Let’s Not Get Carried Away
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As long-time readers know, I have been willing to give Obama credit for his diplomatic moves and his interest in emphasizing conciliatory measures designed to thaw relations with a number of other states that the previous administration had treated mostly as adversaries and threats. I have had positive things to say about his approach towards Russia, his appearance at the Summit of the Americas and, with significant qualifications, even his speech in Cairo, but I cannot think of anything more misleading than to claim that the Lebanese election outcome was meaningfully influenced by the speech in Cairo.
Cynthia Tucker has claimed that the speech had some significant influence:
The president did, it seems, change some minds in the Middle East.
On Sunday, an American-aligned coalition won a surprising victory in Lebanon’s parliamentary elections, pushing back a challenge by Hezbollah, which had been widely expected to win a majority of seats. There were undoubtedly many factors at play — Lebanon’s politics are fractured and Byzantine — but Obama’s well-received speech has been credited with making a difference.
Let us think through this for a minute. Suppose for a moment that it is true that the speech “made a difference” and changed some minds in the region–why do we assume that a March 14 victory is proof of the speech’s influence? What possible connection is there? March 14 is a coalition that was very openly aligned with the previous administration and remains very closely aligned with Saudi interests. It was already the governing coalition. At most, voters stayed with the devils they knew. There had been expectations that they would be defeated, but pre-election predictions can often be mistaken, especially when they do not take increased turnout into account. Perhaps if turnout had remained lower, the outcome would have swung the other way, and Ms. Tucker would now be doing her best to persuade us that Obama’s speech had no influence on the opposition’s victory.
March 14 is a predominantly Druze and Sunni coalition supplemented for the most part by smaller Maronite and other Christian parties. Most everyone seems to agree that it was Aoun’s bungling during the campaign that alienated key Christian votes, who ran into the arms of the governing coalition. To the extent that one can imagine that the speech had any impact on the voting behavior of pivotal Christian voters, I suppose one might identify the reason for this influence on the passing remark Obama made about treatment of Maronites, which might have dovetailed with existing fears about Hizbullah, but it seems awfully strange that this remark would have worked to drive Christian voters away from the largest Christian political organization in the country.
Why else would Christian voters who backed March 14 rather than the opposition coalition, which included Michel Aoun’s Free Patriotic Movement, have come away from a speech that was entirely about Islam and “the Muslim world” with any changed opinions about anything? This is the most generous explanation I can conjure up, and it is a real stretch. Is it not far more reasonable to assume that these voters ignored or simply didn’t care about Obama’s speech and based their decision to switch support to March 14 on their own distaste for Aoun’s cavorting with the Syrians and Iranians? Most of the commentary on Obama’s alleged influence on the Lebanese outcome seems to be little more than examples of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy at work. Lebanon had almost no place in Obama’s speech, much to my dissatisfaction, and except for the reference to the Maronites one would have to look very hard to find any statement that would have been relevant to Lebanese voters.
More to the point, Obama’s supporters and everyone who wants to see a diplomatic track with Iran succeed are doing themselves no favors by playing up the influence of the speech in Lebanon, when Iran figured much more prominently in Obama’s speech and the Iranian election seems unlikely to yield a similarly welcome surprise. If Ahmadinejad loses, it will be in large part because his pie-in-the-sky domestic spending program scarcely materialized, unemployment has worsened and economic conditions remain bad for his core supporters among Iran’s poor. He ran as a sort of economic populist, and has not delivered much to his voters. At the same time, he has played the buffoon in international affairs, which can hardly have helped his image at home. If he still manages to prevail because of the divided opposition, he will be able to claim vindication, and all of the people pushing this far-fetched claim about Obama’s influence in Lebanon will be at pains to say why Obama’s speech could help defeat Hizbullah but failed to do in the Iranian demagogue. The end result will be to judge the effectiveness of Obama’s speech by internal political events in other countries over which he could not possibly have any control and over which he has relatively little influence. It is a guaranteed way to set Obama up for failure, and as has happened so often it is his friends and allies who are doing this to him.
Filed under: foreign policy, politics
Tucker makes a factual error that should be noted. It was a coalition that includes Hezbollah, not Hezbollah itself, that ‘had been widely expected to win a majority of seats’.
I don’t know enough about Lebanese politics to add anything to your analysis. You make a good point about the swing voters being mainly Christian, and so perhaps not likely to be much influenced by Obama’s conciliatory gestures toward ‘the Islamic world’.
The gushing of some Obama supporters reminds me of Bush supporters and the short-lived ‘Arab Spring’.
I wouldn’t necessarily question any of your analysis. You may be spot-on about everything. You obviously know more about Lebanon’s election than I do.
So I’d only say, don’t in general underestimate Obama’s enormous popularity in the Middle East, at least on the street (though I don’t know about Iran or Iraq). As an American (based in the Eastern Province, but traveling around a bit), I’m subject to a steady stream of Arabs and Pakistanis who are all completely intrigued with him and very optimistic about his impact on the world. And they consistently admire America for electing him (while remaining amazed that we did). It’s been an impressive balm, for them!, to the wincing discomfort of the last several years.
So I’m not quibbling with a word of yours, but in your general assessment, don’t underestimate that he is making positive waves in the culture over here. “The street” seems very stirred in a positive way for Obama. (Though I’m personally more in the minimally-positive camp.)
And I actually wouldn’t be surprised if the same waves might very well make a difference in Iran’s elections. Obama is one *less* reason to tolerate Ahmadinejad, “the devil they know but no longer need.” I don’t mean at ALL to pump up Obama by saying that. I’m just saying that the sea change in attitude toward America is really unambiguous around here. That’s bound to factor into some elections at some levels.
Tangentially, I happened to see this today…
TPM has a collection of other neocons, generally freaking out that they will loose their boogeman. Interventionists are happy to have liars on the other side of the table– all the better to forgo the table in the first place, I suppose.
Obama can at least present the image that he’s honestly stating US interests and ambitions, which, disagree with them you might, he is doing. It is the bare minimum he can do, but it must be done before anything else happens. It might or might not have an effect on elections, but nothing other than the plain truth, free of stupid threats, will have any positive effect at all.
Obviously foreign relations figure into elections in some way, just as they do into ours; but like our election showed, its mostly economic and domestic matters that determine the final lever to be pulled in the ballot box. Foreign policy might have something to do with this, if you’re a country that is suffering sanctions or something of the like, or in need of foreign capital (both of which Iran is), but its hard to see how most people on the street see that. It is hard to imagine that many Iranian’s, outside of a kind of managerial middle-class, view foreign investment and/or cooperation as lynchpins to their economic future.
Then theres always the good retort that the Supreme Leader always holds all the cards anyways. It being a rather opaque system they have, we have no idea how much of what Ahmadinejad did was approved or un-approved; its doubtful we’ll ever know. Is the Supreme Leader the true puppet master everyone accuses him of being, or is merely an Islamic version of Queen Elizabeth? That would require far more information than any of us has.
Daniel don’t you get it? Obama is magic.
I find this quote quite humorous, but I wonder if the author intended it that way.
Lebanon’s politics are actually a bit more Damascene than Byzantine. And the problem, most people agree, is that they are simply not sufficiently Levantine.
I’m here all week, try the veal!
I am Lebanese, and I voted for the March 14 coalition last Sunday. I think that the author of the article is correct is saying that Obama’s speech wasn’t the cause of the March 14 elections victory, in the sense that, had Obama not given the speech at all, the outcome of the elections would have been the same, most probably. However, it would be too easy to discount Obama’s new approach in general and its influence on these elections and the region. During the Bush Administration, almost every word that came out of the mouth of a Bush administration official was used in Hezbollah propaganda, (for instance, Condoleezza Rice’s “Birth pangs of a new Middle East” or Bush’s “With us or Against Us). And one has to admit that the speeches and the declarations of the Bush administration officials offered ample amounts of rhetorical ammunition to Hezbollah. They were able to use this successfully to recruit people even among Sunnis. Now, with Obama, Hezbollah have a much tougher job to do. They really did try to attack his speech just before the elections, they said that a country that was built on “the genocide of the native indian tribes of America” had no business proposing solutions in the middle east, but this fell on deaf ears. It would have been entirely different if Obama had said something stupid like Bush’s famous “Bring ‘em on”. I am not even claiming that such a stupid declaration would have made the Sunnis vote for Hezbollah, as I believe this wouldn’t have happened in any case, but certainly it would have disgusted a large number of them of the pro-Western side and they wouldn’t have voted.