Office of Legal Counsel who countermanded the insane torture memos that authorized the Bush administration's torture regime.  There's a link to a Feb. 5 Goldsmith op-ed at the bottom of Podesta's. Goldsmith's latest tells a sad story of disillusionment when compared with Goldsmith's 2009 writings.

Goldsmith takes a step back to consider not just the need for disclosure regarding the drone memos but the need to develop a new legal framework for "secret warfare":

Netanyahu drives his bus at Obama

Three thoughts about what Netanyahu told David Gregory on Meet the Press today.

First, Gregory failed to press Netanyahu on exactly what kind of red line  -- that is, a tripwire that would bring on a US attack if Iran crossed it -- he was calling for. Obama has already laid down a red line: Iran cannot produce a nuclear weapon.  What's Bibi's? Gregory didn't ask, exactly. He asked whether Iran had already crossed Israel's red line. Netanyahu said, "they're in the red zone" -- they're within 20 yards. But the discussion of that point remained metaphorical, and therefore close to meaningless.

Second, though both the U.S. and Israel assert that Iran cannot be allowed to produce a nuclear weapon, there is a real difference in threat perception.  Here's Bibi on the danger of a nuclear Iran:

Obama freezes out extremists and hysterics

In the last year, it seems Obama has learned when not to negotiate, and how to back adversaries into a corner when he has public (or world) opinion on his side. Two apparent instances struck my eye within 30 seconds a few minutes ago.

First, this:

House Republicans have dropped their demands to cut spending on domestic programs, for the time being, and instead unveiled bipartisan legislation to keep the government funded through the end of the year at previously-agreed-upon levels.

'Ware Nemesis, Obama

Courtesy of the Dish, a tweet from Jeffrey Goldberg in immediate reaction to Joe Biden's Convention paeaen to Barack Obama, Osama-killer:

@JeffreyGoldberg I've been told I'm a bloodthirsty warmongering neoconservative, but for whatever reason, I just don't like all this bragging about killing. 6:51 PM - 6 Sep 12

For the record, I was on the same page. Below, excerpts from that section of Biden's speech, and my immediate reactions on Twitter.

Egyptian Etch-A-Sketch, fear in -huville, etc.

In case you're finding the pickings lean on Twitter this weekend, a few good reads:

Egyptian Etch-A-Sketch -- in a good way. The Times reports that the Muslim Brotherhood, in a policy shift, is pressing Hamas to reconcile further with Fatah and present a united front to Israel.  The Brotherhood's Reda Fahmy explains the imperatives of power:  “Any movement of the size of the Muslim Brotherhood, when it is in the opposition it is one thing and then when it comes to power it is something completely different.”

Great writing, great marketing: What a riveting trope David Maraniss chooses to showcase his forthcoming Obama bio (though "old man" jars a bit):

Jeremy Ben-Ami: economic pressure doesn't work?

Jeffrey Goldberg, previewing an interview he's soon to publish with J Street founder Jeremy Ben-Ami, puts up this response of Ben-Ami's to Peter Beinart's proposed Jewish boycott of West Bank settler goods:

"...I don't think that it makes any sense to put negative pressure on people whose behavior you hope to change. I think that the way that Israelis will feel comfortable making the compromises and the sacrifices -- and Israel as a whole, not just the settlers -- is when they really feel that not only American Jews, but the United States, is going to be there for them. I think if you begin to do things that say, "We're not really with you, we're against you, we're putting pressure on you," I think that causes people to pull more into a shell and pull back."

Hmm. I guess Ben-Ami doesn't think much of the sanctions imposed on Iran?  In December 2009, when Rep. Howard Berman (D-Calif.) sponsored a bill in Dec. 2009 granting the Obama administration additional powers to place gasoline sanctions on that adversary, here's what he said:

Does Netanyhau know whether Netanyahu has been "bluffing"?

Jeffrey Goldberg, who's been warning us for two years that Israel is likely to strike Iran's nuclear facilities, recently mused aloud whether Netanyahu might not have been bluffing all along -- threatening a strike to induce the U.S. and the world to ramp up economic pressure on Iran. That stirred some indignation, since Goldberg has projected a kind of mind meld with Netanyahu, relaying his purported thinking and motive in detail.  If he's been played, he's been a main conduit for the rest of us being played.  James Fallows, accordingly, in his genteel way, has challenged Goldberg (via blogalog) to make a judgment. What's his best guess now? Bluff or strike?  Would he like to reassess his past analyses in light of what he's recently learned?

When I read that challenge, I thought of what I'm learning now about the Israeli government's conduct of policy in the wake of the 1967 war -- at least as presented by Gershom Gorenberg in The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977. Then, an analogous question might have been posed: annexation or land-for-peace?  (There is a crucial difference, in that there was not a short-term clock running on that decision, but the analogy still holds to a degree.)  And Gorenberg's thesis is that the leadership -- Levi Eshkol in particular at the outset -- never decided: their de facto policy was not to decide.

The president who doesn't do sound bytes, revisited

Below, I've reposted my Friday response to Obama's remarkable in-depth interview with Jeffrey Goldberg focused on his Iran policy.  First, a prescript:

I felt a pang when I read in Andrew Sullivan's take that not a word in this interview was spoken about the Palestinians, because I had noted the same thing and meant to address it in my post, but left it out in my pre-workday "post haste" and enthusiasm for Obama's bravura performance.  So I want to say that in a sane political environment, on the policy merits, I think the American president should be able to make clear to the Israeli prime minister that U.S. aid would be cut off if Israel launched an unprovoked attack that the U.S. judged to be against its own interests and a threat to global order.  I also think that the U.S. should cut off aid if Israel continues to build new settlements on the West Ban and in East Jerusalem.

The president who doesn't do sound bytes

Quite a tribute to Jeffrey Goldberg to be singled out by President Obama as honest broker enough to receive the most precise and nuanced briefing on a vital foreign policy issue by a sitting president that I have ever seen or read.

While rapport is evident in this interview, with Obama's respect for Goldberg's ability to consider the interests and perspectives of all players plain, there is also a tension: Goldberg is looking for a couple of sound bytes.  And Obama doesn't do sound bytes. What he does, instead, is lay out guiding principles with precision, while maintaining strategic ambiguity on the crunch points.  Here are the key takeaways as I read them:

No ramping up of war talk.  The buzz is that Netanyahu wants new red lines: "all options are on the table" has been cast as a tired cliche. But it's good enough for Obama:

On "moral responsibility" to Israel

Mulling over a jaw-dropping assertion by Haaretz columnist Ari Shavit that the United States has a "moral responsibility" to guarantee Israel that Iran will not obtain a nuclear weapon, Jeffrey Goldberg drops an aside that I find revealing:

(And a small digression: Isn't it Europe, and Germany in particular, that should be considered to have greater moral responsibility here? Israel exists mainly because of European moral failure).

Stux chucks world into flux

Ever since I first encountered Jeffrey Goldberg crowing about Stuxnet, the cyber-weapon that reportedly set back Iran's nuclear program by 1-2 years, I've worried that by launching such weapons (or helping the Israelis launch them) the U.S. is sowing the wind and will reap the whirlwind.  The same might be said for our ever-expanding drone deployments. David Rothkopf fleshes out such fears:

"America still hasn't quite understood that we are opening Pandora's box. Take drones. We feel we can use them anywhere, soon others will be using them against us. There are dozens of countries around the world developing their own drone technology or buying what is out on the market. The same is true for technologies like those associated with Stuxnet," said the former senior diplomat who has worked closely throughout his career with the military and intelligence communities. Or as another journalist friend of mine put it who has been covering the issue closely, "The day after Stuxnet was like the day after Hiroshima. We had the technology and no one else did. But within a matter of a few years that had changed." So had the nature of modern warfare...and by extension of modern diplomacy and that's what is going to happen here.

Jeffrey Goldberg, excommunicator

Jeffrey Goldberg has ignited a blog conflagration with an attack on Allison Benedikt's coming-of-age tale of her progressive disillusionment with the gung-ho Zionism she sucked up in summer camp. I found Benedikt's  narrative riveting, and Goldberg's critique smotheringly self-righteous.

Goldberg asks of Benedikt: "Does she ever try to answer for herself why Israel exists? Or is she happy to subcontract out her thinking about the most important questions facing Jews first to her camp counselors, and then to her husband?"  It's true that Benedikt's stances on the issues are barely sketched in, but that in itself suggests neither a lack of thought nor of due diligence. Her focus is on how her changing perceptions registered emotionally, not on the data points that caused them. Hers is not a policy piece; it's a chronicle about how she navigated the family mania for Israel -- and later, her husband's antipathy toward the country -- over the course of a decade and a half or so. Benedikt's response to Goldberg makes this point better than I can.

I want to focus on Goldberg's most poisonous charge -- which he saves for last. I think it reveals more about him than about Benedikt:

And then there is a whole set of other questions:  Does she ask herself whether she has a responsibility to make Israel a better, more humane, place? Does she question herself about the consequences of abandoning Israel? Does she think about the sin of the wicked son in the Passover story, and how that sin might echo in her own life? 

Abandoning Israel? Goldberg seems to have derived that idea from Benedikt's kicker at the close. Let's take a look:

Schlockly awe

Jeffrey Goldberg is stunned into quasi-religious wonder at the possibility that the Stuxnet virus may have seriously set back Iran's nuclear program:

If it is true, however, that Stuxnet is still corrupting Iranian computers so many months after it was introduced, it is something like a miracle. I still find it difficult to imagine that a computer virus may be able to achieve what many people thought only the American or Israeli air forces could achieve. 

It seems obvious to me that if a weaponized computer virus can seriously disrupt a uranium enrichment program, similar attacks could cripple vital systems of all kinds...elsewhere. That is not cause for celebration.

Call me risk averse (and perverse), but my reaction to news of such wondrous weaponry reminds me of how I feel when contemplating a Senate unbound by the filibuster: wait till the other side gets hold of it.

Fidel, let me help you walk that back...

Jeffrey Goldberg affects bemusement as Fidel Castro tries to walk back his startling statement to Goldberg that "the Cuban model doesn't even work for us any more."  Castro told CNN

he was correctly quoted, but that, "in reality, my answer meant exactly the opposite of what both American journalists interpreted regarding the Cuban model. My idea, as the whole world knows, is that the capitalist system no longer works for the United States or the world," he said. "How could such a system work for a socialist country like Cuba?"

Castro called Goldberg "a great journalist." "He does not invent phrases, he transfers them and interprets them," he said. "I await with interest his extensive article."

Goldberg responds with perhaps a shade too much glee:

Jews, Gays, and History

Defending Andrew Sullivan's use of the term "final solution" to describe experiments aiming to prevent homosexuality by tampering with hormones in utero, Goldblog free-associates a further link between that  pair of strange, pardon the expression, bedfellows, both victims of Nazi hate:

I've come to the conclusion that some people are gay because God specifically wanted them be to gay. Don't ask me how I came to this; don't ask me to explain my thinking (yet) and don't ask me to explain what I think to be God's purpose is in this case. I can't quite figure out God's reason for creating Jews, much less gays.

Maybe Richard Florida can help; he's suggested that gays are an essential element in "the creative class: a fast-growing, highly educated, and well-paid segment of the workforce on whose efforts corporate profits and economic growth increasingly depend."  Sound familiar?  Jews are another reviled out-group that have catalyzed economic and cultural development in the city.  As medieval kings and dukes periodically courted Jews, Florida has suggested various means by which ambitious city fathers and employers should -- and perhaps semi-consciously, in some cases, have --  provided amenities that attract "creative class" types, who are disproportionately gay.

For the theologically minded, is it such a leap to suggest that God created Jews and gays to prick forward human progress?  And for those more inclined toward amorphous rationalist mystery, that cracker-barrel philosopher Kurt Vonnegut, in Slaughterhouse Five, gropes in a congruent vein toward the unseen dynamics of human sexual-social life:

One of the biggest moral bombshells handed to Billy by the Tralfamadorians, incidentally, had to do with sex on Earth. They said their flying-saucer crews had identified no fewer than seven sexes on Earth, each essential to reproduction. Again: Billy couldn't possible imagine what five of those seven sexes had to do with the making of a baby, since they were sexually active only in the fourth dimension.

The Tralfamadorians tried to give Billy clues that would help him imagine sex in the invisible dimension. They told him that there could be no Earthling babies without male homosexuals. There could be babies without female homosexuals. There couldn't be babies without women over sixty-five years old. There could be babies without men over sixty-five. There couldn't be babies without other babies who had lived an hour or less after birth. And so on.

It was gibberish to Billy (p. 114, Dell edition).

 Perhaps we can credit Florida with some 4-dimensional thinking:

There is no one-size-fits-all model for a successful people climate. The members of the creative class are diverse across the dimensions of age, ethnicity and race, marital status, and sexual preference. An effective people climate needs to emphasize openness and diversity, and to help reinforce low barriers to entry. Thus, it cannot be restrictive or monolithic. 

 Go for it, Goldblog. Gay and straight created he them....