The Amateur

by Edward Klein

  The crisis over Libya, which began in February 2011 and lasted for seven long months, accentuated the glaring inconsistencies in the Obama Doctrine. Vice President Biden, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, and National Security Adviser Tom Donilon all urged Obama not to intervene in the Libyan civil war. By ignoring their counsel, the president violated three of the main principles supporting the Obama Doctrine:• Principle No. 1. America will lead the world in supporting democracy and fostering international human rights.Violation of Principle No. 1. As the Wall Street Journal pointed out: “No one can any longer doubt the U.S. determination not to act before the Italians do, or until the Saudis approve, or without a U.N. resolution. This White House is forthright for followership.”

  • Principle No. 2. America will not get involved in foreign military adventures unless its national interest is directly challenged.Violation of Principle No. 2. In Libya, Obama plunged the United States into a long and costly military campaign that had little strategic value and less public support.

  • Principle No. 3. America will not repeat George W. Bush’s mistake of invading an Islamic country like Iraq in order to topple a brutal dictatorship.Violation of Principle No. 3. The military campaign in Libya was aimed at deposing the dictatorship of Muammar Gaddafi. In that respect, it was Bush Redux.

  Given the violations of his own principles, why did Obama go into Libya?

  “There has been much speculation that the intervention in Libya was about oil,” wrote George Friedman, the founder and CEO of the global intelligence newsletter Stratfor. “All such interventions, such as those in Kosovo and Haiti, are examined for hidden purposes. Perhaps it was about oil in this case, but Gaddafi was happily shipping oil to Europe, so intervening to ensure that it continues makes no sense.”

  In fact, the whole exercise in Libya made no sense unless it was viewed through the prism of domestic politics. Opinion polls at the beginning of 2011 showed that Obama’s confused and feeble response to the Arab Spring had seriously undermined his credibility. His dithering amateurism added to the growing impression that he lacked the courage of his convictions, and was unable to provide decisive and resolute leadership. An anonymous Hillary Clinton aide told The Daily that the secretary of state, who until then had meticulously avoided criticizing Obama, was fed up with “a president who can’t make up his mind.” Hillary reportedly referred to Obama as “a president who can’t decide if today is Tuesday or Wednesday.” She also likened Obama and his advisers to “a bunch of amateurs” in their handling of Gaddafi.

  “Since the beginning of the Arab Spring, the Obama administration had been grappling with how the United States should respond to the wave of democratic uprisings sweeping the region, first in Tunisia, then in Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, Libya, Morocco, and Syria,” wrote Michael Hastings in Rolling Stone magazine.

  ... [O]nce those governments actually began to fall, the Obama administration was slow to distance itself from the oil-rich autocrats the U.S. had supported for decades.

  In Egypt, Vice President Joe Biden downplayed the democratic revolt, saying that he didn’t consider Hosni Mubarak a “dictator.” In Bahrain—home of the U.S. 5th Fleet—the administration looked the other way as the royal family allowed the military to violently crush peaceful street protests. In Yemen, the U.S. chose not to intervene when the country’s military fired into crowds calling for the president’s resignation. To Arab protesters, Obama’s “new beginning” [proclaimed in his Cairo speech] seemed more like the same old American realpolitik that had long dominated the Middle East.

  From all appearances, Obama was fiddling while the Arab world burned. But behind the scenes, a fierce battle for influence over policy was brewing at the White House. Among Obama’s foreign policy advisers, Samantha Power, the far-out leftist firebrand, complained that the administration’s cautious, first-dono-harm approach to the Arab Spring had effectively sidelined her in White House councils. She said she’d been relegated to “doing rinky-dink do-gooder stuff,” such as advocating on behalf of beleaguered Christians in Iraq, and no longer had as much access to the president. She was itching to get back into the fray, and she saw an opportunity in Libya.

  Power argued that Obama had ample justification to intervene in Libya under the humanitarian doctrine of “R2P”—shorthand for “Responsibility to Protect.” She outlined the basic tenets of R2P in a speech she delivered at the International Symposium on Preventing Genocide and Mass Atrocities in Paris.

  “What, concretely, should we—we governments, we advocates, we historians, we educators, we museum curators, we citizens, we NGOs—what should we be doing—and what should we be doing differently—in order to further reduce the likelihood of crimes that shock the conscience?” she said. “In his National Security Strategy... President Obama made clear that our effort to responsibly end the war in Iraq and defeat al-Qaeda in Afghanistan must be matched with a vigorous commitment to prevent mass atrocities. His National Security Strategy included the most detailed summation of the U.S. government’s approach to mass atrocity that an American president has given to date.... ”

  In the words of Stratfor’s George Friedman, Samantha Power was advocating what amounted to a policy of Immaculate Intervention. “I call humanitarian wars immaculate intervention,” said Friedman, “because most advocates want to see the outcome limited to preventing war crimes, not extended to include regime change or the imposition of alien values. They want a war of immaculate intentions surgically limited to a singular end without other consequences. And this is where the doctrine of humanitarian war unravels.

  “Regardless of intention, any intervention favors the weaker side,” he continued.

  If the side were not weak, it would not be facing mass murder: it could protect itself. Given that the intervention must be military, there must be an enemy.... My unease with humanitarian intervention is not that I don’t think the intent is good and the end moral. It is that the intent frequently gets lost and the moral end is not achieved.... A doctrine of humanitarian warfare that demands an immaculate intervention will fail because the desire to do good is an insufficient basis for war.... In the end, the ultimate dishonesties of humanitarian war are the claims that “this won’t hurt much” and “it will be over fast.”

  Neither Samantha Power nor her ideological bedfellow, Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, was swayed by the arguments against humanitarian intervention. On the contrary, Rice confessed that she felt guilty for having failed to push for intervention in Rwanda when she served on the National Security Council under Bill Clinton.

  “[Rice and Power’s] formative experience in foreign policy wasn’t Iraq or Afghanistan, but memories of the ethnic cleansing in the Balkans and Rwanda during the 1990s, a period in which they firmly believed that the United States had failed in its responsibilities to other countries,” Rolling Stone’s Michael Hastings noted. “They would now be to Obama what the neoconservatives had been to Bush: ardent advocates for war in the name of a grander cause. Libya, in effect, represent[ed] the rise of the humanitarian Vulcans.”

  But Rice and Power wouldn’t have gotten very far if they hadn’t been joined by a third woman, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. By the second week of March, with Gaddafi’s forces on the outskirts of Benghazi, the second largest city in Libya, and the rebels on the brink of collapse, France, England, and the members of the Arab League were clamoring for action. Convinced that there was a coalition of the willing, Hillary Clinton threw her support behind the hawkish Rice and Power, and urged Obama to begin a bombing campaign.

  Obama hesitated. He was under pressure from opposing wings in the Democratic Party. “Humanitarian idealists” urged him not to stand idly by and watch a repeat in Libya of the 1994 Rwanda massacre, which had been a blotch on the record of Bill Clinton. “Realists” argued just as convincingly that, in the wake of Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States couldn’t afford to plunge into a third war in the Islamic world; such an action woul
d reap a whirlwind of Arab hatred.

  What was he to do?

  In typical Obama fashion, he devised a policy that muddied the difference. He would favor war, without going to war. He would support a NATO air campaign against Gaddafi under the auspices of the United Nations, but he wouldn’t commit significant American airpower to the battle even though the United States was the most important member of NATO. He would support a policy of regime change in Libya, but he wouldn’t declare that as a goal of American policy. He would publicly maintain his continuing opposition to the Bush-era policy of nation building, but he would help create a new government in Libya. He would reject America’s post-World War II role as the initiator and guarantor of world order and, in the now-infamous words of one of his advisers, “lead from behind.”

  In certain quarters, Obama’s Libyan operation was counted a major achievement. Despite the alarming rise of revolutionary Islamism in Libya and other countries convulsed by the Arab Spring, I’ve heard people express the opinion that Obama has proved himself to be a better foreign policy president than a domestic policy president.

  In view of Obama’s pitiful record on the home front, that may not be saying much. Nonetheless, the notion that Obama has been more effective overseas than at home seems paradoxical when the Obama administration boasts of a policy of international retrenchment and believes that the era of American leadership is, and should be, long past. Under the Obama presidency, America has become weaker than at any time since the end of the Cold War. Our Navy has been cut in half and is growing smaller. Our Army and Marine Corps have 600,000 fewer troops, and will soon have even fewer. Our military budget is being slashed by billions. Our adversaries are gaining military, economic, diplomatic, and technological advantage over the United States thanks to a president who is viewed as weak.

  And yet, there are those who argue that Obama has scored several major foreign policy successes. In fact, their view has become part of the conventional wisdom on the Left, especially in the mainstream media. With little to cheer about at home, the media have given Obama a standing ovation over his decision to green-light the daring raid by the Navy SEALs that killed Osama bin Laden, his stepped-up unmanned drone strikes and special-operations campaigns that have decimated al Qaeda’s leadership, and his “immaculate intervention” in Libya, which ended with the death of Muammar Gaddafi.

  What the media miss is that a series of ad hoc military operations do not add up to a successful foreign policy. Effective diplomacy requires something that is sorely missing in Barack Obama’s foreign policy—a coherent philosophy and worldview. Put another way, Obama lacks faith in the goodness of American leadership.

  “The present world order was largely shaped by American power and reflects American interests and preferences,” writes Robert Kagan, a foreign policy commentator at the Brookings Institution and author of The World America Made. “If the balance shifts in the direction of other nations, the world order will change to suit their interests and preferences. Nor can we assume that all the great powers in a post-American world would agree on the benefits of preserving the present order, or have the capacity to preserve it, even if they wanted to....

  “International order is not an evolution; it is an imposition,” Kagan continues. “It is the domination of one vision over others—in America’s case, the domination of free-market and democratic principles, together with an international system that supports them. The present system will last only as long as those who favor it retain the will and capacity to defend it.”

  In the argument over whether Barack Obama has been a better foreign policy president than a domestic policy president, his record is the clincher. Judged by the ambitious goals he set for himself when he became president, he cannot claim to have achieved a single lasting policy objective in any area of the world that is of vital interest to the United States.

  Rather than provide the kind of American leadership that once created the Marshall Plan and the Truman Doctrine, he has watched as a helpless bystander as the European Union has disintegrated. After nearly ten years of war in Iraq, he has undertaken a strategic withdrawal from the Middle East, leaving a vacuum that is certain to be filled by our sworn enemies in Iran. He called Afghanistan “a war of necessity,” dispatched an additional 30,000 troops there, but foolishly set a date certain to bring America’s troops home, thus creating yet another vacuum in an explosive part of the world. He has done little or nothing to stem the rise of China as a military power in the Far East. His ambivalent policy toward the mullahs in Iran and their ambition to become a nuclear power could only be described as an uncertain trumpet.

  The Obama Doctrine with its two corollaries—“leading from behind” and “Responsibility to Protect”—is naïve, simplistic, and superficial. If further proof of this were needed, it came in the early months of 2012, when Bashar al-Assad began slaughtering his civilian opponents in Syria, which unlike Libya is of vital strategic importance to the United States, because Syria’s regime is allied to both Russia and Iran.

  “If the responsibility to protect civilians is a legitimate part of international law, why would it apply to Libya and not to Syria?” Steven Erlanger asked in the New York Times. “Why shouldn’t the world intervene in what is already a one-sided civil war? Without a robust intervention, what happens to the momentum and principles of the Arab Spring? Will Western calls for democracy and equal rights suffer and help radical Islamists rise to power?”

  Several leading Republicans called on the Obama administration to act. But the voices of the “humanitarian Vulcans”—Samantha Power, Susan Rice, and Hillary Clinton—were effectively silenced when Russia and China vetoed a Security Council resolution aimed at aiding the Syrian rebels and toppling the Assad regime. Without the fig leaf of international cooperation, which would allow the timorous Obama administration to lead from behind, Obama remained frozen in inaction. His refusal to take the lead in Syria to save civilian lives made a sham of “Responsibility to Protect,” the guiding moral principle behind the Obama Doctrine.

  As in past crises, the one in Syria demonstrated that Obama and his foreign policy team were bound by a narrow, cramped worldview. They envision a world of declining American power and the emergence of a new world order that will contain a half dozen major powers—the United States, Europe, China, Japan, Russia, and India. However, such a highly competitive, dangerous multipolar world is not inevitable. It will only materialize if the United States lets it. Obama should be more careful what he wishes for.

  PART V

  A ONE-TERM PROPOSITION?

  One nice thing about the situation I find

  myself in is that I will be held accountable.

  You know, I’ve got four years.... If I don’t

  have this done in three years, then there’s

  going to be a one-term proposition.

  —Barack Obama

  CHAPTER 20

  THE “NEW OBAMA”

  [Obama] needs to take a Valium before he comes in

  and talks to Republicans. He’s pretty thin-skinned.

  —Republican Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas

  There is an old saying that nothing prepares a person to be president. Nowadays, a lot of liberals resort to this cliché as a way of excusing Barack Obama for the serial failures of his nearly four years in office. After all, liberals argue, if no one ever arrives at the White House with the requisite skills and talents to carry out the duties of the modern presidency, how can Obama be faulted for a first term that has been characterized by false starts and failed experiments? At least he tried.

  But presidents don’t get points for trying. What’s more, the hackneyed saying that all presidents are unsuited for office is simply not true. It certainly wasn’t true of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, and Ronald Reagan. All of them were eminently suited for the presidency, because they had the temperament, management skills, and vision to tackle the job.

  Wh
at is invariably true about our presidents is that the most successful ones grow in office. During the Civil War, Lincoln went through five commanders in the East before he settled on Ulysses S. Grant. In an assessment of John Kennedy, his speechwriter Theodore Sorensen noted: “If one extraordinary quality stood out among the many, it was the quality of continued growth. In November 1963, he had learned more about the uses and limitation of power, about the men on whom he could depend, about the adversaries and evils he faced, and about the tools and techniques of policy.” The historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. seconded the motion. “Kennedy,” he said, “made his share of mistakes. But Kennedy never lost the capacity to learn from his mistakes. Each year he became a better president.”

  Can the same be said of Barack Obama?

  Has he learned from his mistakes?

  Has he become a better president?

  The answer to these questions will strike many readers of this book as all too clear. I can just hear them chanting in unison: “No! No! NO!”

  Nonetheless, the subject cannot be so easily dismissed. It is one thing for conservatives to view Obama as an irremediable political delinquent and bungling amateur who is hopelessly out of his depth. It is quite another thing to say of Obama, as Talleyrand was supposed to have said of the Bourbons, that he has “learned nothing and forgotten nothing.” Indeed, the outcome of the 2012 presidential election may well be decided in Obama’s favor if independent swing voters can be convinced that he has grown in office and deserves a second chance.

  To shed light on the subject of Obama’s “growth,” I interviewed dozens of people in government, media, academia, and business. More than a few of them had worked in the Obama White House or in previous administrations. Others had studied Obama and his predecessors as reporters, writers, and historians.