Hobson's choices in Syria

Re Syria, the FT's Gideon Rachman is at his best -- teasing out the geopolitical crosscurrents tugging at those countries that fancy themselves able or compelled to try to influence events, and noting the extent to which appearances may be deceptive:

As the world edges towards a peace conference on Syria, three ideas about the west’s role in the conflict are widely accepted. First, that the longer the conflict goes on, the greater the chances of direct or indirect western military intervention. Second, that there is a deep and bitter division between the US and Russia that is making progress much harder. Third, that the Syrian civil war is dominating western thinking on the Middle East. Few people publicly dispute these propositions. And yet they are all distinctly questionable (my emphasis).

Western inhibitions about intervention are driven not just by the debacle in Iraq but by the "success" in Libya:

Did Romney "panic"? Or revert to form?

Ezra Klein and Jonathan Chait each offer insightful views of the thinking, such as it was, behind Romney's disgustingly opportunistic attack on the Obama administration's response to the assaults on U.S. missions in Egypt and Libya, the latter of which left four Americans dead. But the two explanations are actually somewhat at odds with each other.

Klein takes the verbal assault as evidence that the Romney campaign is panicking.  It has been determined to keep the focus relentlessly on the economy:

The key word here is "disgraceful"

In the wake of the attacks on the U.S. missions in Libya and Egypt and the Obama administration response, Mitt Romney released this statement:

"I'm outraged by the attacks on American diplomatic missions in Libya and Egypt and by the death of an American consulate worker in Benghazi. It's disgraceful that the Obama Administration's first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks."

Leave aside the merits of the measured administration statement or the in-the-heat  responses from the U.S. embassy in Cairo, which were not "administration" response. You do not have to be expert in anything to assess the merit of Romney's reaction -- or his fitness for the presidency. You need only be a social mammal of the human species.

Herman Cain on Libya: "The Spotted or Herbaceous Backson"?

I had deja vu when I listened to this exchange between the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and Herman Cain:

Asked if he agrees with the president on Libya, Cain looks up and says, "OK, Libya." He then pauses for a moment.

"President Obama supported the uprising, correct?" he asks, speaking carefully. "President Obama called for the removal of Qaddafi - just want to make sure we're talking about the same thing before I say yes I agree, or no I didn't agree. I do not agree with the way he handled it for the following reason - nope, that's a different one."

Cain then pauses for about five seconds.

"I gotta go back and see - um, I got all this stuff twirling around in my head," he says. "Specifically, what are you asking me. Did I agree or not disagree with Obama?"

It was the "Specifically, what are you asking me" that triggered the prefiguration. It's in The House at Pooh Corner, Ch. 5, "In Which Rabbit has a Busy Day, and We Learn What Christopher Robin Does in the Mornings."

The slippage in Obama's "days, not weeks" promise

James Fallows, soberly upbraiding Obama for blowing off Congress in his prosecution of the isn't-war in Libya, repeats a quasi-misconception that in an odd way illustrates his point.  Arguing that Obama set himself up for Congressional rebuke by not seeking Congressional buy-in from the start, he writes:

This was a problem foreseeable from the very start* -- more than three months ago, when we were told that this would be a campaign of "days, not weeks."

Obama did not quite say that -- though there is some ambiguity in reports of what he did say on the two occasions when he used the phrase "days, not weeks."

First, on March 18, ABC's Jake Tapper relayed second hand what Obama reputedly said behind closed doors to Members of Congress.  The headline of the short item misrepresents the body content:

The audacity of nuance

James Fallows today puts his finger on "complexity" in Obama's speeches:

Obama's big speeches have been unusual, because the side they come down on is that of complexity. In his classic Philadelphia "race in America" speech: the recognition that every part of our racial mix has its insecurities and blind spots. In his Nobel prize address: that military force is not the answer but is an answer. In his West Point speech a year and a half ago: that the U.S. can't stay in Afghanistan forever but should stay for a while. You can apply this analysis to almost every major address...

From some politicians, for instance those otherwise dissimilar Georgians Jimmy Carter and Newt Gingrich, a collection of "complex" ideas often comes across as just a list. Obama, most of the time, has pulled off the trick of making his balance-of-contradictions seem a policy in itself. Rather than seeming just "contradictory" or "indecisive." This is unusual enough that it's worth noting.  (And for another time: the vulnerabilities this approach creates.)

I would add two corollaries, one implicit above.  First, those "complex" speeches generally explain or presage complex hybrid policies -- not only in Afghanistan, as Fallows notes, but also in Libya, and in the tax cut deal Obama cut with Republicans last December.  Second, the embrace of complexity also defines his tactical approach to striking legislative or international deals. In formulating his role,  he seems to have internalized, and has in fact explicitly voiced the principle, backed by political science data and the experience of long-term legislators, that a president's public advocacy of a given policy proposal from the "bully pulpit" polarizes party positions and lessens the chance of compromise. As he put it with regard to long-term budget/tax reform negotiations in a Feb. 15 press conference:

Spencer Ackerman writes a short Obama Doctrine

In response to Obama's speech on Libya, Spencer Ackerman hones in on a passage that I flagged as a sign that Obama's harks back to the future of George H.W. Bush:

One more thing, and it’s peripheral to Libya. But there’s a lot of debate over whether there’s an “Obama Doctrine” or not. (I’d had my own take on that since the 2008 campaign.) It won’t do to simply say it’s to intervene militarily when U.S. interests and values align to stop a given atrocity, since every post-Cold War president says that.

This line may be more instructive: “American leadership is not simply a matter of going it alone and bearing all of the burden ourselves. Real leadership creates the conditions and coalitions for others to step up as well; to work with allies and partners so that they bear their share of the burden and pay their share of the costs; and to see that the principles of justice and human dignity are upheld by all.” 

Then Ackerman comes out himself with what strikes me as a nice concise formulation of the Obama Doctrine-in-progress (my emphasis):

Obama on Libya: all-but-vital interests

Some quick notes on Obama's speech on Libya tonight:

1) In the wake of Robert Gates' weekend assertion that "vital interests" are not at stake in Libya, he threaded a needle between "vital interests" and "interests and values"  - a combination of humanitarian concern and, shall we say, not-quite-vital strategic interest:  

There will be times, though, when our safety is not directly threatened, but our interests and values are.

The Financial Times hearts dithering

The Financial Times Comment crew is bidding fair to turn "ditherer" into a term of honor. Clive Crook, who slapped the term on Obama during his deliberations over Afghan policy, yesterday cataloged the virtues of dither-beration in the emergence of the strategy in Libya. Today, Gideon Rachman sings a similar tune.

Crook notes that in Obama, Europe has the antidote to Bush it thought it wanted:

Not long ago, Europe complained that the US was bullying, reckless and high-handed. Not long ago, Europe was ecstatic at Mr Obama’s election because this was not his style. You would think, having longed for a president who was cautious, deliberate and respectful of other countries’ opinions – and having voiced contempt for George W. Bush because he was none of those things – Europeans would hesitate to say: “The time for talking is over. Just start shooting.” 

Both kinds of critic – US hawks and Europe’s militant multilateralists – are right to say dithering held up the allied attacks and made the mission harder. The problem for multilateralists is that dithering is built into the system they advocate. If you cannot tolerate dithering, better not demand UN authority for your military interventions.

Obama's military triangulation

President Obama has not adequately explained why he decided to go to war in Libya. But this reported aspect of his decision-making process disturbs me:

In his meeting with Members of Congress today, sources tell ABC News, President Obama said he expected that the period that the US would be involved in heavy kinetic activity would be "days, not weeks," after which he said the US would then take more of a supporting role.

That recalls Obama's response to the conundrum of whether to ramp up or cut back U.S. engagement in Afghanistan.  Faced with the terrible choice of eschewing or undertaking military action (or reducing vs. escalating), Obama's signature decision seems to be "do it quickly" and "do it at minimal cost."  There's a kind of triangulation here that, while posing as an extreme realism (policy nuance based on the facts of the particular case) may actually reflect a form of escapism -- a bid to shape events to a degree that human activity can't attain. Perhaps that goes as well for the attempt the clothe the U.S.'s role as a supporting one -- though the latter does seem like good policy if you accept the premise that military action was required.

The decision-making pattern seems at least to rhyme with that portrayed in great detail by Bob Woodward in Obama's War.  As I've noted before, while Woodward does not explicitly pass judgment on Obama's chosen course, his narrative skews toward those in the administration's counsels who highlighted apparently insurmountable obstacles to standing up a self-sustaining government in Afghanistan: the total corruption of the Karzai regime, the complete failure to date of "handing off" responsibility to any unit of the Afghan army or police; the near-complete sanctuary enjoyed by the Taliban in Pakistan.  Rather than fully confronting the "mission impossible" implications, Obama imposed his own conditions on the military brass: do it with (somewhat) fewer troops, and do it on a shorter timeline.  That may have preserved his authority in some obscure sense, but seems unlikely to have increased the odds of a successful outcome.

"A spectacle of war and intervention"

Marc Lynch has a balanced and frankly ambivalent analysis of the U.N. action on Libya, noting both its potential to strengthen the rule of law in the world and its potential to devolve into a bloody quagmire with no exit.


Not venturing to call odds on those possibilities, I just want to note one sidelight cast by Lynch's scenario-izing. It's here (my emphasis):

But if it does not succeed quickly, and the intervention degenerates into a long quagmire of air strikes, grinding street battles, and growing pressure for the introduction of outside ground forces, then the impact could be quite different.  Despite the bracing scenes of Benghazi erupting into cheers at the news of the Resolution, Arab support for the intervention is not nearly as deep as it seems and will not likely survive an extended war.  If Libyan civilians are killed in airstrikes, and especially if foreign troops enter Libyan territory, and images of Arabs killed by U.S. forces replace images of brave protestors battered by Qaddafi's forces on al-Jazeera, the narrative could change quickly into an Iraq-like rage against Western imperialism.   What began as an indigenous peaceful Arab uprising against authoritarian rule could collapse into a spectacle of war and intervention.  

What strikes me here is the framing of contemporary war as spectacle -- the implicit acknowledgment that the ground war and the PR war are inseparable, and the implication that the PR war is the decisive one.

No risk-free course in Libya

Max Hastings writes a powerful brief in today's FT against yet another military plunge into the unknown in Libya:

The first principle for any nation using force is to ensure it succeeds. But in Iraq and Afghanistan the west has learnt that unseating regimes is relatively easy; the hard part is to promote acceptable alternatives.

The intelligence failure in Libya, and indeed across the Maghreb, has proved absolute. Western leaders know almost nothing either about the Libyan insurgents or about what is happening on the ground. It would be madness to commit US and allied forces to destroy Col Gaddafi, with no notion of what would follow.

What Hastings doesn't acknowledge, though, are the perhaps equally fraught consequences of standing aside. He overstates the upside of eschewing military intervention: