A progressive case for Obama's foreign policy
greatness?
At The Daily Beast, Michael Tomasky today
says that while President Obama "hasn’t
been much of a domestic-policy president from nearly anyone’s point of
view" (he apparently hasn't read
Steve Benen or Ezra
Klein lately), the war in Libya highlights how
"one can see how he might become not just a good but a great
foreign-policy president." Tomasky's argument is somewhat
cautious and expressly contingent on unknown, future events, but is nonetheless
revealing -- both in what it says and what it omits -- about how some
influential progressives conceive of the Obama presidency.
First, I'm genuinely astounded at the pervasive willingness to view what
has happened in Libya as some sort of grand triumph even though virtually none of the information needed to make
that assessment is known yet, including: how many civilians have died,
how much more bloodshed will there be, what will be needed to stabilize that
country and, most of all, what type of regime will replace Gadaffi? Does
anyone know how many civilians have died in the NATO bombing of Tripoli
and the ensuing battle? Does anyone know who will dominate the subsequent
regime? Does it matter? To understand how irrational and
premature these celebrations are in the absence of that information,
I urge everyone to read this brief though
amazing compilation of U.S. media commentary from 2003 after U.S. forces
entered Baghdad: in which The Liberal Media lavished Bush
with intense praise for vanquishing Saddam, complained that Democrats were not
giving the President the credit he deserved, and demanded that all those
loser-war-opponents shamefully confess their error. Sound familiar?
No matter how moved you are by joyous Libyans (just as one was
presumably moved by joyous Iraqis); no matter how heinous you believe Gadaffi
was (he certainly wasn't worse than Saddam); no matter how vast you
believe the differences are between Libya and Iraq (and there are significant
differences), this specific Iraq lesson cannot be evaded. When foreign
powers use military force to help remove a tyrannical regime that has ruled for
decades, all sorts of chaos, violence, instability, and suffering -- along with
a slew of unpredictable outcomes -- are inevitable.
Tomasky acknowledges these uncertainties yet does not allow them to deter
him, but that makes no sense: whether this war turns out to be wise or just
cannot be known without knowing what it unleashes and what
follows. Just as nobody doubted that the U.S. could bring enough
destruction to Iraq to destroy the Saddam regime, nobody doubted that
NATO could do the same to Gadaffi; declaring the war in Libya a
"success" now is no more warranted than declaring the Iraq War
one in April, 2003.
Then there's the issue of illegality. Tomasky pays lip service
to this, dismissing as "ridiculous" Obama's claim that he
did not need Congressional approval because the U.S. role in Libya didn't rise
to the level of "hostilities." By that, Tomasky presumably means that Obama
broke the law and violated the Constitution in how he prosecuted the
war. Isn't that rather obviously a hugely significant fact when assessing
Obama's foreign policy? The Atlantic's Conor Freidersdorf
argues that no matter how great the outcome
proves to be, Libya must be considered a "Phyrrhic victory for
America" because:
Obama has violated the Constitution; he
willfully broke a law that he believes to be constitutional; he undermined his
own professed beliefs about executive power, and made it more likely that
future presidents will undermine convictions that he purports to hold; in all
this, he undermined the rule of law and the balance of powers as set forth by
the framers.
That leads to an equally dangerous precedent from acquiescing to illegality
that has not received nearly enough attention. There seems to be this
sense that while it's regretful that Obama had to break the law to wage this
war, the outcome is so good, the cause was so imperative, that we can accept
this.
As someone who spent years arguing literally on a daily basis about Bush's
lawlessness, I can assure you that this rationale was exactly the
one offered by Bush followers over and over again: even if it was
technically illegal to eavesdrop without warrants, it was justified because
(a) FISA is too restrictive a law on presidential authority and (b)
the cause -- detecting Terrorist plots -- is so important and just. Replace
"FISA" with "War Powers Resolution" and "detecting
Terrorist plots" with "vanquishing Gadaffi" and one finds
that mentality in full force today (in December, 2005, I wrote a
postentitled "Claiming the Right to Break the
Law," highlighting how Bush officials such as Condoleezza Rice were
defending the NSA program on that ground
that stopping Terrorists was so vital that it justified the
warrantless eavesdropping (and see the discussion there of how Bush followers
justified anything their leader did even when it was illegal), and in January,
2006, I wrote a
post entitled "The Bad Law Defense," critiquing the claim from Gen. Michael Hayden that illegal
eaveasdropping was permissible because FISA was too restrictive). As
I wrote back then about that latter view:
As always, the first -- and, for this scandal,
the dispositive -- principle is that the solution to a bad law is to change the
law, not to break the law in secret and then claim once you’re caught that the
law you broke was a bad law. If the President has the power to comply only with
those laws he likes but to violate the laws he dislikes – and that, at bottom,
is the Administration’s position -- then we have a President who, by
definition, does not believe in the rule of law and refuses to comport himself
to it.
And as I wrote in my first book, How Would a Patriot Act?,
about Bush lawlessness and the NSA scandal:
The heart of the matter is that the president
broke the law, deliberately and repeatedly, no matter what his
rationale was for doing so. We do not have a system of government
in which the president has the right to violate laws, even if he believes doing
so will produce good results. . . .
An illegally fought war isn't some minor nit on Obama's foreign policy
record generally or the war in Libya particularly; it's fundamental to what he
did and how it should be assessed.
Then there are the multiple claims and promises of Obama's that were
clearly breached by this war. When running for President, he vowed
that "we will again set an example for the
world that the law is not subject to the whims of stubborn rulers" and:
"no more ignoring the law when it's inconvenient. That is not who we
are." He unambiguously told The Boston Globe that "the President does not have power under the Constitution
to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not
involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation." And he told
the nation when explaining the war in Libya after he
ordered U.S. involvement that the purpose was protecting civilians, not
regime change, and that "broadening our military mission to include
regime change would be a mistake." All of those public vows were
simply brushed aside -- blithely violated -- without the slightest explanation.
But even more confounding than the praise Tomasky heaps on the war in Libya
is his broader admiration for Barack Obama's foreign policy generally.
Not only has the Democratic President escalated the war in Afghanistan, but
he's dramatically increased American violence and aggression in multiple
countries around the world, including Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen. His
actions have ended the lives of dozens upon dozens of innocent civilians,
including a single cluster bombs attack in Yemen -- cluster bombs --
that by
itself killed 23 children and 17 women; his own top General in
Afghanistan described
an "amazing number" of innocents killed at checkpoints; drone attacks continue to pile up
the corpses of innocent human beings. None of this massive
war escalation, increased aggression, and civilian death at Obama's hands
even merits a mention from Tomasky, let alone impedes the gushing; all of that
has just been whitewashed from the progressive mind.
Then there is Obama's continuation -- and strengthening -- of
the Bush/Cheney Terrorism and civil liberties template that many
progressives once pretended to find so deeply offensive. Perhaps
Tomasky could argue that these don't belong in a critique of Obama's foreign
policy (though I was just told by
Scott Lemieux that these issues don't belong in a
discussion of Obama's domestic policy), but surely some of it
does. Obama has fought
to deny Afghan prisoners any minimal habeas corpus rights, employed Somali proxies to house
accused Terrorists in black sites, used "detention and torture by proxy" in Kuwait and elsewhere, targeted U.S. citizens
for due-process-free assassinations, and vastly
bolstered the secrecy regimesurrounding his actions. Maybe some of that should be taken into
account by progressives rushing to proclaim Obama's foreign policy Greatness?
Stranger still are the alleged accomplishments Tomasky cites in his
concluding paragraph:
But it’s hardly impossible to envision an Obama
administration in a few years’ time that has drawn down Afghanistan and Iraq,
helped foster reforms and maybe even the growth of a couple of democracies
around the Middle East, and restored the standing of a country that Bush had
laid such staggering waste. And killed Osama bin Laden. If this is weak
America-hating, count me in.
That's all very moving, except for the fact that none of it is real.
Obama hasn't "restored" America's standing; granted, the country
is more popular in Western Europe, but in the crucial Middle East and
predominantly Muslim regions, America, if anything, isviewed more negatively now than it was under Bush. There's no sign that Obama is "drawing down" in
Afghanistan (his announced "withdrawal" plan would leave more
troops than were there when he was inaugurated),
and he's currently working hard topressure
Iraq to agree to U.S. troops in that country beyond the
repeatedly touted deadline (beyond theprivate
army to be maintained by the State
Department). And Tomasky's fantasy that Obama will spawn "the growth
of a couple of democracies around the Middle East" --
the hallmark of neocon yearning -- is revealing indeed; it's also quite
redolent of this bit of
speculative presidential tongue-bathing about Bush's democracy-spreading from Time's Joe Klein in 2005:
But that is where the democratic idealism of the
Bush Doctrine has led us. If the President turns out to be right -- and let's
hope he is -- a century's worth of woolly-headed liberal dreamers will be
vindicated. And he will surely deserve that woolliest of all peace
prizes, the Nobel.
Tomasky is right about Obama's tonal improvements over Bush: as
I've noted before, his less belligerent rhetoric is welcome. And it's also true that
it's impossible to imagine Obama landing on an aircraft carrier wearing a
fighter pilot costume (though he was hardly shy about dispatching anonymous
aides leaking classified information to cover him with glory over the bin Laden
killing). And Obama deserves credit for more effective use of the U.N.
and alliances to manage American wars. But much of that is atmospheric,
and it is setting a very low bar indeed: he's not as much of an overtly
chest-beating play-acting warrior as George W. Bush is not exactly
greatness-establishing.
On the level of actions, any progressive decreeing Barack Obama's
foreign policy Greatness can do so only via willful blindness and/or a complete
repudiation of previously claimed progressive principles. Both are
vividly on display in Tomasky's salute.
* * * * *
On the subject of Libya and Obama's foreign policy generally, Jeremy
Scahill's appearance this morning onMorning Joe, in which he tries to
explain some basic facts to a very confused Howard Dean and Tina Brown, is
a must-watch:
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