Obama: His Words and His Deeds 

July 14, 2011 

David Bromwich 

The New York Review of Books

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/jul/14/obama-his-words-his-deeds/?pagination=false&printpage=true

[Barack Obama and Benjamin Netanyahu at a meeting in the
Oval Office, May 20, 2011- Charles Dharapak/AP Images]

In early June, a constitutional crisis faced Barack
Obama over his defiance of the War Powers Act of 1973.
The law requires the President to seek approval by
Congress within sixty days of committing American
forces to an armed conflict anywhere in the world. Two
resolutions emerged and were debated in Congress to
force compliance from Obama. One, drafted by the
Speaker of the House, John Boehner, called for the
President to give a justification of US actions in
Libya. On June 3, the Boehner resolution passed by a
vote of 268-145. An alternative resolution, drafted by
Dennis Kucinich, the best-known anti-interventionist
among Democrats, would have called for US withdrawal
from Libya within fifteen days. The Kucinich resolution
was defeated 148-265.

The debate and the two votes were the first major signs
of congressional resistance to the aggrandizement of
executive power begun by George W. Bush in Afghanistan
and Iraq and continued by Obama in Afghanistan and
Libya. The reasons the President had cited in a letter
to Congress for his circumvention of congressional
approval of his actions in Libya betrayed a curious
mixture of arrogance and disregard for the War Powers
Act. The US military role in Libya, Obama said, was
subordinate, and, since NATO was now in command, the
Libya war hardly qualified as a war. Congress was free
to discuss the matter if it liked, and he would welcome
its approval, but in his view he acted within his legal
powers in giving the orders without approval.

Few members of Congress as yet hold a fully articulated
objection to America's wars in Asia and North Africa.
But other causes in play may trouble the President's
determination to show his sympathy with the Arab Spring
by military action in Libya. Obama has an unfortunate
propensity to be specific when it would serve him well
to avoid particulars, and to become vague at times when
dates, names, numbers, or "a line in the sand" is what
is needed to clarify a policy. On Libya, he was
specific. He said the American commitment would last
"days, not weeks." It has now lasted a little under
three months. Reliable reporters such as Anthony Shadid
of The New York Times and Patrick Cockburn of The
Independent have suggested that an end to the conflict
is nowhere in sight. 

The narrow aim of enforcing a "no-fly zone" to protect
civilians, asserted by Susan Rice and Hillary Clinton
as the limit of American aims, turns out to have been a
wedge for an air war against Qaddafi, a war, in fact,
as thorough as is compatible with avoidance of harm to
civilians. The surest thing one can say about the end
of this engagement is that the US--along with France,
Great Britain, and perhaps also Italy, which arranged
the intervention--will at some point install a client
state and fit out a friendly government with a
democratic constitution. Nothing about the war affords
any insight into the intermediate calculations of Obama
and his collaborators, Nicolas Sarkozy and David
Cameron.

Obama was in Brasilia on March 19 when he announced his
authorization of "limited military action" in Libya.
For that matter, he has been away from Washington for a
large part of his two and a half years as president.
This fact may be dwelt on excessively by his
detractors, especially at Fox News, but its importance
is scarcely acknowledged by his allies. (According to
figures compiled at the end of 2010 by the CBS reporter
Mark Knoller, Obama's first twenty-three months in
office saw seventy days on foreign trips and
fifty-eight days on vacation trips.) He has gambled
that it pays to present himself as a statesman above
the scramble of something disagreeable called
Washington.

Here he follows a path trodden by almost all his
predecessors. Carter, Reagan, Clinton, and George W.
Bush all affected the stance of outsider; only Bush
Senior scorned to adopt the tactic (and could not have
gotten away with it if he tried). Nor does taking such
a position confer an automatic advantage. It worked
well for Reagan until the Iran-contra scandal in 1986.
Clinton was helped and hurt in about equal parts by the
outsider pretense. For Carter and the younger Bush, it
seems to have added to the impression of incompetence
or disengagement. People came to think that there were
things these men could have learned from Washington.

The anti-Washington tactic, and the extensive travel it
licenses, have not worked well for Obama. He retains
the wish to be seen as a man above party; and a more
general distaste for politics is also involved. But
what is Barack Obama if not a politician? By his tones
of voice and selection of venues he has implied several
possibilities: organizer, pastor, school principal,
counselor on duties and values. Most prominently, over
the past six months he seems to have improvised the
role (from materials left behind by Reagan) of a kind
of national host or "moderator" of the concerns of
Americans. From mid-2009 through most of 2010, Obama
embarked on solo missions to shape public opinion at
town hall meetings and talk show bookings, but the
preferred format now appears to be the craftily timed
and planned and much-heralded ecumenical address.
Obama's televised speech on January 12 at the memorial
service after the Tucson shooting was his first major
venture on those lines. His speech on May 19 at the
State Department was the second; and its announced
subject was even more ambitious: the entire domain of
US policy in the Middle East.

Being president of the world has sometimes seemed a job
more agreeable to Barack Obama than being president of
the United States. This goes with another predilection.
Obama has always preferred the symbolic authority of
the grand utterance to the actual authority of a
directed policy: a policy fought for in particulars,
carefully sustained, and traceable to his own
intentions. The danger of the built-up speech
venues--the Nobel Prize speech of December 2009 was
another example--is that they cast Obama as the most
famous holder-forth in the world, and yet it is never
clear what follows for him from the fact that the world
is listening. These settings make a president who is
now more famous than popular seem not popular but
galactic.

The speeches also display as a strength a personal
trait that can seem, instead, an indulgence. For Obama,
protracted moods of extreme abstraction seem to
alternate with spasmodic engagement. The blend is hard
to get used to. His detachment from congressional
negotiations on health care and cap-and-trade was
resented by Democrats, while leaders of the Palestinian
Authority were at a loss to account for the
dissociation from active pursuit of a settlement that
followed his Cairo speech of June 2009. His decision to
back the Libyan rebels was an instance of sudden
engagement, against the prudential advice of a
secretary of defense whom Obama trusts and admires.

The May 19 speech at the State Department brought
together in a single performance Obama's vagueness in
defining a policy and his wish to embrace a challenge.
A broad survey of the events of the Arab Spring in
Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, and Bahrain committed him
chiefly to giving money to the new governments of
Tunisia and Egypt. He would move, he said, to ensure
financial stability, promote reform, and integrate the
emerging Arab democracies into the international
economy. To Bahrain, the home of the US Fifth Fleet, he
recommended "dialogue" between the government and the
peaceful protesters whom it has attacked: "You can't
have real dialogue when parts of the peaceful
opposition are in jail."

Before an international audience, Obama tends to speak
as if he were the United States addressing the world;
and he treats the United States as the most grown-up
country in the world. This is the picture he has
conveyed in speeches from Oslo to New Delhi, and it was
the picture he showed again in his Middle East address
at the State Department. As, in February, Obama had
wielded a grammar of imperative commandment whose
authority was unclear (the "transition" in Egypt "must
begin now")--and as, in March, he seemed to trap himself
in a similar grammar (Qaddafi "must go")--so on May 19
the President remarked the imperative of a transition
from despotism in Syria: "President Assad now has a
choice. He can lead that transition, or get out of the
way."

These commandments emanate from a special understanding
of the uniqueness of America's example. Nonviolent
protest and peaceful reform, Obama sometimes seems to
be saying, are the only means he can support, and
constitutional democracy is the only political end he
approves of. Some nations may take a long time to get
there but that is another matter: we just want them to
show themselves on the path. Yet he illustrated his
position on May 19 by three American examples: the
rebellion against the British Empire, the Civil War to
abolish slavery, and the civil rights movement of the
1950s and 1960s. Two of these three movements to widen
American democracy were violent. Again, in Libya, he is
supporting by arms a violent rebellion. The point is
worth making only because the contradiction--which seems
to have passed into his thinking undetected--must have
been instantly obvious to his Arab listeners.

Obama, as much as any American leader, is captivated by
an image of America as the world-historical touchstone
of generous conduct toward other nations. This
understanding had emerged in his Nobel Prize speech,
with a nationalist shading oddly mismatched to the
occasion:

The service and sacrifice of our men and women in
uniform has promoted peace and prosperity from Germany
to Korea, and enabled democracy to take hold in places
like the Balkans. We have borne this burden not because
we seek to impose our will. We have done so out of
enlightened self-interest--because we seek a better
future for our children and grandchildren, and we
believe that their lives will be better if other
peoples' children and grandchildren can live in freedom
and prosperity.

The phrase about having "borne this burden" may have
looked back to John Kennedy, but Obama's
self-assurance, in speaking for a patriotism innocent
of selfishness, went even further back to the
liberalism of William Gladstone. "The high office of
bringing Europe into concert, and keeping Europe in
concert, is an office specially pointed out for your
country to perform," Gladstone told a British audience
in 1880. "That happy condition, so long as we are
believed to be disinterested in Europe, secures for us
the noblest part that any Power was ever called upon to
play." It seems a peculiar temptation for one kind of
leader--the head of an empire--to suppose as Gladstone
did and Obama does that a policy of national
self-interest will prove identical with a policy of
international nobility and self-sacrifice.


Obama in his Nobel Prize speech--which was in large part
a defense of American conduct after 1945 and in smaller
part a plea for the legitimation of humanitarian wars
such as he has now committed the US to support in
Libya--went on to say of the duties of a great power:
"Inaction tears at our conscience and can lead to more
costly intervention later." The idioms of duty and
utility are strangely mixed in that sentence. How can
we be sure that an act that the President would like
the world to see as benevolent will be seen as
benevolent? It is surely easier to have that feeling if
one knows oneself as the preeminent power, and believes
oneself to be carried forward by the momentum of the
world. Anyway, Obama appears to entertain as few doubts
about this feeling as any of his predecessors. He
implied to his audience in Oslo, and again in
Washington on May 19, that the world wants commercial
democracy. The current metaphor for that condition is
"social networks."

Only a fraction of Obama's May 19 speech was allotted
to Israel and the creation of a Palestinian state. Yet
the concrete language of that part--which contained
names and dates, if not numbers--drew immediate and
heated comment. The most controversial sentence was
doubtless this: "The dream of a Jewish and democratic
state cannot be fulfilled with permanent occupation."
It was a plain statement of an obvious truth. Obama, in
addition, said that the shape of a Palestinian state
would be based on the 1967 borders of Israel, only
altered in accordance with "mutually agreed [land]
swaps."

This had been the common understanding and phraseology
of American-Israeli-Palestinian discussions over two
decades; but in the past several years, the word "1967"
was used less than before; and this became the detail
Benjamin Netanyahu seized upon. Immediately after the
speech, he issued a statement in Jerusalem that the
1967 borders of Israel were "indefensible." He repeated
the same objection after he met with Obama in the White
House. The differences between the two leaders were
played out once more in their speeches to the annual
AIPAC convention.

Without backing down, Obama explained the meaning of
his reference to 1967: the borders of course would not
stay the same, but land swaps would offset the
differences. This candor, on the occasions when Obama
shows it, is an impressive quality, and it seemed to be
appreciated even by the AIPAC audience. Besides, on May
19 he conceded most of what Netanyahu could have asked.
He alluded to Gaza only once. He offered no criticism
of new Israeli settlements, as he had done in Cairo two
years ago, and made no mention of the dispossession of
Palestinians on the West Bank.

From his silence on these points, it was clear that
after the failure of the most recent shuttle diplomacy
and the resignation of George Mitchell on May 13, Obama
personally planned to initiate no further negotiations
between Israel and the Palestinians. He trusted that
under the visible pressure of an Arab Spring of their
own, now gathering on both sides of Israel's borders,
most Israelis would eventually see his words as a
kindly prophecy.

Netanyahu struck back as if Obama had mounted a
deliberate assault with a threat of lasting enmity. Yet
Netanyahu's speech to AIPAC was emollient compared to
his speech to Congress on May 24. There he made a
conquest that can have few precedents. He began with
brash familiarity, in a backslapping salute to Joe
Biden; spoke with boyish humor about his early years as
a diplomat within the Beltway, and his knowledge of an
America beyond it; reestablished, with passion and
simplicity, the close ties between America and Israel
that Obama had sought to view with an impartial
loyalty; in short, pulled out all the stops to undercut
President Obama on his native ground. The speech itself
was a tissue of cliches, anecdotes, and half-truths,
but delivered with dramatic buoyancy and urgency as if
his life depended on it.

Congress gave Netanyahu twenty-nine standing ovations.
How did he do it? By presenting himself to his audience
as an all-but-American politician--one less lucky than
they, and more brave, a leader with a fight on his
hands; a real fight, in his own backyard and not six
thousand miles away. He spoke with gusto of his part in
an earlier episode of that never-ending war:

I was nearly killed in a firefight inside the Suez
Canal--I mean that literally: inside the Suez Canal. I
was going down to the bottom, with a forty-pound pack,
ammunition pack on my back, and somebody reached out to
grab me and they're still looking for the guy who did
such a stupid thing.

Netanyahu did not speak of the subsidized increase of
Israeli settlements that accounts for the "certain
facts on the ground" he had mentioned at the White
House. He invoked the biblical names of Judea and
Samaria as if they were as natural to modern Israel as
St. Louis is to the state of Missouri. And Congress
loved him, or seemed to think it should, from the very
moment when he said in a flattering exordium:
"Congratulations America. Congratulations, Mr.
President. You got bin Laden. Good riddance!" The
performance combined the maximum of demagogy with the
maximum of smarm, and it mixed aggression, paternalism,
and a preening collective self-love, in proportions
that Netanyahu assumed Americans would be comforted by.
Israel, this speech said, has everything in common with
America. We are the home of freedom and wisdom among
the ancients, just as you Americans are among the
moderns.

Netanyahu's speech to Congress was also part of a
larger strategy of his right-wing coalition. He got his
invitation to address Congress from Eric Cantor, the
House majority leader, and the Republican Party is now
working to detach Jewish donors from the Democrats and
to convert Republicans at large to the Likud and
neoconservative politics that support a greater Israel.
In the pitch offered to Americans, taking sections of
the West Bank from Palestinians is as warranted as the
taking of lands from American Indians. Mike Huckabee
has indicated his sympathy with this point of view.
Sarah Palin wore a Star of David on her necklace in her
recent liberty tour. Glenn Beck has planned a mass
event, "Restoring Courage," on August 24 at the
Southern Wall excavations in the city of Jerusalem.
Americans of the chauvinist and evangelical right are
being invited to think of Israel as a second homeland.

Considered as a response to this predicament, Obama's
speech at the State Department, with its broad-gauge
pronouncements and its candor regarding Palestine, was
utterly overmatched by Netanyahu's speech to Congress.
It is an unhappy fact of politics that victory goes to
the pressure that will not let up. Netanyahu's belief
in his immoderate purpose is stronger than Obama's
belief in his moderate purpose.

Walter Bagehot in The English Constitution divided
government into two components, the dignified part and
the efficient part. The dignified part is concerned
with matters of ceremony, the arrangement and conduct
of state occasions for celebration or mourning, the
issuance of joint communiques with foreign leaders and
commands delivered from a majestic height. The
efficient part is the part of government that
governs--by making laws above all, but also by striking
bargains between factions, and filling the positions of
upper, middle, and lower functionaries, and threshing
out party platforms on the way to becoming laws.

Barack Obama from the start of his presidency has
exhibited an almost exclusive taste for the dignified
part of government. During the BP oil spill, his
remoteness from the plod and toil of problem-solving
showed day after day. That was a "teachable moment," if
ever there was one: a public catastrophe that
implicated the environment and energy resources close
to home for all Americans. The moment escaped this
president, as the nuclear disaster in Japan has also
escaped him. He never broke a sweat as he could
have--literally and figuratively--by descending into the
muck on the spoiled Louisiana beaches. Few presidents
have ever seemed farther than Obama from being "in the
thick of things." The impression came back as he left
Washington with Netanyahu triumphant, and took a plane
for Ireland to speak of hope and peace.

Obama's management of the killing of bin Laden is the
one action of his presidency in which his leadership
has seemed beyond challenge. "Revenge," wrote Francis
Bacon, "is a kind of wild justice," and that sentiment
fitted the reactions of most Americans on hearing the
news. Obama guided the popular feeling when he said
"Justice has been done." Yet revenge and justice are,
to the citizens of a constitutional democracy,
different ideas, and a leader more scrupulous or less
confused would take pains to keep them separate. A
string of questions in any case soon became a drag on
the event. How could bin Laden's residence in a
prominent house in a garrison town have been concealed
for so long? Did elements of the Pakistani intelligence
service know of this hideout? What now prevents
American commanders in the field from concluding that
our allies are acting in complicity with our enemies?
The aftermath of the bin Laden killing has left the US
as deeply entangled as ever in a hostile region, with
no prospect of amelioration from any extension of the
present policy.

On May 26, at the urging of the President, the Senate
and House voted to renew the Patriot Act. Obama signed
it with a teleportable pen, from France. He has said
that he would look to the future, not the past--a slogan
that nullifies the large part of justice that consists
of accountability--but here was an element of the
Bush-Cheney past that he chose to project into the
future with as little discussion as possible. Obama's
real trouble has come, however, in his attempts to
inhabit the present. He is slower to react than most
people, far slower than most politicians. He gave away
six months of the health care debate without pressing
his initial advantage while the resistance sprang up
all around, the Tea Party was created, and
congressional enemies gained on him. He let the
controversy over his birth certificate blow up to
absurd proportions over two and a half years before
dispelling all doubts at a stroke in a press briefing
that was hastily called and testily managed. At
present, he is waiting for Afghanistan to calm down and
let him withdraw troops on a deliberate schedule. But
things can flare up while you are waiting, or flare up
elsewhere and set back every cautious preparation.

The position of a moderate who aspires to shake the
world into a new shape presents a continuous
contradiction. For the moderate feels constrained not
to say anything startling, and not to do anything very
fast. But just as there is trouble with doing things on
the old lines, there is trouble, too, with letting
people understand things on the old lines. At least,
there is if you have your sights set on changing the
nature of the game. Obama is caught in this
contradiction, and keeps getting deeper in it, like a
man who sinks in quicksand both the more he struggles
and the more he stays still. This is one lesson of his
passage from inaction in Egypt to action in Libya, and
from his summons of reform in Cairo in June 2009 to the
guarded speech from the sidelines in May 2011.

Netanyahu made the "existential threat" of Iran a major
part of his appeal to Congress, as was to be expected.
And this is probably the final terrain on which, in the
next two years, Obama will have to confront the
difference between the reformist intentions he
cherishes and the conventional signals he has been
sending. In 2007, there were many signs that the
neoconservative policy elite, and the Office of the
Vice President, wanted the US to back Israel or combine
with Israel in an attack on Iran. They were thwarted by
Admiral William Fallon, the commander of CentCom, and a
letter from the Republican Senator Chuck Hagel to
President Bush, and a few other acts of resistance from
persons in authority. Most of all, the case for
attacking Iran was defeated by the 2007 National
Intelligence Estimate, which declared that no evidence
existed of an Iranian nuclear program that could yield
a weapon.

The 2011 NIE has now appeared, and it says much the
same. But it has been kept under wraps by the Obama
administration, in a manner reminiscent of the way the
2007 NIE was suppressed, as far as possible, by Cheney
and Bush. According to Seymour Hersh, writing in the
June 6 New Yorker, American intelligence has found "no
conclusive evidence" that an Iranian weapons program
exists. A June 3 New York Times article by Ethan
Bronner backs up the Hersh report with testimony from
Israeli sources. Meir Dagan, the recently retired head
of Mossad, and other senior members of the Israeli
intelligence establishment are now warning Israel, and
by implication warning America, not to fall in with the
adventurism of Netanyahu--the war fever he is drumming
up in two countries with no foundation in an actual
threat.

Yet Obama's national security advisers have disparaged
Hersh's findings as warmly as if they were still
seeking a pretext to attack Iran. And the tight inner
circle around Obama has denied a visit with the
President to informed dissenters on Iran policy like
Thomas Pickering. As a Times editorial pointed out on
June 13, the latest report of the International Atomic
Energy Agency cites new reasons for calling on Iran to
disclose the possible "military dimensions" of its
nuclear program. Plainly the answers to such questions
will form a necessary part of any negotiations between
Iran and the US. Meanwhile, the attempt to isolate the
President from views such as Pickering's seems full of
hazard; though presidents who are said to be victims of
isolation, from Johnson to Reagan to Obama, have become
so by staying close to persons who shield them from
unwelcome stimuli. In the same way, one recalls, on
Afghanistan Obama declined offers of help by dissenters
from the Petraeus-McChrystal escalation policy, even
when they came from officials as well placed as Karl
Eikenberry and Richard Holbrooke.

In appointing a new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, Obama passed over the person who was said to
have been his first choice, General James Cartwright,
the former vice-chairman of JCOS: a skeptic on
Afghanistan who had become a trusted adviser of the
President. He has appointed instead General Martin
Dempsey, who had served as head of Tradoc (Training and
Doctrine Command for American ground forces). The
Israeli newspaper Haaretz devoted a June 1 article to
the appointment of Dempsey under the headline: "Obama's
New Security Staff May Approve Attack on Iran." The
author of the article, the military correspondent Amir
Oren, finds it significant that Dempsey has studied
closely the operations of the Israeli Defense Forces,
and that he worked at Tradoc with an IDF liaison
officer. This appointment can stand as the first of
many footnotes to the encounter, in late May 2011,
between Barack Obama and Benjamin Netanyahu.

Copyright (c) 1963-2011 NYREV, Inc. All rights reserved.

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