Obama's Middle East Policy Speech May 19, 2011

Walter Russell Mead, "Obama Throws Palestine Under the Bus as World Hails his Courage."
 @The American Interest. May 22, 2011.

Jeffrey Goldberg, "Foxman: Obama Gave a Pro-Israel Speech."
@The Atlantic. May 20, 2011.

Yossi Klein Halevi, "Yes We Can't: An Analysis of Obama's Middle East Speech."  
The New Republic. May 20, 2011.

Matthew Levitt, "Obama Puts the Onus on Hamas, Where It Belongs -- and 1967 Borders, With Swaps, Makes Sense." New York Daily News. May 20, 2011.


Walter Russell Mead, "Obama Embraces his Inner Bush."
@The American Interest. May 19, 2011.

Jeffrey Goldberg, "Why Are Republicans Misreading Obama's Speech?" @The Atlantic. May 19, 2011.

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Trying to understand American policy in Libya

Why Libya? This is a rare instance where what we should do is something we can do. Qaddafi expresses enthusiasm for murdering his own people, and has been bullying and/or terrorizing us and our allies--and basically half the continent of Africa--for decades. He has no friends at home or abroad, thus eliminating one common obstacle to making war on repressive rulers who constantly thwart our interests. That makes him less complicated to attack then the majority of situations where the international community, such as it is, might like to intervene to prevent a tyrant from slaughtering his own people. Also, in some cases the tyrants are our friends, or not so much our friends as unsavory strategic deals we are stuck with, at least in the short-term (Saudi Arabia). This does not mean that we should not publicly criticize their brutal crackdowns on their own uprisings. We absolutely should do everything we can to pressure them to reform, but we are not going to be sending planes in to take down an government with which we are allied.

Then you have perhaps the most greatest obstacle to ousting tyrants in countries like Syria and Yemen (and Iraq under Saddam), which is that they are not nations at all. Sectarian hatreds are brimming just beneath the surface, and will only be exacerbated, at least in the short-term, by the removal of the current strong man. The rulers in these countries are not only violently repressive (and they are unmistakably that), but they are also the current stop valve on what we can easily imagine would be civil war otherwise (at least in the short-term). It is much less plausible to criticize that we are “intervening in a civil war” in Libya, than if we were asserting a no-fly zone in, say, Bahrain, Yemen, or Syria. Yemen is an especially difficult case in that anarchy already reigns in parts of the country. Yemen is already a hospitable environment for Al Qaeda to carve out a home for itself. And then there are the countries where Iran has a stake--Syria in particular, and Bahrain. There is a great deal of uncertainty about what forces and factions will dominate a Qaddafi-free Libya, but the opposition to Qaddafi (and support, as minimal as it is) does not overlap with obvious sectarian divisions. No doubt they will find they have things to argue about, but at least there is unity in opposing Qaddafi. In Syria, on the other hand, there are probably sincere defenders of the current regime among Alawites--and legitimate fears that if the current regime falls, they will be slaughtered or otherwise put under the boot.

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Is the "Arab Street" more enthusiastic about American military invention against Qadafi than the "American Street?" Michael Slackman, "Dislike for Qaddafi Gives Arabs a Point of Unity." New York Times. March 21, 2011.

Why has Obama made less of an effort to rally support at home than abroad? The U.S. Congress, whatever else one might say about, at least was elected by the American people. Garrett Epps, "Barbary War III: The Case for Congressional Authorization." The Atlantic. March 22, 2011. NB: the question Epps addresses, rightly I think, is not, is the President legally required to obtain Congressional authorization, but is it prudent for him to do so, to which Epps responds, "yes."

On the internal administration dynamics in the past few weeks. Obama's female hawks?

D.B. Miller, "War in Libya: Why We Had No Choice." The Atlantic. March 22, 2011.

Here is the rare alignment of a terrible, tyrannical head of state, an oppressed people pressing for change, and formal censure not only from the West, but also the Arab League. However tarnished, the U.S. is the last superpower, and in times of crisis, the world still looks to it. The choice was to bear witness to an atrocity, or to end it. President Obama chose the latter.

The argument follows that the United States is somehow hypocritical for bombing Libya but not the other oppressed Islamic nations using violence against its citizens. The implication of this position is that the choice is either war everywhere at once, or no war at all; the president appears to have answered it with a policy based on patience and opportunity, one country at a time. Tunisia's Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and Egypt's Hosni Mubarak fell without U.S. meddling or force. When Qaddafi falls, no one can credibly argue that America was the driving force behind these changes.

The strength of the president's policy is also its weakness. By waiting weeks, and then only after submitting for United Nations approval, Qaddafi positioned the Libyan chessboard to his liking. He has placed human shields so as to maximize civilian casualties and capitalize on the resulting press. He seized and fortified the town of Ajdabiya and blitzed Benghazi, provisional capital of the interim government.

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How Obama Turned on a Dime

Josh Rogin, :How Obama turned on a dime toward war" Foreign Policy. March 18, 2011.

"This is the greatest opportunity to realign our interests and our values," a senior administration official said at the meeting, telling the experts this sentence came from Obama himself.

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Standing by while Libya burns

Last Friday, Obama claimed that he is "tightening the noose" around Qadhafi. Really? All evidence suggests that Qadhafi and his mercenaries are actually doing the tightening--around the last opposition stronghold in Benghazi.  Not only are we failing to aid this courageous uprising against a brutal thug, failing to assert our interests and values in this changing Middle Eastern landscape, but our president has shown his word means nothing. He has declared which side we are on, called for Qadhafi to go, but not followed through in any substantive way. This will not go unnoticed.  As Larry Diamond puts it, "If Barack Obama cannot face down a modest thug who is hated by most of his own people and by every neighboring government, who can he confront anywhere?"

Leon Wieseltier weighs in with one of the most powerful critiques of Obama's handling of the would-be Libyan revolution ("Darkness," The New Republic Online. March 11, 2011). [See excerpt below]

Fareed Zakaria explains why American interests are at stake in the outcome in Libya ("The Libyan Conundrum," Time. March 10, 2011).

Larry Diamond argues that Libya is our business first and foremost because Obama has made it clear where the U.S. stands, and not backing up its words with action sends a dangerous signal. ("Obama's Moment of Truth," The New Republic. March 15, 2011)

Hussein Ibish, who has been calling for strong American action from the beginning of the uprising, wonders whether the window of opportunity might have already passed. ("Can a No-Fly Zone Still Fly Today? Now Lebanon. March 15, 2011).

Michael Totten contends that Arabs bear a large responsibility for American hesitation to assert itself against Qadhafi.  ("What About Our Hearts and Minds?" New York Sun. March 14, 2011).

Wieseltier writes:

We will not act to prevent a crime against humanity because by doing so we will offend—who, exactly? Not the Libyans who are clamoring for Western assistance, or the Egyptians who looked to us for unequivocal support in their fight for freedom, or the Iranians who made a similar mistake. No, we will offend only a certain doctrinaire Western notion of what the contemporary Arab world thinks about the West, a notion that the democratic upheavals in the Arab world are making manifestly obsolete. We will offend not their assumptions, but our assumptions about their assumptions...

[Obama] declares that Qaddafi must go and that we will stand with the Libyan people, and then he does nothing. No, that’s not right. He consults and consults, and his staff works round the clock, and economic sanctions are instituted against the rampaging dictator who has tens of billions of dollars in cash. Obama is prepared to act, just not consequentially. He does not want the responsibility for any Arab outcome. He says they must do it for themselves. But they are doing it for themselves. They merely need help. And the help they need is easy for us to provide. (Jam their fucking communications.) And their cause is freedom, which is allegedly our cause. What they seek from Obama is an extended hand. What they are getting is a clenched fist. If Muammar Qaddafi takes Benghazi, it will be Barack Obama’s responsibility. That is what it means to be the American president. The American president cannot but affect the outcome. That is his burden and his privilege. He has the power to stop such an atrocity, so if the atrocity is not stopped it will be because he chose not to use his power. Perhaps that is why Obama has been telling people, rather tastelessly, that it would be easier to be the president of China. Obama will not be rushed. He is a man of the long game. But the Libyan struggle for freedom, and the mission of rescue, is a short game. That is the temporality of such circumstances. If you do not act swiftly, you have misunderstood the situation. Delay means disaster. Does Obama have any idea of what Qaddafi’s victory will mean for the region and its awakening?

 
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"Either I rule you or I kill you"

Hussein Ibish has been writing extensively about Libya. He calls for robust, US-led intervention on behalf of the anti-Gaddafi revolutionaries. I don't understand the situation well enough to evaluate his argument about Libya in particular. It seems clear though, that the wave of fire spreading across North Africa and the Middle East puts into focus the question of US power in the region--influence, involvement, or what have you--and for those who chastise it, "meddling."  See also "Act. Now: the world must do more than watch the Libyan bloodletting," Hussein Ibish. Foreign Policy. Feb. 24, 2011.

 

Not just US power but overlapping controversies about "humanitarian intervention," or international judgment and punishment in general. 

One thing remarkable about this case is that you have the Libyan Ambassador to the UN, Mohamed Shalgham, a Gaddafi crony since their youth, denouncing the "brother leader" and calling for international help to prevent Gaddafi's efforts to make sure all of Libya goes down in flames with him.

Shalgham repeated: He is saying, "either I rule you or I kill you"

See Shalgham's rather dramatic speech at the UN Security Council Feb. 25, 2011.

Background on US-Libya Relations:

Timeline of US-Libya Relations. Sept. 5, 2008. Reuters.

Elliott Abrams, who was on the NSC under Bush when Libya "made the switch" in 2003, wrote an op-ed in the WSJ on Friday, Feb. 25, explaining the strategic, if unpleasant, bargain the US government had to make with Gaddafi.

After the U.S. Army made short shrift of Saddam Hussein's forces in 2003, Gadhafi approached British intelligence and sought to come in from the cold. He agreed, after negotiations conducted largely by the CIA and London's MI6, to abandon terrorism and hand over to the U.S. his programs for developing missiles and weapons of mass destruction.

He kept his part of the bargain: Those materials reside at a military base in the U.S., and he has stayed away from terrorist groups. Libya began making payments to the families of those killed on Pan Am 103, ultimately reaching an agreement with all but one family and handing over a total of $1.5 billion...

Our annual human rights reports told the truth, but there was no question that the Bush administration (and the Obama administration that followed) felt limited by Gadhafi's adherence to the bargain. We had not promised to be silent about human rights abuses, and we were not, but there was no real energy behind our statements. We were doing business with Gadhafi, not trying to overthrow him...

Seen from this bloody February of 2011, the agreement with Libya was still the right policy. Gadhafi in his bunker with control over missiles, chemical weapons and a rudimentary nuclear program is a terrifying thought. So is a Libya after regime collapse with those materials available to the highest bidder.

Had we reneged—taken Libya's weaponry but then started a campaign against Gadhafi's rule—he'd have re-armed fast and gone back to terrorism. It's also not clear what more strenuous and public efforts to promote change in Libya would have achieved. It's not as if one could reason with Gadhafi.

And finally, we should take a moment to recall that the Libyan government, such as it is/was, has been defined by a single "personality" to a greater extent than, well, most governments one hears about.

From The National Post [Canada]. Adam McDowell and Adrian Humphreys. Feb. 22, 2011.

“The non sequiturs, the paranoid conspiracy theories, the anger — if it weren’t so tragic, we could laugh at it,” said David Schenker, director of the program on Arab politics at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy...

Nasser Wedaddy, civil rights outreach director for the American Islamic Congress, warned: “People think of Gaddafi as this buffoon who is acting on impulses and whims. There’s some truth to that. “But through the years,” continued the former resident of Libya, “Gaddafi has been a master of manipulating media. He uses his buffoonery … to get media attention, which he craves. And a lot of his talking points, which he has recycled through the years, are designed to appeal to his support base, [to portray him as] the guy who’s confronting the big powers in the world.”

 And I was hoping someone had done this "best of" series: Fashion, Qaddafi-style. Vanity Fair. Henry Porter and Annabel Davidson. August 12, 2009.

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