West of Eden: The Washington Playbook

Recess at an Aleppo elementary school, 19th century. Halep'de Bir Sıbyan Mektebi, Oyun Saati, Ottoman Archives.

Early on in the big Jeffrey Goldberg piece in the Atlantic on the "Obama doctrine" (as I said, it's got a lot more than David Brooks thinks it does):

Power sometimes argued with Obama in front of other National Security Council officials, to the point where he could no longer conceal his frustration. “Samantha, enough, I’ve already read your book,” he once snapped.

Mr. President, thanks!

I also loved learning that the phrase "stupid shit caucus", which I thought I invented in October 2014, was actually common currency in the White House around the same time, after the newly departed ex–Secretary of State Clinton gave Goldberg that interview in the August 2014 Atlantic complaining about Obama's failure to build up a "credible fighting force" out of the students and professionals who had led the peaceful protests against Assad in the beginning of the Arab Spring:

When The Atlantic published this statement, and also published Clinton’s assessment that “great nations need organizing principles, and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle,” Obama became “rip-shit angry,” according to one of his senior advisers. The president did not understand how “Don’t do stupid shit” could be considered a controversial slogan. Ben Rhodes recalls that “the questions we were asking in the White House were ‘Who exactly is in the stupid-shit caucus? Who is pro–stupid shit?’ ” The Iraq invasion, Obama believed, should have taught Democratic interventionists like Clinton, who had voted for its authorization, the dangers of doing stupid shit. 

(Nice en-dash there, Atlantic copy editors!)

No, I don't think they got it from me. But I'm pleased, and not just in my vanity, by the evidence in this essay that Obama's thinking on foreign policy has a lot of the unconventionality I've hought, and hoped, it did. Goldberg has accomplished something pretty remarkable, in putting together sucth a clear and untendentious account of what it is, because he himself continues to oppose it on the usual Likudnik and anti-Iran grounds, as far as I can tell (that was more apparent in his NPR interview on Thursday morning).

One thing I think Goldberg is unconscious of, but emerges nevertheless, is a connectedness in the White House responses to the evolving situations in Libya and Syria, following a kind of single arc:

• July 7 2012 Libyan parliamentary election
• August 20 2012 Obama's "Red Line" speech on Syria
• September 11 2012 "Innocence of Muslims" protests and riots internationally, and attack on CIA annex at Benghazi consulate
• April 11 2013 US and UK diplomatic staff withdrawing from Libya due to political unrest
• June 13 2013 US declares Assad has used chemical weapons
• July 2013 Barqa rebels in eastern Libya take control of oil terminals and halt exports
• August 21 2013 chemical weapons attack in Syria kills 1400
• August 20 2013 British parliament fails to pass Cameron request for military authorization
• September 9 2013 Assad agrees after Putin request to give up chemical weapons
• September 10 2013 Obama asks Congress to postpone vote on authorizing action in Syria

The Libya intervention of spring 2011 went largely, in Goldberg's retelling, as I've imagined it, with the president deeply reluctant to go along but persuaded by the liberal interventionists in the cabinet, especially Power and, alas, Clinton—

(Biden, who is acerbic about Clinton’s foreign-policy judgment, has said privately, “Hillary just wants to be Golda Meir.”)

—and by the need to cultivate initiative on the part of the French and British governments, who were to lead the operations, and Gulf Arab governments, all of which have long existed as "free riders", to Obama's annoyance, on US policy and US military spending.

It was just a month past the greatest moment of triumph in Libya, when they had succeeded in electing their first democratic government, just like Tunisia, purple fingers and welcoming the NATO forces as liberators and all that jazz, that Obama made his Red Line commitment, such as it was, to stop the Assad regime in Syria from using chemical weapons on its rebellious citizens, and just a month after that that the situation in Libya began to deteriorate more and more seriously, to the point where the following summer they were dress-rehearsing the division of the country into pieces; and it was just at that point that Assad's use of chemical weapons became impossible to ignore, and the president forced to start thinking about a military intervention once again.

Only this time he didn't give in to the pressure:

“I’m very proud of this moment,” he told me. “The overwhelming weight of conventional wisdom and the machinery of our national-security apparatus had gone fairly far. The perception was that my credibility was at stake, that America’s credibility was at stake. And so for me to press the pause button at that moment, I knew, would cost me politically. And the fact that I was able to pull back from the immediate pressures and think through in my own mind what was in America’s interest, not only with respect to Syria but also with respect to our democracy, was as tough a decision as I’ve made—and I believe ultimately it was the right decision to make.”

This was the moment the president believes he finally broke with what he calls, derisively, the “Washington playbook.”

He was learning, you see, through the Libyan experience, not to pay to much attention to the Village wisdom, particularly as it involves chimerae like "credibility", and to trust his own better thinking. Toward a sad but necessary understanding that after the Bush catastrophe (Obama wouldn't of course say that, not his style), the Middle East can't be fixed at the moment, only triaged (with the occasional stroke of brilliance like the Iran nuclear deal certainly making things better in the long run), and it's better to spend more time on things where politics as opposed to fighting can accomplish something, in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

Wish I had some hope that Clinton could work her way through the same intellectual process out of the Stupid Shit Doctrine. Today, for a change, I'm a little more than halfway with Loomis: Damn that 22nd Amendment!

Bonus Bits:

Explaining Indonesia to Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull—the arrival of a previously unknown kind of Islam, fundamentalist, that comes with Saudi money:

“Aren’t the Saudis your friends?,” Turnbull asked.

Obama smiled. “It’s complicated,” he said.

And

“It is literally in my DNA to be suspicious of tribalism,” he told me.

And then

The president also seems to believe that sharing leadership with other countries is a way to check America’s more unruly impulses. “One of the reasons I am so focused on taking action multilaterally where our direct interests are not at stake is that multilateralism regulates hubris,” he explained.... “We have history,” he said. “We have history in Iran, we have history in Indonesia and Central America."

Bernie seems to think he's not aware of this. Bernie himself is not aware as far as I know of what happened in Indonesia, or much of anything that's happened in the Middle East since about 2007.

On Netanyahu's insufferable patronizing:

“Bibi, you have to understand something,” he said. “I’m the African American son of a single mother, and I live here, in this house. I live in the White House. I managed to get elected president of the United States. You think I don’t understand what you’re talking about, but I do.”

The Nixonian Madman in the White House approach:

“But let’s examine the Nixon theory,” he said. “So we dropped more ordnance on Cambodia and Laos than on Europe in World War II, and yet, ultimately, Nixon withdrew, Kissinger went to Paris, and all we left behind was chaos, slaughter, and authoritarian governments that finally, over time, have emerged from that hell. When I go to visit those countries, I’m going to be trying to figure out how we can, today, help them remove bombs that are still blowing off the legs of little kids. In what way did that strategy promote our interests?”

The cult of toughness:

He reminded me that Reagan’s great foe, Daniel Ortega, is today the unrepentant president of Nicaragua.

Ah, read the whole thing! And backup from Robert Farley at LGM.