Missing What Is In Plain View
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Quin Hillyer complains about Obama’s first television interview, which Jake Tapper reports will be with Al-Arabiya. This is different, but it doesn’t mean very much one way or the other. At most it means that President Obama was serious when he made irenic remarks in his Inaugural directed to Muslims, but I suspect this has zero significance when it comes to policy. Like the appointment of George Mitchell, which represents an exception to the general rule of administration personnel on regional policy, giving an interview to Al-Arabiya is a conciliatory gesture designed to try to make up for the reality of U.S. policy. It is the sort of conciliatory move that Obama believes he can make because he is confident in his own “pro-Israel” bona fides, as well he might be considering the make-up of his Cabinet, staff and Middle East policy team, just as Obama’s general acceptance of national security ideology gives him the flexibility and the political cover to critique and oppose individual policy decisions.
This Al-Arabiya interview is most likely a case of attempting to “re-package” or “re-brand” the same policy in a more attractive way, which assumes that Arab and other foreign publics are not reacting negatively to the substance of U.S. policy but only to its presentation. More basically, critics of this interview must not understand Obama at all. Obama likes negotiation and consensus-building, and he likes to try to explain one group’s situation to another. This is the peril of his bridge-building instinct that I mentioned long ago: the attempt to convey a message from one side to another is routinely mistaken as a concession to the other side. This is why some other conservatives (usually those who ended up voting for him) made a very different kind of mistake in assuming that Obama sympathized with certain conservative policy proposals that he did not dismiss out of hand. The claim that Obama represents a Rohrschach test, which I have seen so many people make, is really a statement about how badly the people making the claim misread what Obama tries to do. It’s not that Obama makes a secret of what he thinks or does not have a clear record on where he stands, but that very few people on either side of any given debate seem willing to believe that Barack Hussein Obama can really be as establishmentarian and conventional as he is. People project their own hopes and fears onto him not because he is a blank screen, but because they refuse to believe what they see when they look at his record and statements. Like his acceptance of national security ideology that I discussed last week, Obama’s establishmentarian instincts are an important part of the reason why he was able to win the election, but there is no reason to doubt that he will continue to follow such instincts just as he will keep adhering to the ideology of national security.
Hillyer is citing this interview as support for the utterly unfounded idea that “there ain’t no way that Obama is gonna support Israel when push comes to shove.” Never mind that Obama has done exactly this throughout his public career when it has mattered. Hillyer’s complaint is consistent with the tiresome theme developed during the election, again without any basis in Obama’s record or statements, that Obama lacked in appropriate “pro-Israel” zeal. To support this claim, tiny, insignificant quotes and episodes were turned into meaningful signs of how Obama might be more sympathetic (i.e., “too sympathetic”) to Palestinians. As I noted in my post-election article on Obama, both sides of the debate invested these episodes with significance they did not possess–proponents of an “even-handed” approach were hopeful, and conventional “pro-Israel” sorts were fearful, but there was a strong desire all around to imagine that Obama’s view of the conflict was anything other than what he said it was. We see more of this via Leon Hadar’s post on the kind of arcane textual interpretation that some people on the side of reforming U.S. policy are reduced to making to find some glimmer of encouragement.
After all, the thinking seems to go, he was the “change” candidate–how could the “change” candidate be so boringly conventional on such a controversial subject? Therefore, he must be set on making major changes to U.S. policy, which encourages critics of the status quo and frightens defenders of the same. The same people who declare Mr. Bush to have been the best friend Israel ever had warn gravely that Obama will endanger Israel, despite the clear record that Obama and Bush hold exactly the same positions and have supported the very same policies. If you believe Bush is a good friend to Israel, you really must believe the same about his successor. To argue otherwise is as if supporters of Taiwan had run around warning that John “War for Quemoy and Matsu” Kennedy was going to abandon Taiwan to the Chinese. That’s how crazy this sort of criticism of Obama is.
To illustrate how silly this preoccupation with lip service and symbolism really is, consider Obama’s relationships with Rick Warren and Rashid Khalidi. No one, or at least no one sober, believes that Obama’s cordial relations with Rick Warren represent anything other than a friendship the President has with a conservative pastor. No one, save perhaps unduly optimistic pro-life Obama voters, expects Obama to be harboring secret pro-life views that are “revealed” by his association with Warren. Virtually everyone accepts that Obama is very pro-choice and has a record to back this up, and we have no reason to assume that Obama is going to tangle with Democratic interest groups by breaking with his party’s traditional position. When it comes to Khalidi, however, the mere fact of their association and friendship supposedly proves that Obama is not as conventionally “pro-Israel” as he appears to be. This same over-interpretation of the smallest moves is at work in criticism of Obama’s interview, which just manages to miss everything that matters.
Update: James Joyner discusses the interview and reactions to it here.
Filed under: foreign policy, politics
9 Responses to “Missing What Is In Plain View”
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To argue otherwise is as if supporters of Taiwan had run around warning that John “War for Quemoy and Matsu†Kennedy was going to abandon Taiwan to the Chinese.
The expression ‘as if’ if seems to imply that this very thing didn’t happen. Was that a deliberate joke?
Damn. The second ‘if’ was a typo.
JFK didn’t abandon Taiwan, but he did sign a nuclear test ban treaty and other agreements with the Russians. Some liberals called this ‘the end of the Cold War’, and hawks were furiously critical. I think it’s fair to say JFK’s policies in office were less hawkish than his campaign rhetoric.
The spectrum along which Obama’s looking to move isn’t from one side toward another, it’s from one feeling to another. He’d like people to be, as you suggest they needn’t be, more nervous. Contrary to the thrust of the international intervention since ‘67, Obama appreciates that both the Israelis and the Palestinians need to feel less secure about their standing in the world if they are going to really entertain the concessions needed for peace.
George Mitchell in this respect was an inspired choice, less immediately for his negotiating capacities than his credibility with European publics and decision-makers. The long-term hope of Palestinian rejectionists rests on an ever growing division btwn the EU and US. His work will thwart the trend in that direction and weaken those arguing that it represents a winning strategy. A more visible, sympathetic engagement also bolsters the Egyptians and others who do not want to encourage Iranian involvement or Palestinian intransigence but who are appalled by the suffering of ordinary Palestinians.
As for Israel, small gestures will induce significant concern. However resilient and resourceful, Israel is keenly aware that its prospects fundamentally depend upon the good will of the outside world. The temperature has to cool only slightly among its stakeholders to consider new positions.
People negotiate most flexibly when they have something to lose as well as something to gain. The President appreciates that a light but perceptible touch is needed to alter the strategies of those we’d like to be bargaining instead of battling.
The Taiwan/Kennedy reference wasn’t exactly a joke. I was trying to compare the way hard-line anticommunists responded to Kennedy by way of showing how misguided their fears were. No doubt Obama will disappoint the hard-liners on Israel who find Bush to be insufficiently zealous and uncompromising in the same way.
[...] I finally got a chance to read Obama’s interview with Al-Arabiya, and I really did not find anything groundbreaking in it. Larison is skeptical: [...]
The notion that this is just a superficial verbal gesture is belief by Obama’s actual words addressing that very notion in the interview:
“But these are just words, and what we need now are actions.”
This is what gets the Muslim world excited. You can of course say that Obama doesn’t really intend to back his words up with action, but since he explicitly says he will indeed back these words up with action, you have to call him a liar to suggest his gesture means nothing. Since your critique of Obama has rested on the notion that we really can take him at his word (meaning that he never actually promises to do anything different from the status quo), when he does promise to do something real (though non-specific), don’t we need to assume that he means it?
This means of course that we should expect Obama to actually do something in the realm of action that is different from Bush and the status quo, and that if he doesn’t, we can say that he’s broken his word. So that’s a meaningful difference already.
What he means when he refers to action is unclear. The responses to Obama’s interview that I find so frustrating are those that assume that the action he is promising is anything like the action they hope/fear he will take. Thus you have J Street folks, such as Daniel Levy (who wrote a very good article for the magazine in the latest issue, btw), citing remarks about Palestinian suffering as if administration policy is going to be any more concerned with alleviating that suffering than Obama was with alleviating Lebanese civilian suffering (i.e., he wasn’t). So, okay, he wants to back up his words with action, but said action is not going to involve major breaks with the status quo. There is nothing in his stated positions that you could not find among the establishment consensus of the Baker-Hamilton Report: two-state solution, talk to regional powers, etc. To my mind, that is a weakness because it doesn’t go far enough, but for most people that should count as a positive thing. What I am trying to stress is how boringly mainstream Obama is, which many on both sides of foreign policy debates seem not to want to believe or regard as some kind of trick. Inevitably that means that, for all of the “language of respect” Obama wants to use, the treatment of many Muslim countries is still going to be heavy-handed and violent.
I would observe in closing that I am being extremely *charitable* to Obama in pushing back against tendentious misreadings of his words. If I thought there was any truth to either interpretation, I would not attack them in these terms, but it does no justice to Obama’s record and his stated policy proposals to pretend that he will follow through in a way that will actually satisfy persuadable and non-radicalized Muslim populations. Neocons used to love to talk about all of the interventions they supported that helped Muslim populations (at the expense of their Christian neighbors), which gave them the confidence that they could support attacks on other Muslim populations without being accused of prejudice or vendetta. The last two administrations have used a lot of “respect” rhetoric while perpetuating policies that do not show that respect. Until proven otherwise, I assume that Obama will continue most of those policies while talking a good game about showing respect.
In general I think it’s fine to be skeptical, but I do think you are continuing to underestimate Obama’s intentions. At the very least it would appear that Obama aspires to change things around considerably, which to him means means changing the status quo itself.
My general sense of Obama is that you are right in that he likes to act within the status quo, but this neglects that he intends to change the status quo itself, to the point where this allows him to do things which previously would have seemed radical, but when he actually does them they seem normal. His election is itself an example of that. I can’t say what he will actually do for muslims, so it’s hard to judge anything at this point, but I do think we can expect him to pursue a strategy in which the “center” is moved to a position that allows him to do things which will not seem very radical when they happen, but which do indeed represent a significant change from previous policies. In fact, by portraying himself at all times as a centrist, bi-partisan broker who stays within the status quo, he can propose all kinds of things and still have them seen as part of the status quo. This is a strategy of having the mountain come to Mohammed, while he seemingly stays in the same place.