The Obama Doctrine

I've been writing a lot lately about Iraq, as events on the ground are forcing it back into its inevitable position at the forefront of the Presidential campaign and our politics generally. Until we deal with the stain of Iraq, not only figuring out the best course moving forward to get our troops out of harm's way, but figuring out how to safeguard against such a hijacking of our foreign policy by narrow-minded ideologues, we're simply not going to have the energy to tackle any other big problem. Iraq will always lurk in the background and pop up at the most inopportune times. It's embarrassing that we're now going to have to give a SECOND mandate to end the war, but that's where we are. What must be clear is that whoever we empower to end the war must be trusted to do so. At this time I can't say that about a Presidential candidate who says this:

"In the last five years, our soldiers have done everything we asked of them and more. They were asked to remove Saddam Hussein from power and bring him to justice and they did. They were asked to give the Iraqi people the opportunity for free and fair elections and they did. They were asked to give the Iraqi government the space and time for political reconciliation, and they did. So for every American soldier who has made the ultimate sacrifice for this mission, we should imagine carved in stone: 'They gave their life for the greatest gift one can give to a fellow human being, the gift of freedom.'

This war was simply not something glorious that bestowed the great gift of freedom on the Iraqi people. It was a brutal and often murderous occupation that bestowed fear, anger distrust and ethno-genocide, and shattered a country. If you are so compromised that you can't admit or understand that, if your mindset is so rigid that so cannot disavow the worldview of the stupid elites who brought us to this precipice, you're actually not equipped to lead in this historical moment. Hillary Clinton is just wedded to a foreign policy vision that has outlived its usefulness. When I see her campaign staffers out-and-out calling the Obama campaign anti-Semites because they don't hew to a view of Israel 10 degrees to the right of Likudniks and settlers, I have the same reaction as Atrios:

Remember back in junior high, when you had that friend that the bullies picked on all the time? And you defended that friend, who really never did all that much for you, which led to you getting your ass kicked a few times yourself? And then you got to high school and your friend joined up with the bullies? It's kind of like that.

The familiar line for a lot of bloggers is that Clinton and Obama's policies are virtually identical, but this is not true in the area of foreign policy. More to the point they have radically different mindsets for a 21st-century American foreign policy in a dangerous world where our power has eroded due to the tragedy of Iraq. Spencer Ackerman wrote a really insightful article called "The Obama Doctrine" that lays out his vision of "dignity promotion". Obama's foreign policy team by and large opposed the invasion of Iraq, and united by their correctness on that issue, they make a very compelling case for a new way of looking at the world. This is a long excerpt, but necessary because it's important to focus on his foreign policy shop's argument.

This ability to see the world from different perspectives informs what the Obama team hopes will replace the Iraq War mind-set: something they call dignity promotion. "I don't think anyone in the foreign-policy community has as much an appreciation of the value of dignity as Obama does," says Samantha Power, a former key aide and author of the groundbreaking study of U.S. foreign policy and genocide, A Problem From Hell. "Dignity is a way to unite a lot of different strands [of foreign-policy thinking]," she says. "If you start with that, it explains why it's not enough to spend $3 billion on refugee camps in Darfur, because the way those people are living is not the way they want to live. It's not a human way to live. It's graceless -- an affront to your sense of dignity."

During Bush's second term, a strange disconnect has arisen in liberal foreign-policy circles in response to the president's so-called "freedom agenda." Some liberals, like Matthew Yglesias in his book Heads In The Sand, note the insincerity of the administration's stated goal of exporting democracy. Bush, they observe, only targets for democratization countries that challenge American hegemony. Other liberal foreign-policy types, such as Thomas Carothers and Marina Ottaway of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, insist the administration is sincere but too focused on elections without supporting the civil-society institutions that sustain democracy. Still others, like Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch, contend that a focus on democracy in the developing world without privileging the protection of civil and political rights is a recipe for a dangerous illiberalism.

What's typically neglected in these arguments is the simple insight that democracy does not fill stomachs, alleviate malaria, or protect neighborhoods from marauding bands of militiamen. Democracy, in other words, is valuable to people insofar as it allows them first to meet their basic needs. It is much harder to provide that sense of dignity than to hold an election in Baghdad or Gaza and declare oneself shocked when illiberal forces triumph. "Look at why the baddies win these elections," Power says. "It's because [populations are] living in climates of fear." U.S. policy, she continues, should be "about meeting people where they're at. Their fears of going hungry, or of the thug on the street. That's the swamp that needs draining. If we're to compete with extremism, we have to be able to provide these things that we're not [providing]."

This is why, Obama's advisers argue, national security depends in large part on dignity promotion. Without it, the U.S. will never be able to destroy al-Qaeda. Extremists will forever be able to demagogue conditions of misery, making continued U.S. involvement in asymmetric warfare an increasingly counterproductive exercise -- because killing one terrorist creates five more in his place. "It's about attacking pools of potential terrorism around the globe," Gration says. "Look at Africa, with 900 million people, half of whom are under 18. I'm concerned that unless you start creating jobs and livelihoods we will have real big problems on our hands in ten to fifteen years."

Obama sees this as more than a global charity program; it is the anvil against which he can bring down the hammer on al-Qaeda. "He took many of the [counterinsurgency] principles -- the paradoxes, like how sometimes you're less secure the more force is used -- and looked at it from a more strategic perspective," Sewall says. "His policies deal with root causes but do not misconstrue root causes as a simple fix. He recognizes that you need to pursue a parallel anti-terrorism [course] in its traditional form along with this transformed approach to foreign policy." Not for nothing has Obama received private advice or public support from experts like former Clinton and Bush counterterrorism advisers Richard Clarke and Rand Beers, and John Brennan, the first chief of the National Counterterrorism Center.

While foreign policy establishment types like George Packer nitpick around the details and grow frustrated that Obama doesn't embrace their pet concerns about what happens if things go wrong (which always weds us to bad policy), Obama is actually thinking big here, and laying forth an idea of public diplomacy that would really drain away the conditions that foster radical extremism. The kind of people who can only contemplate foreign policy with guns won't be likely to understand. And this is not, by the way, to say that Obama wouldn't be willing to use force when necessary. Apparently he's more willing than Clinton or McCain to do so against bin Laden, or at least he's more willing to say it out loud. Obama's vision and the idea of sustainment - that we sustain international order through prosperity and rebuilding our legitimacy as a world leader - share a lot of parallels. We use force when absolutely necessary, but we don't back down from using the tools of soft power to lift up impoverished nations and restore our moral capacity to lead.

I don't know if he'll be able to pull it off; certainly there are pitfalls, given the near-hegemony of the "serious thinkers" on foreign policy in Washington. But there's really no sense in not trying, and making this a watershed election, a full break from the past.

But while the doubts about Obama contain fair points, they also, to a certain degree, reflect a triumph of the Iraq War mind-set. Why not demand the destruction of al-Qaeda? Why not pursue the enlightened global leadership promised by liberal internationalism? Why not abandon fear? What is it we have to fear, exactly?

"He goes back to Roosevelt," Power says. "Freedom from fear and freedom from want. What if we actually offered that? What if we delivered that in the developing world? That would be a transformative agenda for us." The end of the Iraq War mind-set, it turns out, may be the beginning of America's reacquaintance with its best traditions.

I noted earlier today this piece of video from Obama where he critiques Hillary Clinton for not believing in bottom-up democracy. I actually think he's critiquing the whole Washington establishment.



A bottom-up vision of foreign policy does work on the ground instead of looking to the elites to make the decisions necessary from the top-down. It's community organizing at the macro level. It responds not to our "vital national interests" but individuals, in an age when one individual can wreak destruction. It's why I support Sen. Obama. Bottom-up democracy is exactly what we need.