Soccer Dad

The freedom agenda rip

In a typically snarky but ultimately vacuous column Maureen Dowd writes:

W.'s strategy was inspired by his insecurity. He has acknowledged that he went to war based on body language, without a full-throated debate or analysis; there was just a vibe coming from the general direction of the Pentagon and the vice president's office that it was a good thing to do. His only real goal was to prove he was tough.

The confident and unsentimental Mr. Obama, by contrast, has redefined the missions in Iraq and Afghanistan around endgames.

President Bush wasn't moved to policy out of insecurity. The opposite, was true. He possessed a confidence that freedom should be a goal of his foreign policy. There can differences whether one is inclined to emphasize his successes or failures. And the former president can be faulted for failing to follow through properly on his rhetoric or that he saw freedom where none really existed. But what can't be denied is that President Bush had confidence in the United States, its basic goodness and wished to spread the fundamental building block of our nation all around the world.

His successor, President Obama - who is a symbol of the nation's virtue - ironically rejects that confidence in America's goodness. He also has taken a number of steps that have shown that he does not believe that the American example is one that ought to be spread. He once the United States to be respected, not emulated.

Jonathan Chait identifies one, the President's appointment of Chas Freeman (via memeorandum).

Freeman belongs to the camp that's the mortal enemy of the neoconservatives: the realists. Realist ideology pays no attention to moral differences between states. As far as realists are concerned, there's no way to think about the way governments act except as the pursuit of self-interest. Realism has some useful insights. For instance, realists accurately predicted that Iraqis would respond to a U.S. invasion with less than unadulterated joy.

But realists are the mirror image of neoconservatives in that they are completely blind to the moral dimensions of international politics. Realists scoffed at Bill Clinton's interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo, which halted mass slaughter. Realists tend not to abide the American alliance with Israel, which rests on shared values with a fellow imperfect democracy rather than on a cold analysis of America's interests.

The gratuitous put down of neoconservatism aside, this is a pretty astute observation. Michael Barone lays out a somewhat broader case:

Still, for anyone with knowledge of American foreign policy over the last four decades, Clinton's remarks were jarring. It is one thing not to press a tyranny very hard on human rights; it is another thing to come out and say you're not going to raise the issue at all. It is a kind of unilateral moral disarmament. One arrow in the quiver of American foreign policy has been our pressing -- sometimes sotto voce (as in the Helsinki Accords), sometimes in opera buffa ("Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!") -- tyrannical regimes to honor human rights. Hillary Clinton has put that arrow over her knee, broken it in two and thrown it away.

She is not the only one. On this as on other matters, she is following the lead of the man who beat her for the Democratic nomination. In his inaugural speech, Barack Obama made only the most passing mention of human rights. In his Feb. 26 speech to Congress, he devoted just 7 percent of his words to foreign and defense policy, and made just one mention of freedom.

He is reportedly poised to name as head of the National Intelligence Council a man who has endorsed China's 1989 suppression of pro-democracy students at Tiananmen Square. He has noted with cold indifference the success of the provincial elections in Iraq.

President Obama's retreat from a "freedom agenda, probably should not be all the surprising given another observation that Barone makes.

All of which brings to mind the report of a conservative blogger who watched George W. Bush's 2005 inaugural speech with a group of liberals. Every time Bush called for spreading freedom and democracy around the world, the crowd guffawed and groaned and jeered. For them, evidently, Bush was a figure of fun, and his calls for democracy and human rights laughable. The same people who decried his supposed authoritarian rule at home had nothing but contempt for his call for freedom and democracy abroad.

Abe Greenwald identifies the hypocrisy that is rampant in President Obama's approach.

What's most repugnant about the Obama administration's indifference to human rights abuses is the way this posture was achieved. Obama created a rights-abusing bogeyman in the person of George W. Bush and then, with full executive bravado, slew the monster by way of inaugural rhetoric and a few high-profile (but technically watery) presidential orders. So Barack Obama has supposedly done his share for human rights.

He's closing (but really just relocating) the Guantanamo facility, so he doesn't have to mention the wrongfully imprisoned thousands throughout China. He's ending (but really just discussing the ramifications of ending) tough interrogations, so he doesn't have to bring up Syrian torture when reaching out to the Assad regime. He's closed down temporary CIA detention facilities, so when he goes on Arabian TV he's free to praise the "courage" of a Saudi king whose domestic anti-terrorism program amounts to a secret network of sheer brutality.

We are seeing the real-world impact of equating three cases of American waterboarding with institutionalized international torture. Obama set up Bush's America as a human rights wasteland in order to play to the netroots and taint his Republican challenger. It worked, as a campaign strategy.

In other words denouncing the United States as a deeply flawed role model when it comes to rights, was an effective campaign strategy, but it masks the real obstacles to freedom in the world.

And as Jennifer Rubin points out, taking this approach may indeed hurt the United States internationally as it betrays a lack of interest in foreign policy and national security.

Perhaps this is so, but then there is no rhyme or reason to our national security apparatus. We have a president who ricochets from one set of critics to the next without regard for the merits of the issue before him. Is this is what we are to expect -- the toady of the House of Saud in a key role "balanced" by a "boycott" of Durban II? This is a peculiar compromise indeed: to be just a little bit in the thrall of the Israel-bashers. And it raises the troubling question as to who really is in charge of decision making: everyone or no one or a very confused president?

So the Spock-like President Obama who helms our starship of state may not be as impressive as Maureen Dowd imagines:

Speaking of the Enterprise, Mr. Obama has a bit of Mr. Spock in him (and not just the funny ears). He has a Vulcan-like logic and detachment.

I can't say much for the logic. But having a Commander in Chief who is detached is not what we need.