Tom Streithorst
Johnson: what can Obama learn from Vietnam?
A popular new president, committed to ambitious domestic reform. A war halfway around the globe, inherited from his predecessor. Generals demanding more troops, predicting defeat if they are denied. The year, 1965, the president, Lyndon Johnson, the war, Vietnam.
Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Lyndon Johnson in 1965, like Obama today, was dubious about the prospects for victory in his far away war. Nor was he convinced of its geopolitical significance. What persuaded him to send troops—the decision that ultimately destroyed his presidency—was the fear that if he didn’t, his opponents would paint him as militarily weak—as the president who lost Vietnam.
During the campaign, in order to maintain his militaristic bona fides, Barack Obama liked to compare the war in Afghanistan, the “good war,” with the “bad war,” the war in Iraq. He made the point, correctly, that by shifting troops in 2002-2003 for the invasion of Iraq, America took its eye off the ball in Afghanistan.
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Christopher de Bellaigue
President Obama’s television address to the people of Iran on 20th March, on the occasion of the Iranian new year, was a neat bit of drama. For the sizeable (if unquantifiable) minority of Iranians who watched, via illegal satellites installed on their roofs, it was an exhilarating departure from the alternately menacing and schoolmasterly approach of George W Bush. Even those reading the mostly sceptical commentary in the closely controlled Iranian press must have taken a small thrill from the American president’s “happy holiday” in Persian, or his quote from the Iranian poet Sa’di. By inviting the “Islamic Republic of Iran” to “take its rightful place in the community of nations,” Obama reversed Bush’s policy of not referring to Iran by its chosen name. He also abandoned his predecessor’s distinction between Iran’s people (good) and its leaders (bad). Finally, by committing himself to diplomacy, he effectively disowned the option, which Bush kept in view, of attacking Iran’s nuclear infrastructure and even of regime change. The question for those watching remained: what, if anything, would Obama’s overture deliver?
In Iran’s forthcoming presidential election on 12th June the incumbent, incendiary populist Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, faces two moderate rivals and a lesser candidate from his own conservative camp. Obama’s March address marked the end of America’s blind ideological hostility towards Iran and the beginning of a tentative rapprochement. But a new “partnership” with Iran is still perilously difficult—no matter who wins the election—and much rides on its success, including the resolution of a dispute over its nuclear ambitions and its influence in Iraq and Afghanistan. To forge this deal, Obama has a new team of Iran experts in the state department and the national security council, some of Iranian origin. The team is being co-ordinated by Dennis Ross, a respected senior diplomat who is distrusted by many Muslims for an apparently pro-Israel tilt during the Clinton years. Ross recognises that the Iranians have genuine grievances, and interests, and supports Obama’s promise to negotiate without preconditions. Both are a move forward from the Bush-era policy, which was often to impoverish the state department’s Iran desk and to belt out hostile messages through a megaphone.
To find out about this new approach and its likelihood of success, I went to Washington in April. There I found Ross’s team operating under a new brief: to craft overtures and carefully decipher the messages coming back. “We don’t want to miss anything when the Iranians are talking to us,” one official told me, “for too long, the US and Iran have been like ships passing each other in the night.” But I also found officials fretting about their ability to “read” a country so different, so alien. Some wondered privately how Obama’s call for a new partnership, while obliquely warning Iranians not to make nuclear bombs or help terrorists, would be received. I was handed numerous policy papers stuffed with theories on the beliefs, fears and ambitions of the Islamic Republic. One, Reading Khamenei, seemed to be on every desk, and started with: “There is perhaps no leader in the world more important to current affairs but less known and understood that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran.”
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Moataz El Fegiery
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Obama’s speech to the Muslim world in Cairo today is meant as a fresh start for America’s relationship with the Muslim world. But the simple fact of choosing Egypt, a bellwether state in the Arab world, matters just as much. The Bush administration, in another Cairo speech by Condi Rice in 2005, pushed it pro-freedom agenda by openly criticising Egyptian democracy, embarrassing the government and bolstering Egyptian human rights activists. Bush’s mistakes in Iraq ultimately lead such words to be associated only with unwise military intervention. But even this should not entirely over-shadow the real successes of some US democracy promotion policies; successes Obama would do well not to forget when he speaks tomorrow.
The speech is something of a diplomatic rebirth for Egypt itself, and an end to a recent diplomatic freeze with the US following President Mubarak’s first White House visit in five years. This freeze was in part a legacy of pro-democracy pressures from both Europe and the US between 2003 and 2005, which implicitly helped to trigger a wave of popular opposition protests unprecedented in the country’s history. The Egyptian authorities, in turn, were forced to show relative tolerance, both towards demonstrations and increasingly vocal criticisms of political and social conditions. Similar tough love strategies had also begun to show democratic chinks of success in Iran, the Middle East’s other key strategic state.
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Peter Baldwin
Talk about upending accepted certainties! While Europe is now in the hands of right-of-centre parties (France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Denmark and David Cameron pacing restlessly in the wings), America has “gone socialist.” Nationalising the financial sector by the back door, considering massive subsidy of production industries, increasing state spending on healthcare and education, promising big investments in all manner of greenery, and limiting executive salaries: is Barack Obama beating Europe at its own game? “We are all socialists now,” Newsweek trumpeted in February, predicting that, “as entitlement spending rises over the next decade, we will become even more French.” General Jack D Ripper, Dr Strangelove’s nemesis, who fulminated against fluoridation of the water as another of communism’s nefarious advances, must be rotating in his Valhalla.
How quickly things change. It seems just a few months ago that the presidency of the younger Bush—unilaterally going to war, refusing to submit to international treaties, disparaging the seriousness of global ecological catastrophe—convinced bien pensant opinion that the gulf between the US and Europe was stark and growing ever wider. Indeed, old and well-worn mental ruts are hard to steer out of. It remains a staple of political discourse on both sides of the Atlantic that Europe and America are worlds apart. Everyone knows this.
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Jo-Ann Mort
While February’s parliamentary elections in Israel signalled a move to the right by the Israeli population, the results have been tempered by the manoeuvring of incoming Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. By persuading the severely weakened Labor party (they came in fourth behind Likud, the centrist Kadima party headed by Tzipi Livni, and by a Russian-émigré dominated right wing party, Israel Beitenu) to join his government, Netanyahu has taken the right-wing gloss off of his party. But whether there is anything beneath the sheen, and indeed whether there is any real hope for the middle east peace process, could depend on outside forces.
This new government is a triumph for two men: Netanyahu and his incoming defence minister, Ehud Barak, who dramatically brought his Labour party back to government, even though it endured the worst electoral showing in the history of the state.
There’s a saying in Israel that a politician “doesn’t want to give up his Volvo”—the car usually offered to government ministers. In Labor’s case, this was certainly the reason for arguing their way back in. Barak and the older half of his party—ministers like “Fuad” Ben Eliezer and Matan Vilnai—are men who have nothing to do outside of government and see their roles as ministers as their own private full employment policy.
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Anastasia Moloney
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With the G20 spectacle behind us, the next big gathering of world leaders scheduled this month is the 5th Summit of the Americas. Heads of states from 34 nations from Latin America, the Caribbean, Canada and the US, will gather in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago’s colonial capital between the 17th and 19th April. It will be the first time President Obama steps foot in Latin America; an ideal opportunity to kick-start a new approach in US foreign policy in the region. And in Washington, there are high hopes pinned on the increasingly assertive regional leadership of Brazil’s Luiz Inacio Lula de Silva. Lula is the key player who can help open the doors to a new era in Washington’s relationship with Latin America—less Chavez-and-Bush-style aggression, and more mutually beneficial cooperation.
Ahead of the summit, Obama has begun to tentatively nurture a new relationship with Brazil. In March, Lula, a former shoe shiner and metal worker, was the first Latin American leader to be invited to the White House since Obama took office, signaling the end of the “special relationship” that Colombia’s conservative President Álvaro Uribe enjoyed with the US during the Bush era. And with Brazil’s other main regional rivals—Venezuela, Mexico and Argentina—consumed with domestic problems, the timing couldn’t be better for Lula to assert his country’s regional leadership. While Mexico grapples with drug violence, Venezuela suffers double-digit inflation and Argentina struggles to keep its economy afloat, Brazil is emerging as the natural regional leader. It has enjoyed steady economic growth (an average of nearly 4 per cent) for the past 5 years, driven largely by the global commodities boom. The tenth largest economy in the world, Brazil is the leading producer of sugar cane-based biofuels, and its newly discovered offshore oil reserves which could propel it to a top ten oil exporter by 2011. It is already overshadowing the influence of oil-rich Venezuela.
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Ashraf Ghani
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What hope for Afghanistan? Most Afghans feel that their country is sliding in the wrong direction. The outside world is increasingly vocal about the threat of insurgency, the menace of narcotics, and the crisis of governance. Our predicament is captured in our drop—from 117th in 2005 to 176th in 2008—on Transparency International’s corruption index, and our rise from 11th to 7th on the failed states index.
But these indices do not reflect the determination both inside and outside the country to do better. The international community’s new push—and the calibre of people leading it, from General David Petraeus and Richard Holbrooke to President Obama—is creating a second chance; one with a prospect of success.
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MG Zimeta
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The dust appears to be settling on Guantánamo Bay; by presidential decree, it will be closed within a year. The last British detainee, Binyam Mohamed, was released on 23rd February. The Guantánamo experiment was, say its critics, a comprehensive failure. But this depends on what it was trying to achieve. The strategic victories it won for the Bush administration during the eight years of its existence will last much longer than the camp itself.
“Guantánamo” has become a byword for all that is wrong with America’s war on terror. At first glance, it appears to have been a legal failure too. Its architects’ cynical reinvention of (and disregard for) the law has been widely documented. David Bowker, a lawyer in the department of state’s office of the legal adviser, reported how he and colleagues were asked to “find the legal equivalent of outer space” where detainees would have no legal rights. But in June 2006, the US supreme court ruled that its inmates were entitled to protection under the Geneva convention—despite the administration’s attempts to establish the contrary.
Guantánamo’s guiding philosophy—that being of the wrong religion in the wrong place at the wrong time can make you eligible for inhumane treatment—has also been widely denounced as a moral failure. Binyam Mohamed is a case in point: a 30-year-old cleaner accused of making a nuclear bomb, he was held at Guantánamo for 54 months and tortured. Towards the end of his incarceration there was speculation he was being held purely to conceal the torture he had suffered. “You will be punished,” Samuel Beckett wrote in his novel The Unnameable, “for having been punished.”
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Bernard Avishai
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President Obama may be surrounded by experts, but no one seems to be telling him what he really needs to know about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: that both sides are divided peoples.
Most people know, roughly, that Palestine is two entities: a West Bank majority, nominally led by the Palestinian Authority—but really by a secular business and professional class in Ramallah—and an Islamist minority, centred in Gaza, run by an arguably pragmatic but unarguably totalitarian Hamas. What we have yet to learn, however, is that Israel is two entities also.
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Renegade
Obama the lion tamer
Can Barack Obama play the lion-tamer and rein in his big beasts? Trouble may lurk ahead in the way that he intends to run the grander fiefdoms of his administration. Start with foreign policy, where Hillary Clinton at the state department, Robert Gates at the Pentagon, Leon Panetta at the CIA and Jim Jones, who as national security adviser is based in the White House, will all be growling from their separate dens. Off to one side is vice-president Joe Biden, who as former chairman of the senate foreign relations committee reckons that he knows more about foreign affairs than the rest combined.
Clinton’s loyalists are muttering about the “military axis” of Jones, a former Marine general, and the Pentagon. The buzz is that Hillary insisted that Panetta (Bill Clinton’s former chief of staff) replace General Mike Hayden at the CIA on the grounds that too many prominent generals would send the wrong message.
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