Worldmaking (87 page)

The defining moment of Obama's early engagement strategy was a landmark address at Cairo University in June. The administration had spent months crafting the speech, testament to the importance it attached to repairing America's image in the Middle East. In front of a crowd of three thousand, a black American president with the middle name Hussein began his speech with the words
Assalamu alaykum
, a traditional Muslim greeting that translates as “Peace be upon you.” It was clear that Obama possessed points of connectivity to the non-Western world that were unavailable to his predecessors. He discussed his paternal lineage, described his roots in a “Kenyan family that included generations of Muslims,” and spoke of the awe inspired by his “hearing the call of the
azaan
at the break of dawn and the fall of dusk.”
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It was a frank performance that celebrated his cosmopolitanism and his nation's pluralism. It drew a line under the monism of the Bush administration: “I know there has been controversy about the promotion of democracy in recent years, and much of this controversy is connected to the war in Iraq. So let me be clear: no system of government can or should be imposed upon one nation by any other.”

This was a critical moment in the speech, the point at which Obama's virtues and Bush's failings were starkly contrasted to the anticipated acclaim of the crowd. But the expected applause line did not materialize (although Hosni Mubarak was undoubtedly cheering on the inside). Human Rights Watch's Tom Malinowski, who had informally advised Obama's campaign, put his finger on the problem: “I don't think he was aware that the audience both despised George W. Bush and desperately wanted Bush's help in their cause.”
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In an interview with
The Wall Street Journal
two years later, Paul Wolfowitz identified as significant the moment when Obama's modesty and preference for incremental change fell flat in a nation (and region) desperate to free itself from autocrats like Mubarak. It was the word “democracy”—not Obama repudiating his predecessor's operationalization of the concept—that had stirred applause. Wolfowitz re-created what must have been going through the president's mind at the end of that segment: “There's something not quite right here. I'm about to say it's controversial, and … they've applauded the mere mention of the topic.”
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But the significance of the moment became clear only subsequently. Obama's critics immediately after the speech were less nuanced and incisive. Frank Gaffney, an aide to Richard Perle through the 1970s and 1980s, observed that Obama “not only identifies with Muslims, but may actually be one himself.”
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Obama's reluctance to hitch U.S. foreign policy to an unpredictable wagon like democratization was displayed clearly in the months that followed. A week after Obama's speech in Cairo, Iranians went to the polls to cast their votes for one of two primary alternatives: the hard-line incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or reformist Mir-Hossein Mousavi. Ahmadinejad won the contest, gathering a suspiciously high proportion of all votes cast: 63 percent. Mousavi's supporters took to the streets of Tehran—where Mousavi's popularity was highest—to protest the fraud that had clearly been perpetrated. Hundreds of thousands assembled in pursuit of a green revolution—the color of Mousavi's campaign, which was embraced subsequently by all who sought Ahmadinejad's removal—but the government moved swiftly to strangle the movement in its infancy.

The demonstrations were the largest seen in Iran since 1979, but the United States refused to get involved. Obama condemned the brutality of the government's response, in which scores of protestors were killed, observing that the “United States and the international community had been appalled and outraged by the threats, the beatings and imprisonments of the past few days.” But the chastening aspect of the president's intervention ended there. “The United States respects the sovereignty of the Islamic Republic of Iran,” Obama added reassuringly, “and is not interfering with Iran's internal affairs.”
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His caution was conditioned by two factors that were comprehensible in the context of that time. First, Obama was keen to engage Iran on its nuclear weapons program and did not want to derail the possibility of direct talks that could lead to meaningful progress. Second, history suggested that American intervention in support of the protesters might undermine the independence of that very movement, allowing them to be portrayed by Ahmadinejad and his lackeys as unpatriotic stooges of the United States.

Again, Paul Wolfowitz took strong exception to Obama's position, decrying his logic as devoid of values and, indeed, strategic merit:

On Iran, it was just terrible. To me the analogy is in 1981, when martial law was declared in Poland … Reagan saw it as an opportunity to drive a wedge into this opening, and he and the Pope went at it … You had a similar opportunity in Iran in June of 2009 … What did we do? We sat on our hands. Why? [Because Obama] entertained this hope that we could negotiate with the regime, and therefore we didn't want to antagonize them … Which, by the way, isn't even a smart way to negotiate. It suggests such an eagerness to negotiate that the other guy knows he has you.
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Wolfowitz did not state precisely what the president should have done instead. Another U.S. intervention in the Middle East might have midwifed a permanent democratic revolution in Iran. Or it might have drawn the United States into a civil war as bitter and intractable as the one in Iraq. Or it might have raised and then dashed the expectations of ordinary Iranians—alienating everyone. What we do know is that Obama's inaction looked weak and unprincipled and Wolfowitz's critique was easy to make but difficult to own. Henry Kissinger strongly backed Obama: “I think the president has handled this well. Anything that the United States says that puts us totally behind one of the contenders, behind Mousavi, would be a handicap for that person. And I think it's the proper position to take that the people of Iran have to make that decision.”
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*   *   *

In 1895, the Swedish chemist and armaments manufacturer Alfred Nobel established a peace prize in his will, to be awarded annually to individuals who have “done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.” Some believe that Nobel added peace to chemistry, physics, medicine, and literature as penance for the dynamite that his factories had brought to the world. Whatever its rationale, the Nobel Peace Prize became one of the most significant accolades in world affairs. Previous American recipients include Theodore Roosevelt in 1906, Elihu Root in 1912, Woodrow Wilson in 1919, Frank B. Kellogg in 1929, Jane Addams in 1931, Cordell Hull in 1945, Emily Balch in 1946, George Marshall in 1953, and Henry Kissinger in 1973. The Nobel Committee awarded prizes to each in homage to previous efforts and achievements—whether apparent or real, durable or ephemeral—in making the world more peaceable. But in 2009, the committee decided to reward promise rather than achievement. In recognition of “his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples,” and for having “created a new climate in international politics,” Barack Hussein Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
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Obama's political opponents had some fun with the announcement, mocking the committee's ulterior motive—this was clearly a swipe at Bush, not a reward for Obama—and the president's slight achievements. The chairman of the Republican National Committee, Michael Steele, was not alone in expressing disbelief: “The real question Americans are asking is, ‘What has President Obama actually accomplished.'”
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It was a prize that Obama might have done without.

“To be honest,” Obama said upon learning the news, “I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many of the transformative figures who've been honored by this prize.” But it was also impossible for him to decline such an honor. And besides, the award assisted certain of his aspirations, particularly in regard to the restoration of America's reputation. “I also know … that throughout history,” Obama added, “the Nobel Peace Prize has not just been used to honor specific achievement; it's also been used as a means to give momentum to a set of causes.”
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The acceptance speech itself was a wonderful opportunity for the president to build momentum, to explain to a world audience what he wanted to achieve.

Obama's Nobel acceptance speech developed some of the themes present in his “antiwar” speech of October 2002. In Chicago he had to distinguish his opposition from that of Jesse Jackson. In Oslo he had to pay homage to Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi while dismissing the nonviolence they practiced as inapplicable to someone holding his office. Obama had to dim the crowd's ardor by asserting that while peace is the ultimate aspiration of humankind, meting out violence against “evil”—the precise word he used—is often necessary:

We must begin by acknowledging the hard truth: We will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes. There will be times when nations—acting individually or in concert—will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified … I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: Evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler's armies. Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda's leaders to lay down their arms.

Obama spoke directly to the tension in America “between those who describe themselves as realists or idealists—a tension that suggests a stark choice between the narrow pursuit of interests or an endless campaign to impose our values around the world.” The president maintained that there was fluidity across that boundary, that the pure application of either made for bad foreign policy. “I reject these choices,” said Obama, and he celebrated those individuals in recent history who had transcended the dogmas conventionally ascribed to them—alienating many traditional supporters along the way—in pursuit of larger goals:

In light of the Cultural Revolution's horrors, Nixon's meeting with Mao appeared inexcusable—and yet it surely helped set China on a path where millions of its citizens have been lifted from poverty and connected to open societies. Pope John Paul's engagement with Poland created space not just for the Catholic Church, but for labor leaders like Lech Walesa. Ronald Reagan's efforts on arms control and embrace of perestroika not only improved relations with the Soviet Union, but empowered dissidents throughout Eastern Europe. There's no simple formula here. But we must try as best we can to balance isolation and engagement, pressure and incentives, so that human rights and dignity are advanced over time.
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“There's no simple formula here” was the most revealing line in the speech. It signaled that the Obama Doctrine was the absence of one.

*   *   *

In the weeks after Obama's election victory in the fall of 2008, Doug Lute, a three-star general, briefed the transition team on Afghanistan. A tall and imposing man, Lute did not pull his punches. As Tom Donilon, who became Obama's deputy national security adviser, recalled, the very first PowerPoint slide stated an uncomfortable truth: “It said we do not have a strategy in Afghanistan that you can articulate or achieve. We had been at war for eight years, and no one could explain the strategy.” For Donilon and others, this was a startling revelation. What had the Bush administration been doing these past six years? What precisely was America trying to achieve in Afghanistan beyond the eradication of al-Qaeda training camps (which had been achieved by 2002)? As David Sanger asks in
Confront and Conceal
, Was it “a full-blown democracy with the rule of law and respect for human rights? A divided country in which every warlord runs his own piece of turf? A state-in-name-only that survived on revenue from opium, minerals, and foreign aid? Something else?”
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No one in the Bush administration appeared to have figured this out. It fell to the Obama administration either to provide an answer or head for the exit.

Members of the administration had different answers to these questions. Vice President Joe Biden believed that the conflict between the Taliban and the corrupt Karzai government was unresolvable—he began with the requirement for a swift American withdrawal and worked from there. President Hamid Karzai was an Ngo Dinh Diem–type figure who lacked popular legitimacy and whose government would fall quickly without U.S. support. Biden feared that Afghanistan could become Obama's Vietnam, leading to a lingering foreign-policy death by a thousand cuts. Instead he recommended a strategy of “counterterrorism plus,” requiring the withdrawal of conventional U.S. ground troops and the increased use of Special Forces–spotted drone and cruise missile strikes. America's focus should solely be on those individuals who seek to do the nation harm; anything more was fantastical. Biden was worried by those who did not care to remember their history. Susan Rice's observation that Vietnam “is not the frame of reference for every decision—or any decision, for that matter. I'm sick and tired of reprising all of the traumas and the battles and the psychoses of the 1960s” was a source of concern to Biden and other like-minded colleagues.
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George Santayana's observation that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” seemed apposite in the circumstances.

Hillary Clinton rejected the Vietnam analogy as misleading—embedding gains rather than cutting and running was her goal. Her preference was for a policy of “sustained counterinsurgency,” transferring General Petraeus's successful surge in Iraq to Afghanistan. She and Petraeus believed the United States could actually win over the Afghan people by protecting them, through pressuring Karzai to reform and delegitimizing the Taliban by displaying the competence and durability of an alternative. If Clinton had a time scale in mind, however, it was undoubtedly shorter than the two generations that Petraeus had identified as a possibility in private discussions: “You have to recognize … that I don't think you win this war. I think you keep fighting. It's a little bit like Iraq, actually … This is the kind of fight we're in for the rest of our lives and probably our kids' lives.”
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Her perspective was close to that of Petraeus but perhaps not that close. A key motive behind Clinton's preference for sustained counterinsurgency was her desire to render permanent the progressive gains that had permitted some 2.4 million Afghan girls to attend school for the first time since the communist era.