[Peace-discuss] Obama as neocon

[C. G. Estabrook]

[Eli Lake is a disgusting rightist and supporter of murder -- as are Richard 
Clarke and Randy Beers (a childhood friend of mine), his principal sources. But 
the article's theme -- that Obama's foreign-policy is not that far from the 
neocons' -- is correct.  Rightists have usually been better at seeing Obama for 
what he is -- see, e.g., "Obama the Interventionist" by Robert Kagan in the 
Washington Post 29 April 2007 -- perhaps because their vision isn't obscured by 
hope. --CGE]

  	Contra Expectations
	Obama isn't Jimmy Carter--he's Ronald Reagan.
	Eli Lake,  The New Republic
	Published: Wednesday, July 30, 2008

On his first day in office, President Barack Obama will head to the situation
room for a video conference with his most important commander, General David
Petraeus. If the conversation is chilly, it is not just the awkwardness of
virtual chatting. Obama and Petraeus have a history. While Obama has called for
withdrawing U.S. forces from Iraq, Petraeus oversaw the deployment of more than
30,000 additional troops. To win support from the left, Obama postured as a
skeptic of the general's Iraq strategy during congressional hearings. Meanwhile,
Petraeus has emerged as something of a hero to the right -- and, despite his
protestations, might someday run for president as a Republican.

But, more than any campaign rhetoric or past slights, the relationship between
the general and his commander-in-chief will hinge on much larger questions about
Barack Obama and the war on terrorism.

And, while it's easy to dismiss the conservative critique of Obama's foreign
policy as a politically motivated caricature, you can see why McCain supporters
have tried to tag him as a latter-day Jimmy Carter. During the primaries, Obama
talked about the war on terrorism with the fastidiousness of a civil libertarian
-- emphasizing the constraints that he would impose on our military and CIA and
rarely mentioning specific methods for prosecuting it. He has, for instance,
talked extensively about closing the Guantánamo Bay prison and ending the policy
of extraordinary rendition.

There are arguably many moral and strategic reasons for this agenda. But the
insights gleaned from the counterinsurgency in Iraq and seven years of fighting
Al Qaeda across the world also yield harsher lessons. American national
interests often demand collaboration with security forces, militias, and tribal
leaders who don't conform to our highest ideals. What's more, a key plank of the
Petraeus strategy in Iraq is to isolate and shrink the pool of irreconcilable
insurgents. That means in practice paying off former bomb-makers, torturers, and
terrorists to entice them to join the fight against Al Qaeda -- and these are,
needless to say, not the types to fret over the nuances of the Geneva
Conventions. Or, as one former Sunni insurgent turned ally in Fallujah told The
Washington Post, "We never tortured anybody. Sometimes we beat them during the
first hours of capture."

If you read the fine print of Obama's policy papers and talk with his advisers
and examine their careers, you'll find something surprising about how an Obama
administration would view this dark side of the war on terrorism. Far from
eschewing alliances with unsavory proxies, these ties are essential to Obama's
plans for destroying Al Qaeda. As he has put it, the United States must develop
the "partnerships we need to take out the terrorists." Obama hasn't fully
fleshed out what he means, but his advisers have some ideas. They told me that
he would deepen cooperation with Pakistan's government and military and
Somalia's transitional federal government in their battles with Al Qaeda -- and
that, while opposed to the troop surge, he applauds the partnership between the
U.S. military and Iraqi tribal leaders that helped turn the tide in the fight
against Al Qaeda there.

So, even though Obama and Petraeus have rhetorically gone in diametrical
directions in the last year, they have actually converged on substance. In
important ways, an Obama approach to the global insurgency of Al Qaeda mirrors
Petraeus's counterinsurgency in Iraq.

Before unpacking the Obama view of the war on terrorism, let's dismiss the
comparisons to Jimmy Carter. A bit of a refresher course in the horrors of the
late 1970s: Jimmy Carter pledged to enshrine human rights as a central value in
U.S. foreign policy. That was an admirable goal, but Carter didn't just inject
human rights into U.S. foreign policy; he allowed it to rule policy, no matter
the implications for the fight against communism. During the Carter era, the
United States cooled its relations with vital client states like the Shah's
government in Iran and the Somoza regime in Nicaragua, even as they fought for
their lives. The locus classicus of this critique was, of course, Jeane
Kirkpatrick's Commentary essay, "Dictatorships and Double Standards," where she
excoriated the Carter administration for its studied neutrality as pro-American
autocrats fell to Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries. She concluded that Carter's
foreign policy was incapable of distinguishing between real democratic activists
and would-be totalitarians who cloaked their ambitions in the rhetoric of
democratic self-determination. "Liberal idealism need not be identical with
masochism, and need not be incompatible with the defense of freedom and the
national interest," she wrote.

Does her critique apply to Barack Obama, too? That's what John McCain has, in
essence, alleged. But to understand why this charge won't stick -- and to
understand the intellectual DNA of the Obama approach to counterterrorism -- you
need to review the careers of Richard Clarke and Rand Beers.

Both Clarke and Beers are lifelong national security bureaucrats who left the
Bush administration in protest of the Iraq war. Both have offered private advice
to Obama and might well hold top posts in his war cabinet. Clarke helped draft
the campaign's counterterrorism strategy, and Beers contributed ideas for his
August 1, 2007 counterterrorism speech. Both also have the trust of the party's
antiwar base and have, in many ways, articulated the Democratic Party's most
substantive critique of Bush's war on terrorism.

 From some of their criticism of the Bush administration, you might think them
soft-power squishes. But, during their careers, they have never expressed much
hesitation about working with proxy armies with less than admirable human rights
records. During the Clinton administration, Beers served as the assistant
secretary of state for international narcotics and law enforcement affairs, a
bureau known as "drugs and thugs." In that post, he helped conceive Plan
Colombia, which has, over the last eight years, funneled about $5.5 billion to
the country's military. Much of that has been spent combating the Revolutionary
Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), which has funded its Marxist-Leninist rebellion
by presiding over a vast drug empire.

In many ways, the program was a great success. Today, the FARC is nearly
defeated, and the civil war in that country is over. But Plan Colombia worked in
part because Beers was prepared to assist a national army that worked closely
with pro-government death squads -- and, for that reason, Plan Colombia provoked
the ire of Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy and the left wing of the Democratic
Party. Beers takes criticism of this brand of alliance seriously but considers
it surmountable. He told me that such alliances require that the United States
conditions its assistance: "We are prepared to work with you, but you are going
to have to change your stripes. You are going to have to operate in a fashion
where that kind of behavior stops." Indeed, in the Colombian instance, there's
strong evidence that Beers's plan also helped curb the worst excesses of
America's military partners.

Clarke is a somewhat more familiar figure. During congressional testimony, he
famously apologized for allowing September 11 to happen while serving as the
National Security Council's terrorism czar. He left a long paper trail on Al
Qaeda, including the "Delenda Memo" of 1998, which takes its name from the Latin
word to "blot out" and was based on a more detailed strategy for regime change
in Afghanistan. In both its goals and rhetoric, that strategy harkened back to
the cold war. It spoke of "rollback," and, taking a page from the anti-communist
strategy of the Reagan years, it called on the government to fight a proxy war
against Al Qaeda and their Taliban hosts.

Like Beers's Plan Colombia, Clarke's approach placed the United States in bed
with thugs. He proposed "massive support" to the anti-Taliban coalition that
included the sadistic warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum, who would, in 2001, load
thousands of Taliban fighters into sealed containers. When the captives pleaded
for air, Dostum's men shot holes in the containers -- and many of the prisoners
therein. The strategy also called for covert assistance to the regime of Uzbek
dictator-for-life Islam Karimov, who has allegedly ordered the boiling of his
political opponents. Clarke told me that he and his staff knew that, if such
alliances managed to neutralize the threat from Al Qaeda without a major attack,
they would face political heat for their tactics: "Everyone would say we were
crazy because the disaster never occurred."

Clarke and Beers in effect were drawing on a time-honored tradition of foreign
policy that goes back to the Gurkhas: finding proxies to fight an enemy. It was
a tradition for America that found its apotheosis in the Reagan Doctrine of the
1980s, which was defined by Charles Krauthammer as "unashamed American support
for anti-Communist revolution," regardless of whether or not such support
respected the sovereignty of communist states. It was a policy that manifested
itself in U.S. support for the Nicaraguan Contras, Jonas Savimbi's insurgency in
Angola, and the Afghan mujahedin. In a sense, the Reagan doctrine was a
full-throated rejection of the Carter era. It was Kirkpatrick's Commentary essay
put into practice. So here we arrive at the central irony of the charge that
Obama will revive Carterism: The two most important architects of his
counterterrorism policy came of age at the height of the Reagan Doctrine, and
that thinking continues to inform their strategy.

Last November at a foreign policy forum in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Obama said
there may be "40,000 hard-core jihadists with whom we can't negotiate." He went
on. "Our job is to incapacitate them, to kill them." In that spirit, he famously
announced that he would strike terrorist bases in Pakistan if President Pervez
Musharraf ever refuses to move on actionable intelligence against Al Qaeda -- a
threat that earned him the chastisement of John McCain, among others.

Of course, the opportunities for that kind of strike are rare and the diplomatic
costs can be high. That's where we begin to see the interesting confluence that
will likely emerge as the Obama Doctrine. His counterterrorism policy will bear
the imprint of the Beers-Clarke experience in the national security apparatus.
And that pedigree will be coupled with the lessons that David Petraeus has
gleaned from Iraq. The result will likely be a combination of force and
kindness. In the search for allies against Al Qaeda, the U.S. military will
aggressively seek out allies among the tribes that co-mingle with the
terrorists, as well as the police and intelligence agencies in those countries.
Our military would try to pry them away from Al Qaeda by offering them money and
basic infrastructure -- and then send them into battle against the terrorists.
But, at the same time, through that engagement, it would also attempt to instill
practices that minimize the brutality and corruption of local police.

A good guide to what such an ambitious program would look like is Obama's plan
to give frontline police and intelligence agencies $5 billion over three years
through a "Shared Security Partnership Initiative." His campaign materials
promise the plan will extend "from the remote islands of Indonesia to the
sprawling cities of Africa."

Or take the Pakistan example. Richard Clarke envisions a policy that would
pressure and entice the Pakistani military, which has been markedly reluctant to
challenge jihadists, to use the same sorts of tactics that have flourished in
Iraq: "The Pakistani army is not trained and equipped for counterinsurgency. One
of the things we say is, 'We know you are reluctant to do this. But we would
like to help you, give you military aid and create an ability to do this.'" As
one of Obama's top foreign policy advisers, Susan Rice, puts it, "Obama will
support efforts to encourage the legitimate leaders in Pakistan's tribal areas
who seek to thwart extremism." (Rice made sure to add that the campaign believed
the conditions in Anbar to be different than in the Pakistani frontier and that
it was primarily the responsibility of the Pakistanis to root out terrorist safe
havens in their sovereign territories.)

Both Clarke and Beers concede that this type of counterinsurgency necessitates
keeping some unpleasant company. The Pakistani intelligence services, for
instance, have an atrocious history of abetting Al Qaeda; tribal leaders who
Obama would like to co-opt operate under prehistoric codes of justice. But the
Obama program would attempt to cajole its partners into abandoning brutal tactics.

Clarke explains this as follows: "When you partner with people with unsavory
records, it has to be consciously a temporary spate, partnering has to include
fixing them, and they have to be genuinely willing to be fixed." In fact, this
is the key difference between the Reagan doctrine and the Petraeus-Obama brand
of counterinsurgency -- where the Reagan doctrine placed its emphasis on blowing
up bridges, Petraeus and Obama want to build them. Their program depends on
winning the allegiances of local populations -- a goal undermined, over the long
run, by brutal tactics.

Susan Rice is tipped to be a senior figure in an Obama administration. Earlier
this month, I sent her a handful of questions about counterterrorism policy. Her
answers were filled with all the hedges and qualifications that you would expect
in the middle of a campaign. She told me that Obama would eschew a "one size
fits all approach" to fighting terrorism. "In some cases that may mean strong
support for proxies (as in Anbar). In other places it may mean direct U.S.
action. In others, it may mean relying more on an allied government or the
international community." But there were several answers she provided that I
found highly revealing. She described Obama's opinion of America's historic
involvement with insurgency and counterinsurgency. She applauded the 1980s
arming of the mujahedin resistance to the Soviets: "[S]upport for the Afghan
resistance to Soviet aggression was the right decision in the 1980s." And she
said that the Anbar Awakening was "responsible for much of the security progress
we have seen in Iraq," though she insisted that Sunni militias must eventually
be incorporated into state security forces. In light of some of the criticisms
that have been lobbed in Obama's direction, those are pretty suggestive allusions.

Of course, the Obama counterterrorism policy is still a work in progress. As his
recent zigzags illustrate, he still hasn't figured out his stance on some of the
larger questions. But, in discussing his plans for Iraq, he has made one key
admission: He will listen carefully to the advice of his generals. You can
easily see how this will play out. Obama will enter office with a set of
somewhat inchoate instincts about American power and the importance of
outsourcing force. These instincts will mesh with the evolving thinking of his
top commanders, who have also begun to realize the limitations of an
overstretched army and the value of counter-insurgency. And that brings us back
to the situation room on Obama's first day. If he and Petraeus can overcome
whatever awkwardness lingers, they will discover a mind meld and an emerging
doctrine -- a doctrine that looks a lot more like Ronald Reagan than Jimmy Carter.

Eli Lake is a senior reporter on national security issues for The New York Sun.

http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=0e0846cd-694f-40d1-a6d9-55e20de176cf