SmartRemarks

Wednesday was Barack Obama’s 100th day in office. Everyone else has been talking about it. Why not me?

A hundred days is a pretty arbitrary number, of course. But ever since FDR used it as a marker in 1933 for taking quick action against the Depression, it’s been a convenient hook on which to hang stories about new presidents. Few of them compare to FDR, of course. Then again, few are up against the kind of problems he was.

These days, though, the times make the comparison seem a bit more apropos.

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We’re all welcoming the arrival of spring, but in the Persian world, it’s not just a change of seasons, it’s a major holiday, a new year celebration known as Nowruz. And President Obama seized that occasion today to release a public message to the people and government of Iran, focusing on the theme of new beginnings in relations between Iran and the United States.

The three-minute message (released in English but with Farsi subtitles) can be viewed here or read here. It’s no understatement to call it a rhetorical masterstroke.

Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria wrote a column last week that elicited considerable debate, in which he framed Obama as moving to reverse the Bush administration’s “imperial foreign policy”:

As George W. Bush’s term ended, he had few defenders left in the world of foreign policy. Mainstream commentators almost unanimously agreed the Bush years had been marked by arrogance and incompetence. “Mr. Bush’s characteristic failing was to apply a black-and-white mind-set to too many gray areas of national security and foreign affairs,” The Post editorialized. … There was hope that President Obama would abandon some of his predecessor’s rigid ideological stances.

In its first 50 days, the Obama administration has naturally been consumed by the economic crisis, but it has nevertheless made some striking shifts in foreign policy. Obama announced the closure of Guantanamo and the end of any official sanction for torture. He gave his first interview as president to an Arab network and spoke of the importance of respect when dealing with the Muslim world — a gesture that won him rave reviews from normally hostile Arab journalists and politicians.

These initial steps are all explorations in the right direction — deserving of praise, one might think. But no, the Washington establishment is mostly fretting, dismayed in one way or another by these moves. The conservative backlash has been almost comical in its fury. … 

The problem with American foreign policy goes beyond George Bush. It includes a Washington establishment that has gotten comfortable with the exercise of American hegemony and treats compromise as treason and negotiations as appeasement. Other countries can have no legitimate interests of their own. The only way to deal with them is by issuing a series of maximalist demands. This is not foreign policy; it’s imperial policy. And it isn’t likely to work in today’s world.

Zakaria’s certainly right about the overreaction from the establishment. It’s as if, after years of demonstrating how their approach = Epic Fail, the neocons nevertheless can’t fathom the idea that someone might want to try a different approach. For my own part, though, I’ve found Obama’s foreign policy to be not nearly as divergent from Bush’s as it ought to be:  too much of it seems like a continuation rather than a repudiation. For every overture toward Russia about useless missile shields on on side, there’s a risky buildup in Afghanistan on the other.

Nevertheless, as Zakaria accurately notes, Obama has at least taken some “steps… in the right direction.” And this is a huge one. As Glenn Greenwald puts it, “it’s inconceivable that anything like this video would have been possible at any point during the last eight years.”

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I’d been meaning for  several days to write about the Obama administration’s appointment of Charles (Chas) Freeman to the chairmanship of the National Intelligence Council. It was a praiseworthy choice that promised new perspectives on foreign intelligence and international relations… and therefore, unsurprisingly, it was controversial in certain corners. But I hadn’t gotten to it yet when the news broke this past Wednesday that, in the face of a barrage of criticism from those corners, Freeman had withdrawn his name from consideration for the position.mild

This is a huge disappointment. It’s also a harbinger of policy battles to come. So I’m still going to write about it. Settle in, this is going to be a long one…

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President Barack Obama. Has a nice feeling as it rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it?

It feels like taking a deep breath of fresh, clean air after eight years of holding your breath.

This kind of enthusiasm about the inauguration of a new president is unlike anything in living memory—certainly not mine, at least, and I’ve heard the same thing from folks considerably older. It’s a wonder to behold.

Obama’s name and image are everywhere. He’s on book and magazine covers, he’s on banners hanging over city sidewalks. He’s on soda bottles and baseball caps, coffee mugs and children’s drawings on refrigerators. At the gym yesterday I saw a young woman wearing a T-shirt reading “I (heart) Obama.” Major newspapers have published extra print runs of their Nov. 5 victory editions to sell off at $5 or $10 a pop.

Americans are ready, more than ready, to feel optimistic and idealistic again. After eight years of oppressive despair and decline, the country has (not for the first time in its history) won itself a second chance, a chance to correct the errors of its ways… and proved it deserved that chance, all at the same stroke… by the actions of its citizens at the ballot box.

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At a time of year when most of the rest of the civilized world has been trying to observe a little peace and goodwill, the government of Israel has apparently decided this is a good time to launch “an all-out war to the bitter end” against Hamas… and thus, by extension, against the population of Gaza.

The timing raises questions for reasons that go beyond the season. We’re six weeks away from Israeli elections, in which the right-wing Likud party is favored to win control away from the centrist coalition behind outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert… so there’s the possibility that the current regime is trying to score political points for toughness. We’re three weeks away from Barack Obama’s inauguration, and some White House insiders speculate that Israel’s action was timed to finish before the current administration leaves; others are more cynical, like Middle East scholar Aaron David Miller, quoted as saying “this takes the already slim chance of an early, active and successful Obama engagement on Israel-Palestinian peace and lowers it to about zero.”

Let me stipulate, in order to sidestep the usual straw-man deflections:  Yes, I agree that it’s also bad for Hamas to be lobbing rockets across the border into Israel. And no, I’m not anti-Semitic in any way, shape, or form. However, none of that, nor any possible reason or rationalization Israel may have, either public or private, changes the fact that these bombings are an absolutely unconscionable and illegal act on Israel’s part.

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So, who will Barack Obama appoint to the cabinet and other key positions in his incoming administration?

To stipulate something up front: nobody really knows. When Obama and his transition team are ready to make announcements, they’ll announce them. All we can do at this point is speculate.

So, let’s speculate!

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Interesting news today:

US prepared to accept reconciliation with Taliban

The United States Defense Secretary Robert Gates says the Bush administration would be prepared to reconcile with the Taliban if the Afghan government pursued talks to end the war.

However, he says there’s no chance of any negotiations with Osama Bin Laden’s al Qaeda organisation.

Mr Gates says reconciliation could be the political end to the conflict in Afghanistan, but it must happen on the Afghan government’s terms and the Taliban must subject itself to the sovereignty of the government.

Now, reading between the lines, what this says to me is that the Afghan government is already on board, and talks have already begun under its auspices, through intermediaries. This would never have hit the press if things weren’t at least that far along. It’s obviously a fig leaf for the U.S. needing to withdraw from an untenable situation, where we have too few troops on the ground to control the country and no more available to send in. With a depression nipping at our heels, we can’t afford this kind of adventurism any more (much less the nation-building that comes with it), so it’s time to try to save face and get out as soon as possible.

(That we never should have invaded or occupied the country in the first place, when all we needed was some international pressure along with small, targeted police actions designed to weed out bin Laden and the al Qaeda leadership, is of course never even discussed. This is something about which I definitely disagree with Obama:  we can’t “win” in Afghanistan, no matter what strategy we pursue there. Outsiders never win in Afghanistan.)

Bush can spend years insisting that it’s wrong to sit down with our enemies (wasting billions of dollars and countless lives along the way, all while driving our country into an economic ditch), and he and his party can lambaste Obama for proposing such a naive thing as diplomacy with other nations… but as soon as he’s really up against the wall and needs to cover his ass (pardon the mixed metaphor), suddenly (even with an “evil” organization) formal talks are just fine.

(Just as they were before 9/11, of course, when the U.S. was perfectly happy to deal with the Taliban, even having delegations come to our shores, for no better cause than the hope that it would help facilitate a Unocal oil pipeline.)

Even when Bush stumbles into doing the right thing, it’s for all the wrong reasons, and with a worse result than he could have achieved by leaving things alone in the first place.