Obama Abroad
By MARTIN PERETZ
March 7, 2008
On Aug. 1, 2007 Barack Obama uttered a sentence that has brought him much grief: "If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and [Pakistani] President Musharraf won't act, we will." At the time, virtually all of his Democratic opponents lambasted him for being reckless. As late as their debate in Ohio last week, Hillary Clinton charged that "he basically threatened to bomb Pakistan."
Yet neither in this speech (a densely detailed address at the Woodrow Wilson Center) nor in any other has the candidate mentioned "bombing" Pakistan. It is possible that the antiterrorist operation he envisaged might include an attack from the air. But that is not what he said.
Martin Kozlowski
The extraordinary recoil from Mr. Obama's perfectly sensible statement reminded me of the Clinton administration's quivers about any retaliating against al Qaeda. For a quick reprise of these inhibitions, skim the 9/11 Commission report: One high official in the small circle dealing with tracking the bin Laden brotherhood insisted that the terrorists be brought in alive; another was committed to giving them a fair trial, although a cabinet member feared a jury wouldn't convict; still another official objected that there might ensue some "collateral damage" even from a targeted attack.
The fact is that Hillary Clinton has never answered the red phone at 3 a.m., or any other time, for that matter. And Bill's record on this matter is not reassuring, either.
So what are Mr. Obama's inclinations in foreign policy? Listening to him carefully, I find his saber-rattling about American counterterrorism within Pakistan's borders not at all out of keeping with his larger thinking about the challenges beyond our borders. Put briefly, I would say that he is as tough as he is reasonable.
"This is the wild frontier of our globalized world," Mr. Obama has said of the territory spanning Pakistan and Afghanistan. "There are tribes that see borders as nothing more than lines on a map, and governments as forces that come and go. There are blood ties deeper than alliances of convenience, and pockets of extremism that follow religion to violence." No naïveté there.
Porous frontiers and states that are not nations are threats to the people who inhabit their ambits and to the nations which may be forced to host many of them as immigrants. No one should grow up thinking that terror is normal, as many now do. This is one reason Mr. Obama insisted that, whatever Mr. Musharraf might think, the U.S. could not be inhibited from striking wherever terror was hiding.
In his August speech, Mr. Obama specifically criticized the administration for failing to strike an al Qaeda leadership meeting in 2005. Nevertheless, in January of this year Hellfire missiles from a CIA Predator drone did kill an al Qaeda senior commander in Pakistan. This fit Mr. Obama's operational model, the one that provoked so much controversy: good intelligence on a worthy target, whether Mr. Musharraf agreed or not. Mr. Musharraf was told, the Washington Post reported, when the operation was already underway.
I do not doubt that a military response to al Qaeda's new entrenchments in northwest Pakistan may one day demand something larger than a drone and its missiles. And I have no reason to believe that a President Obama would be inhibited from meeting the demands of that day.
What about the conflict between Israel and Palestine? Many Americans in the policy and opinion elites blindly believe Israel is at fault. This does not appear to be Mr. Obama's belief.
He has made clear again and again that it is not diplomatic ingenuity or American pressure on the Jewish state that is needed to temper the conflict and end it. It is, rather, a transformation in the tempestuous minds of the Palestinian polity, to accept finally the Jewish presence and sovereignty in the land. The Israeli body politic long ago acceded to the idea of a Palestinian state, as Mr. Obama points out again and again.
He has no panaceas for Israel and the Palestinians, which is right. He certainly believes in the peace process, and that American intercession can be helpful and violence-averting. This, too, is right. And like any believer in the peace process and the two-state solution, I imagine that he will insist also upon Israeli concessions, which anyway are inevitable.
There are people in his entourage whose feelings about these matters make me anxious -- who devote most of their thinking about Israeli-Palestinian peace to the devising of axioms and formulas on how to bring the Israelis to heel. Such men and women appear in every campaign and in every administration. But it is the president who counts.
My own qualms about Mr. Obama reflect his enchantment with negotiation. So far he has not allowed that there are conflicts in which negotiation is ipso facto futile, and conflicts in which there may be strategic consequences from the cult of talk. Talking certainly didn't work with Hitler and Stalin, although Western leaders actually negotiated with these tyrants face-to-face. Our partners in those evil days traduced every agreement they made. The same was true of diplomacy with Yasser Arafat.
Mr. Obama says he would be open to a session with Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. And Mr. Obama's Karen Hughes, Samantha Power, says, "we need to get in a room with him -- if only to convey grave displeasure about his tactics, regionally and internationally."
Maybe. But the president of the United States has many ways to communicate his opinion of a foreign leader. And when Mr. Ahmadinejad begs to differ, or expresses to the American president his low view of him, or walks out of the room, what then? Not military action, certainly, but the diplomatic option will have been squandered.
I have no doubt that this idée fixe of the Democrats -- their ardent faith in the salvific power of diplomacy -- will be tried and found wanting. Still, we shouldn't forget that many Republicans (Chuck Hagel and Richard Lugar, for instance) share the yen to chat. And didn't James Baker talk endlessly with Saddam Hussein, to no point except the murder of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Kurds and Shiites? A case can be made for sitting down with our enemies -- as long as we understand that they are our enemies.
So Barack Obama's belief in the power of speech worries me in the realm of foreign affairs. But otherwise he has won my confidence. Unlike the isolationists in the guise of idealists, or the cheerleaders for violence who pretend to be pacifists and populists, Mr. Obama is a patriot of the old cadence and the old convictions, and not easily pushed around. If he is elected president, he will disappoint many of his supporters, and surprise many of his detractors.
Nobody needs to worry that Zbigniew Brzezinski will be made secretary of state. I would even hazard the guess that the chief at Foggy Bottom will be the clear-thinking Dennis Ross, once an avid "peace processor," who has learned with the rest of us that processing peace is not an easy task.
Mr. Peretz is editor in chief of the New Republic.
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