An honorable man should not act according to the following principle: It’s none of my business. If he sees something wrong about to happen and he can do something about it, then he is obligated to prevent it. This is how President Barack Obama explains the U.S. intervention in Libya. To refuse to interfere in the prevailing circumstances would have been a “betrayal of who we are,” he announced to the American public in an address on March 28 regarding the air attacks on the African country.
A Contradiction in Terms
The White House host fought for a moral foreign policy as if he did not see the contradictions in terms, which is sufficiently obvious. A moral duty does not, or in any case, should not depend on circumstances. For a decent fellow, this is an absolute (although one shouldn’t forget where the road paved with good intentions leads). Political duty is relative.
Really, Obama is first and foremost a politician after all. Remember in the summer of 2007, when he was campaigning with the battle cry to end the U.S. war in Iraq, he publically affirmed that the “United States should not use its military to solve humanitarian problems” and that “preventing a potential genocide in Iraq is not a good enough reason to keep U.S. troops there.”*
At that time, Obama was considered an outsider in the race, and the Associated Press, to which this was said, did not quote, but rather paraphrased his words. But these words are widely known, and, in support of his position, the current occupant of the White House then referred to the fact that the U.S. did not intervene (and properly so, in his opinion) in the conflicts in the Congo and Sudan.
Now they are saying the same about the U.S. approach to Côte d’Ivoire. On Libya, Obama also immediately introduced moral absolutism within a harsh political framework. “America cannot use [its] military wherever repression occurs,” he declared. It is always necessary to calculate the “costs and risks of intervention.” In this particular case, the U.S. considered many factors that made the operation justifiable, including its “important strategic interests” in Egypt, Tunisia and in the entire region in general, its “broad coalition” of like-minded allies and the proposed opportunity to “stop Qaddafi’s forces in their tracks without putting American troops on the ground.”
Afterwards, Obama’s aides said that there was no need to “get very hung up on this question of precedent,” i.e., build a model of intervention in Libya in the absolute and try to fit it to other regimes in the Maghreb and the Middle East. Presumably, everyone heard and understood the hint — not only including Syria, let’s say, but also the rather undemocratic U.S. allies in the region.
On the other hand, in that same speech on Libya, the president argued that in general, “never acting on behalf of what’s right” is wrong. Summarizing his approach to “the “use of America’s military power, and America’s broader leadership in the world,” he emphasized: “There will be times, though, when our safety is not directly threatened, but our interests and our values are.” In these moments, America “should not be afraid to act,” provided that others share the “burden of action.” Obama explained, “Real leadership creates the conditions and coalitions for others to step up as well.”
This sounds familiar. The advancement of one’s interests under the flag of defending values is not a new approach, and it is certainly tempting, especially if the act is assumed by proxy. But if you will not argue with moral imperatives, then pragmatic political rationales suggest the possibility of counterarguments.
Critics from the Left: Kucinich
And they weren’t slow to appear. Obama’s speech was criticized from the right and the left. In this case, it’s noteworthy that dissenters, without collusion, predicted more frequent use of military strength in the country’s foreign affairs.
On the left wing of the U.S. Democratic party, Representative Dennis Kucinich occupied an intransigent position on the operation in Libya. He addressed Congress in a lengthy speech, in which the George W. Bush-era doctrine of “preventative war” gave way to Obama’s “assertion of the right to go to war without even the pretext of a threat to our nation,” simply on the foundation that some regime “may threaten force against those who have internally taken up arms against it.” When using such criteria, “the over commitment of our military will be virtually inevitable,” assured the lawmaker. “The Administration’s new war doctrine will lead not to peace, but to more war.”
Kucinich, by the way, directly called this doctrine illegal, insofar as Obama made a decision on Libya based on personal fears and risks without consulting with Congress, to which the Constitution exclusively grants the right to declare war. The statesman brushed off the White House’s allusions to a “limited” nature of this intervention — in time and in scope — as verbal acrobatics in the Orwellian sense. In his words, all of America’s wars after WWII, including Vietnam, were limited. This by no means diminishes the importance of the prerogatives of Congress and their supporting Supreme Court decisions.
From a legal point of view, all these theses seem at least reasonable. Interested observers are already counting 60 days for Libya, during which the U.S. president must obtain Congress’s permission to carry out military actions abroad.
During his speech Kucinich made many interesting statements. For example, in his words, “It is clear that the administration planned a war against Libya at least a month in advance [of the start of military operations].” In substantiation of this claim he cited the president’s anticipatory instructions regarding covert CIA support to the Libyan rebels and he also drew attention to a particular Colonel Khalifah Hiftar, who “spent the past two decades of his life in suburban Virginia where he had no visible means of support,” and recently (about the time when the decision was made to authorize a covert CIA mission) left for his homeland. Shortly afterward, the New York Times reported from Benghazi that the “former general” Hiftar recently returned from exile in the U.S. and “appoint[ed] himself field commander,” but soon fell out with other Libyan opposition leaders.
At the end of his speech Kucinich recalled another curious coincidence. According to him, London and Paris, from November of the previous year had been planning “Southern Mistral,” a series of war games…against a dictatorship in a fictitious southern country called “Southland.” …The joint military air strike was authorized by a pretend United Nations Security Council Resolution. The “Composite Air Operations” were planned for the period of March 21 to 25, 2011.” On the 19th and 20th of March, with authorization from a real UN resolution, France, Great Britain and the United States began air strikes against Libya. According to Kucinich, in this world it is logical to at least wonder whether the operation was spontaneous or planned ahead of time.
Let’s acknowledge that the opinions of Kucinich and his like-minded peers are considered extreme in the Washington establishment (although no one says this openly). However, Obama’s most reliable political base is the democratic left.
Critics from the Right: Kimmitt
As concerns the right, they would soon like a “muscular” foreign policy with an ideological backing. Former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and James Baker coauthored an op-ed (“Grounds for U.S. Military Intervention”) in the Washington Post, in which they argued for a “pragmatic idealism” quite similar to Obama’s approach. They, for example, also think that in principle America “can’t be the world’s policeman,” and cannot use force in response to any “humanitarian challenge” as long as it is uncertain where the use of force will end.
Mentioning in this context Syria, Yemen, Algeria and Iran, as well as U.S. allies — valued foreign regimes like Bahrain, Morocco and Saudi Arabia — Kissinger and Baker expressed confidence that the real criterion should be America’s vital national interest. However, they suppose that an “exception to the rule” could be made for Libya because of the odious nature of the regime in Tripoli and prevailing and propitious — from the point of view of the U.S. — circumstances.
Nevertheless, hesitation can be heard from the American political right. For example, retired General Mark Kimmitt, who served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East under George W. Bush and then became Assistant Secretary of State for Political-Military Affairs, came out on the pages of the Washington Times against the conceptual foundation of the operation in Libya. He recalled that until recently the use of military force was considered in the U.S. as a “decisive option of last resort to support vital U.S. interests.” Force was undertaken only after all remaining options had been tried to no success. On the other hand, having not succeeded with other options, they would then use military strength to the utmost so that not even a house was left standing.
Kimmitt writes that Libya does not fit into this model. Vital U.S. interests were not affected there, and diplomacy was not exhausted. Instead, “the military is being employed in an unprecedented manner, a manner inconsistent with the axioms of previous generations…[merely] as a shaping element in the overall diplomatic campaign.”
According to Kimmitt, this is a “precarious precedent.” The specialist writes, “If Operation Odyssey Dawn is an expression of this administration’s view on the use of force and the U.S. military as an enabler for diplomacy, then expect to see lower thresholds for interventions, more frequent use of the military, and roles that do not leverage its decisive characteristics. For a military carrying the burden of three wars on its back for the foreseeable future, a policy of more frequent intervention and suboptimal use of force as an instrument of diplomacy is a mistake.”
All Problems Are Like Nails
Seeing as we’ve already talked about tools, it is appropriate to recall the American saying: If you only have a hammer, all problems look like nails. A few years ago, at the height of the financial-economic crisis, a well-known political scientist told me in confidence that he feared the militarization of U.S. foreign policy. It is said that during difficult situations of crisis, non-military programs and influence from non-military spheres weaken and are underfunded. The authorities won’t allow military muscle to atrophy, however, not only because of Iraq and Afghanistan, but also because of jobs.
Recently I read something by Stephen Walt, a Harvard professor of government. In it, he wrote about the most successful ideological fraud ever committed by the U.S. political right wing. In his opinion, as a result of concerted efforts made since the mid-1960s till now, Americans are indoctrinated with spending immeasurable sums on “safety,” which for all intents and purposes means war and the preparation for war — which is more worthy of money than improving the standard of living in the U.S.
Writing for the journal Foreign Policy, Walt asks obvious, but nevertheless interesting questions: Why does Obama, who was elected in 2008 as the antipode to Bush, behave himself just like his predecessor when it comes to questions of using the military abroad; and why does the governing political party, desperately fighting for every penny in the federal budget, peacefully watch “a president start running up a $100 million per day tab in this latest adventure?”
Five Reasons
Right off the bat, Walt names five reasons to explain the behavior of those in power in the U.S. The first, he writes, is “when you’ve got hundreds of planes, smart bombs, and cruise missiles, the whole world looks like a target set.” Remember the nail and hammer? Furthermore, this gives absolutely every U.S. politician the general impression that America is not like other countries, that the country has, by right, a special place in the world and a unique historical role. In political science, this is called “American exceptionalism.”
Additionally, the U.S. has no “serious enemies” in the world, according to Walt. To put it plainly, no one can challenge the U.S., and accordingly they have nothing to fear. Incidentally, the Christian Science Monitor recently published a commentary in which it was reasoned that the Libyan experience might encourage so-called “rogue states” toward nuclearization. Libya, which dismantled its nuclear weapons in 2003 and is now being bombed, in this context contrasts North Korea, a country over which Washington “fusses.”
The third reason is the all-volunteer force that constitutes the American military. Walt is sure that if the children of American politicians and bankers were fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, then the wars would have been noticeably smaller. According to new research by specialists from the University of Pennsylvania, mass public support decreases by 17 percent when there is a draft.**
The two remaining reasons are the mood of the establishment (“what’s the point of being a big shot in Washington if you can’t use all that power to try to mold the world to your liking?”) and the relinquishment of power by the U.S. Congress. We already know that Kucinich laments the latter development.
By the way, Walt and Kucinich both rejected Obama’s appeal for humanitarian considerations, but each in his own way. Walt, referring to publications by University of Texas political scientist Alan Kuperman and Chicago Tribune reporter Steve Chapman, pointed out that the horror story about the impending massacre in Benghazi “does not stand up to even casual scrutiny,” seeing as Qaddafi loyalists forces did not conduct large-scale massacres in any of the recaptured cities. In his address to Congress, Kucinich simply asked, “What is humanitarian about providing to one side of a conflict the ability to wage war against the other side of a conflict, which will inevitably trigger a civil war turning Libya into a graveyard?”
Is There An “Obama Doctrine” After All?
Aside from everything else surrounding Obama’s speech on Libya, arguments immediately heated up about whether one could see the creation of a new foreign policy doctrine laid down by the president. Opinions differed, but it’s fact that the debate was noteworthy. Former senator and presidential candidate Gary Hart even stated that if is not yet an “Obama doctrine,” then it needs to be enunciated (like a set of principles for intervention), because “we cannot simply respond in ad hoc fashion to these local and regional crises.”
It is known that Obama himself is not inclined to advance a doctrine. During the 2008 pre-election debates with his opponent John McCain, he said that his approach to international affairs was “not going to be as doctrinaire as the Bush doctrine, because the world is complicated,” and that the U.S. should “view our security in terms of a common security and a common prosperity with other peoples and other countries.”***
Recently, regarding Libya, the president said in one interview that it is “important not to take this particular situation and then try to project some sort of “Obama doctrine” that we’re going to apply in a cookie-cutter fashion across the board. Each country in this region is different.”
Another matter is that this entire region as a whole, which Obama targeted in his famous 2009 speech in Cairo, is now finally moving to the foreground in the eyes of Washington. “The president and his aides also see the revolution in the Arab world as the most important event of Obama’s time in office — as important, perhaps, as the end of the Cold War in 1989,” writes Washington columnist for the L.A. Times Doyle McManus. “They are already working on a larger policy to help it come out right, including a big international aid program…They won’t call it a “doctrine,” but it will almost certainly look like one. From here on out, they say, this will be the centerpiece; this will be what Obama’s foreign policy is about.”
It is worth remembering that until recently the major foreign policy achievement of the current U.S. administration was “resetting” relations with Russia and renewing the process of nuclear disarmament.
To Ours and to Yours
Many times have I watched Obama speak on television or in person at press conferences, and each time I wondered at how thoroughly, academically and in some measure even pedantically this man, famous for his oratorical talent, relates to journalists. It is hard to get rid of the impression that, in general, his style seems correct and natural for him. He himself readily acknowledges to journalists that he does not do anything rashly or impulsively, but rather seeks to analyze and weigh everything carefully, especially in vital matters of war and peace. His willingness to compromise is well known (without which many things would not be, such as his chief domestic policy success—the reform of the U.S. health care system).
The value of all this is, of course, decent and even remarkable. But here is one local journalist with half a century of experience and more than one decade of observing the White House political kitchen up close, who believes that they are making the current president into a comparatively “weak and indecisive leader,” who is “always late,” as in the case with Libya. This experienced observer thinks that a “desire to be liked by everyone” is an even more serious sin for Obama the politician.
This might seem like nitpicking. Who, tell me, not just in politics but any person, does not want to be respected both in their own eyes and in the eyes of others? However, a political leader is judged first and foremost on the results of his policies.
And, for example, concerning Libya, retired U.S. Army Lieutenant General James Dubik, who was responsible for growing the Iraqi security forces in 2007 and 2008, recently wrote from his significant military experience that a no-fly zone is not enough to bring true victory over Muammar Qaddafi’s troops.
The general did not outright reject the middle of the road decision, but was sure that without “boots on the ground” in Libya, Americans and their allies would not succeed. “There is little appetite for yet another large-scale ground commitment, but wartime realities have a way of forcing themselves on those involved,” wrote Dubik, who now works at the Institute for the Study of War. “And by intervening in the first place, however noble the motivation, the coalition is already involved in shaping Libya’s political fate,” at least in order to prevent chaos or “Islamic fundamentalists” coming to power. The coalition must know how to impose its will; “This is what war is about, like it or not.”
A question on filling in the gap
As concerns the doctrine — that is, whether or not Obama has one — that is just scholasticism. It has not yet been formally written and proclaimed, but in practicality it has already been formulated. And, it seems, it is often not entirely as he originally wanted.
After the start of the attacks on Libya, during one of the popular humorous news quiz shows on American public radio, NPR raised the facetious question: What Nobel Peace Prize Laureate has launched more cruise missiles than all the other winners together? Here is to you and all morality.
*These two quotes could not be verified, although several news outlets reported a similar paraphrase. See the following paragraph for the author’s explanation.
**You can read the report at http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~mleven/Matt%20Levendusky%20/Research_files/conscription_final_paper.pdf
***Translator’s Note: This quote was in fact President Obama’s response during a Democratic primary debate. See debate transcript: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/04/us/politics/04transcript-debate.html?pagewanted=7
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