Whose Foreign Policy Is It?

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/09/opinion/09douthat.html

By ROSS DOUTHAT
Published: May 8, 2011 

For those with eyes to see, the daylight between the foreign policies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama has been shrinking ever since the current president took the oath of office. But last week made it official: When the story of America’s post-9/11 wars is written, historians will be obliged to assess the two administrations together, and pass judgment on the Bush-Obama era. 

The death of Osama bin Laden, in a raid that operationalized Bush’s famous “dead or alive” dictum, offered the most visible proof of this continuity. But the more important evidence of the Bush-Obama convergence lay elsewhere, in developments from last week that didn’t merit screaming headlines, because they seemed routine rather than remarkable.

One was NATO’s ongoing bombing campaign in Libya, which now barely even pretends to be confined to humanitarian objectives, or to be bound by the letter of the United Nations resolution. Another was Friday’s Predator strike inside Pakistan’s tribal regions, which killed a group of suspected militants while the world’s attention was still fixed on Bin Laden’s final hours. Another was the American missile that just missed killing Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born cleric who has emerged as a key recruiter for Al Qaeda’s Yemen affiliate.

Imagine, for a moment, that these were George W. Bush’s policies at work. A quest for regime change in Libya, conducted without even a pro forma request for Congressional approval. A campaign of remote-controlled airstrikes, in which collateral damage is inevitable, carried out inside a country where we are not officially at war. A policy of targeted assassination against an American citizen who has been neither charged nor convicted in any U.S. court.

Imagine the outrage, the protests, the furious op-eds about right-wing tyranny and neoconservative overreach. Imagine all that, and then look at the reality. For most Democrats, what was considered creeping fascism under Bush is just good old-fashioned common sense when the president has a “D” beside his name.

There is good news for the country in this turnabout. Having one of their own in the White House has forced Democrats to walk in the Bush administration’s shoes, and appreciate its dilemmas and decisions. To some extent, the Bush-Obama convergence is a sign that the Democratic Party is growing up, putting away certain fond illusions, and accepting its share of responsibility for the messy realities of the post-9/11 world.

It’s a good thing, for instance, that President Obama has slow-walked the American withdrawal from Iraq, and it’s a sign of political maturity that his base hasn’t punished him for doing so. It’s a good thing that this White House didn’t just send every Guantánamo prisoner to a civilian court (or back home without a trial). It’s a very good thing that many Democrats seem willing to opt for frontier justice over procedural justice when the circumstances call for it — as they did in Abbottabad last week.

But there are dangers in this turnabout as well. Now that Democrats have learned to stop worrying and embrace the imperial presidency, the United States lacks a strong institutional check on the tendency toward executive hubris and wartime overreach. The speed with which many once-dovish liberals rallied behind the Libyan war — at best a gamble, at worst a folly — was revealing and depressing. The absence of any sustained outcry over the White House’s willingness to assassinate American citizens without trial should be equally disquieting.

As Barack Obama has discovered, an open-ended, borderless conflict requires a certain comfort with moral gray areas. But it requires vigilance as well, and a skepticism about giving the executive branch a free hand in a forever war. During the Bush era, such vigilance was supplied (albeit sometimes cynically, and often in excess) by one of the country’s two major political parties. But in the Obama era, it’s mainly confined to the far left and the libertarian right.

This vigilance needs to be mathematical as well as moral. The most dangerous continuity between the Bush and Obama presidencies, perhaps, is their shared unwillingness to level with the country about what our current foreign policy posture costs, and how it fits into our broader fiscal liabilities.

Instead, big government conservatism has given way to big government liberalism, America’s overseas footprint keeps expanding, and nobody has been willing to explain to the public that the global war on terror isn’t a free lunch.

The next president won’t have that luxury. In one form or another, the war on terror is likely to continue long after Osama bin Laden’s bones have turned to coral. But we’ll know that the Bush-Obama era is officially over when somebody presents us with the bill. 

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http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/09/how-we-could-lose-in-libya/

How We Could Lose in Libya

by Ross Douthat
May 9, 2011, 12:35 pm

From a Kenneth Pollack essay making the case for Western escalation:

    … Already, we have seen that Qaddafi’s forces have been able to steal brief marches on the NATO air forces and, by “hugging” rebel forces, limit the ability of Western air power to interdict them … This indicates that, over time, there is a real risk that Qaddafi’s forces will be able to catch NATO napping, overpower the rebel ground forces and get into Benghazi, where amid the city’s civilian population and urban terrain, NATO air forces will find it very difficult to stop them from reasserting control and slaughtering the population. In other words, the current situation is unlikely to produce an outcome satisfactory to the United States, and it is at least as likely—arguably more so—that over time, the advantage will tip in Qaddafi’s favor. At some point, NATO’s ability to stop his ground forces will erode, or he will catch them off guard, and the next thing you know, we will be facing the very humanitarian catastrophe that was the raison d’etre for American intervention in the first place.

Nicolas Pelham envisioned a similar scenario in the New York Review of Books a few weeks ago:

    … The alternative is ghastly. The sandstorm season in Libya is fast approaching, and with it the prospect of protection from NATO bombing. Under its cover, the colonel could yet send his pickup trucks, disguised with rebel flags, into Benghazi. Diplomats who had earlier said they were coming to stay are making contingency plans to flee within an hour’s notice, waving goodbye to free Libya.

My column today suggests that there’s a deep continuity between the foreign policies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, to the point where it increasingly makes sense to talk about a “Bush-Obama era” in national security policy. One obvious rebuttal to my argument is that whatever Bush-era policies may have been carried over into the Obama presidency, the current White House hasn’t committed the United States to a high-risk, high-cost war of choice the way Bush did in Iraq. This is true, but I don’t think it obviates my point: Richard Nixon wasn’t responsible for America’s long, tragic escalation in Vietnam, but it still makes sense to talk about a Johnson-Nixon era in American foreign policy. (It should be possible to simultaneously acknowledge the existence of Bush-Obama era while preferring the Obama phase of that era to the Bush phase.)

Also, Obama’s own exercise in interventionism isn’t over yet. Even under worst-case scenarios, our quasi-Libyan war is almost certainly less risky (thank God) than the invasion of Iraq. But it’s still possible — not likely, but possible — that this administration will actually lose its Middle Eastern war of choice.

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http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/10/debating-the-bush-obama-era/

Debating the Bush-Obama Era

by Ross Douthat
May 10, 2011, 5:14 pm

In response to my column on the Bush-Obama foreign policy convergence, Andrew Sullivan runs down what he sees as the five fundamental discontinuities between the two administration’s approaches:

    The first is competence. Think of the fiasco of the Iraq occupation – which remained unfixed for years while tens of thousands died. Now think of the superlative, careful management of the killing of bin Laden, a man Bush had said he’d stopped thinking about.

I hold no brief for Bush’s competence, though I’d like to see how the Libyan war turns out before I give the current president a gold star for “superlative” wartime management. And as much blame as Bush deserves for the fiasco in Iraq, it was his team that eventually brought some kind of stability to that country — a team that Obama basically carried over into his presidency, and then charged with overseeing a similar counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan. The Bush presidency did not end in 2006, and the continuity between the Petraeus-Gates phase of the Bush era and the Petraeus-Gates phase of the Obama era has been almost seamless.

More importantly, though, I wasn’t ever trying to argue that Bush and Obama have been equally competent. I was making an argument about the parallels between the overall architecture of their foreign policies, not the skill with which those policies have been implemented. Here Sullivan’s second point is more germane:

    The second is torture. For the United States to have more success without torture than with it marks a turning point in history’s assessment of the war crimes committed by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, et al.

I don’t know about that “turning point,” since it seems like we’re just having the same argument all over again about the role that Bush-era interrogations might or might not have played in mapping the trail that led to Bin Laden. But otherwise, I agree: The official repudiation of waterboarding, etc., marks the Obama White House’s most significant break with Bush’s approach to the War on Terror.

Sullivan goes on:

    The third is multilateralism. It is inconceivable that Bush would have ceded the initiative on Libya to Britain, France and the Arab League. That humility – which Bush promised in 2000 – was only realized after he had left office. (Ross acknowledged this not so long ago.)

Yes, I suppose “humility” is one way to describe getting buffaloed into war by Bernard Henri-Levy …

Snark aside, where the Libyan war is concerned the Obama White House has displayed both continuities and discontinuities with Bush-era interventionism. On the one hand, our North African campaign has been justified by the same broad worldview and the same kind of arguments that gave us the Iraq invasion. On the other hand, it’s implementation has owed more to Clintonian liberal internationalism than to the neoconservative foreign policy vision. On the other other hand, if you look at military commitments rather than U.N. resolutions, the Libyan campaign arguably less multilateral than the war in Iraq — and it’s a more striking manifestation of the imperial presidency, in a sense, because we’re fighting it with barely a nod to the need for congressional approval.

My sense is that the overall continuities between Obama’s interventionism and Bush’s are both important and surprising. But reasonable people can disagree.

Onward:

    The fourth is a limited executive branch. There is no longer any claim of total supremacy over the laws of the land and the other branches of government in warfare. Yes, classic executive actions – like the killing of OBL – remain in the president’s unique authoritah. But elsewhere, the administration has gone to some lengths in vesting its war powers in all three branches of government.

O.K., but again, the most extreme Cheneyite claims of executive power had either been abandoned or rebuffed in court by the middle of Bush’s second term, so there was never any plausible way for the next administration to carry them forward. Almost every claim that could be carried forward, though, has been. (Eli Lake’s “The 9/14 Presidency” is the piece to read on this front.) Meanwhile, the Obama White House has pushed the executive-power envelope in ways that Bush did not — by taking us to quasi-war in Libya without a vote in Congress, for instance, and by actually trying to assassinate American citizens overseas (a power that the Bush White House claimed, but never put to use). Are these really just “classic executive actions”? They seem rather more imperial than that to me.

Finally:

    The fifth is a transformation in the propaganda war.

    Bush’s unilateralism, false pretenses for the Iraq war and embrace of torture gave us one teetering, blood-stained chaotic and still fragile transition to democracy in Iraq. Obama’s multilateralism, outreach to the Muslim world, and distance from indigenous movements have given us democratic revolutions from below in Egypt, Tunisia, Syria, Iran, Bahrain and Libya. Only the first two have succeeded. But the shift in what’s possible, while by no means primarily due to Obama, has certainly been marked since the cowboy left the Oval Office.

Oh, come on. “Have given us”? Please explain the mechanism whereby President Obama’s policies “gave us” any of these revolutions.  You could just as easily argue that President Bush “gave us” the Cedar Revolution by championing democracy in Iraq, or for that matter that the example of Iraqi democracy ultimately played some role in inspiring the current round of protests and upheavals. That argument would be presumptuous and wrong, but it’s no more obviously ridiculous than crediting Obama’s “multilateralism” with inspiring Iranian protestors, or crediting his “outreach to the Muslim world” with inspiring Egyptian resistance to their (American-backed) dictator, or Bahraini resistance to their (American-backed) king. And where is the evidence that this president has won great victories in the propaganda war? In Egypt, where he delivered his much-touted address to the the Muslim world, the United States is more unpopular today than it was during the Bush era.

Sullivan concludes by praising me for “urging vigilance of the war machine directed by the president,” but dismissing what he calls my attempt “to rescue the failure of the Bush-Cheney years from the historical dustbin they deserve.” Again, I have no interest in “rescuing” the Bush-Cheney years, which were defined by a large foreign policy blunder and many smaller ones as well. But we can’t have an honest conversation about foreign policy in the age of Obama if we pretend that the Bush-Cheney vision of America’s role in the world, how to fight the war on terror, and so on just went into the dustbin in January of 2009 — rather than still being with us, in good ways and bad, deep into a presidency that promised to repudiate it.


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