The Prisoner In The White House Norman Birnbaum

The Prisoner In The White House

Norman Birnbaum

After a year in office, the President seems---rather like most of his predecessors—a prisoner in the White House. The New York Times, not conspicuous for its irony, has just written that, other matters permitting, he hopes to do something about unemployment. Failure to reverse it would indeed make his re-election very difficult---but he is severely constrained by the weight of his inheritance.

The obsession of the foreign and military policy apparatus with its self-perpetuating as well as self-destructive invention, the war on terror, is hardly evidence for its perspacity—and raises suspicions about the motives of some of the more intelligent of its members The major problems we face are: the proliferation of cultural, economic, ethnic, political and religious conflicts across borders in the absence of anything like reliable institutions of global governance, actual and potential struggles over access to markets and raw materials, major changes in economic capacity, wealth and power between the continents (with the European Union and the United States no longer occupying the commanding heights), the threats of irreversible environmental damage.

The problem of maintaining the high American standard of living is far larger, and far more difficult, than the problems of security—the more so, as many of our national conceptions of security rest on unrealistic notions of invulnerability. Our nation over time has been painfully knit together, but at the moment its cultural and ideological divisions are very acute. What we have of consensus has generally come from economic gains allowing the political and social integration of groups otherwise in conflict, or at least, encouraging explicit or tacit periods of truce in our own war of each against all. We may soon import superior Chinese railway systems (just over a hundred years after importing Chinese peasants to build our own)-- a change in the division of international labor with real and symbolic consequences for the society which describes itself as “the greatest nation on earth?” Some of the change has already taken place, undermining somewhat the conviction that the rest of the world wants nothing so much as American hegemony.

When I studied at the Harvard graduate school (1947-52), with my fellow students figures like Bundy,Huntington, Kaysen, Kissinger (as well as rather different persons like Bellah and Geertz ), the reigning ideas had to do with “modernization”---a thoroughly narcissistic view in which there was no need to persuade other nations to imitate us since, given half a chance, they would wish to do so. That the world was marching toward a secular and progressive future, a society of consumption with large amounts of cultural choice, was an item of faith, if with nuances. Kissinger wondered if the US were tough enough for the struggles necessary before the golden age dawned, Bundy was worried that the nation might take democracy so seriously as to dispense with the leadership of those so obviously qualified to exercise it, like the Bundys. That in the less academic neighbourhoods of Cambridge (and in most of the rest of the country) our fellow citizens had radically different conceptions of the nation did not trouble the prophets of Harvard and MIT.

The Cold War did not defend an American way of life , it became the American way of life. National mobilization for the wars in Korea and Vietnam, an enormous expansion of the military and political apparatus, considerable anxiety over resistance without and dissent within, and the singular denials and deformations entailed by preparation for nuclear war produced an atmosphere in which apocalyptic visions and banal careerism merged, The New Deal legacy remained intact, right through Nixon’s Presidency, and a labor force in which one of three workers was unionized was able to claim a decent share of national product. International economic institutions the US had designed and still controlled contributed to the maintenance of economic supremacy.

The post-war decades certainly brought positive changes in our nation, the integration of the descendants of the great wave of immigration between the Civil War and the World War, a large improvement in the condition of women, and a remarkable increase in racial equality. The years 1945-90 also brought problems now very acute. Manufacturing peaked and then declined, our educational system bi-bifurcated into one with the most effective universities and the most under performing schools in the industrial world, our sense of a national mission rigidified into an ethnocentric triumphalism. The party of progress remained dominant, but broke in two. More than one half of the nation considered that the American revolution had been achieved, it remained to defend it against the envious and the evil. A considerable minority insisted on the uncompleted tasks of the twentieth century project of social reform---and on the danger to the US

of exploitation and oppression elsewhere. Meanwhile, at least a fourth of the citizenry are political and religious fundamentalists. They think climate change an invention by arrogant scientists, resent those who too obviously think in ideas of more than one syllable, conceive of government as coercive and threatening, respond to immigration with xenophobia, and do not accept the legitimacy of the President. In a situation of intensified political polarization (for all of the President’s appeal to reason) they constitute the Republicans’ mass of political maneuver, and account for the opposition party’s decision to seek the political destruction of the President. The irresistible rage which moves the fundamentalists is something other than a critical view of the stratification of the nation and the concentration of power in it. They know enough to sense the contempt and exploitativeness with which our elites treat them. . .

The end of the Cold War brought not a respite but new problems which dismayed much of American opinion, since they seemed by comparison with the confrontation with the USSR intractable. and for many, inexplicable. (“Why do they hate us?”) Obama’s intentions of making a new beginning (reconciliation with the Muslim world, cooperative relationships with China and Russia as well as the EU, recognition of the weight of Brazil and India, negotiations with Iran and more equidistance between Israel and the Palestinians) met several sorts of resistance. That large part of the society which does not read Foreign Affairs (circulation, 145,000) remained sceptical. Attached to a view of the world in which the United States was in command, it was unresponsive to the necessity of multilateralism---and considered recourse to force of one or another kind part of the order of social nature. The so-called foreign policy community (academics, bureaucrats, journalists, politicians and their staffs, military officers and those in business, finance, the professions with vocational interests beyond our borders) is not a community at all but a set of exponents of quite antagonistic ideological and material interests—united, of course, in wishing to retain its monopolization of the political agenda.

It has been unusually difficult for the President to form and achieve control of his government. A US President names some five thousand officials, his own staff apart.

The process is preposterously cumbersome, the requisite approval in the Senate slow and often delayed or blocked by the Republicans. There is, for instance, no State Department official in charge of Latin American policy. The nominee has been blocked because of the President’s open disapproval of the coup d’etat in Honduras. (Staff appointments do not require Senatorial approval but are subject to extreme critical scrutiny by the opposition which has obliged the President to relinquish some of his initial choices.) Several hundred are in the areas of foreign and military policy. The President in re-appointing Robert Gates as Secretary of Defense and naming Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State sought persons who would protect him against the very large capacities of the apparatus to sabotage Presidents---and who would also serve as guarantors of his innovative projects insofar as possible. Those possibilities have not been very large and are not becoming larger.

Gates, who will stay for another year, was chosen because he had with former Secretary Rice drawn away from the unremitting aggressivity and unilateralism of Cheney—and, prevented Israel from attacking in Iran in 2008. Gates wrote a doctoral dissertation on Soviet foreign policy, and was a relatively competent CIA Director in an office which fells most of its incumbents, He insists on the indispensable political aspects of military action. That, to be sure, is what the newer generation of admirals and generals (most in possession of advanced degrees from the universities) thinks—the question being, what sort of politics are at issue? Gates thinks that US military operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan can temporarily neutralize adverse political circumstances, giving political processes (and long term projects of reconstruction) time to set matters right. He rebuked (if softly) the US commander in Afghanistan, the special forces general, McChrystal—who had openly challenged the President on the number of troops to be sent to Afghanistan. McChrystal had previously overseen in Iraq the selective killing of adversaries of the occupation, as well as the bribery of others. Under Nuernberg criteria, he would be at severe judicial risk.

The President engaged in a long and somewhat audible period of reflection with his advisers on Afghanistan, and finally sent McChrystal a large number of troops---accompanied by a very weak undertaking to start withdrawal in 2011. Given Afghanistan’s capacity to defeat invaders who intrude on its perpetual civil war, it is exceedingly unlikely that the American military operation there will succeed. The President is threatened by entrapment in a situation which can only worsen. He has explicitly denied the similarity to Vietnam, but the similarity is obvious. Kennedy refused the military and political advice he was given and was on the point of withdrawing US forces from Vietnam before he was murdered, possibly on that account. Neither Johnson or Nixon or Ford could extricate themselves before total defeat. Whatever their geopolitical miscalculations (and they were considerable) their primary motivation was fear of domestic political criticism.

Actually, Obama may have had more scope for reducing the American engagement than he allowed himself: now it is probably too late. The public is not enthusiastic about the Afghan war, and is incessantly told on television that the real problem is in any case Pakistan.Some senior Congressional figures have criticised the escalation in Afghanistan, and we may have a debate on its funding. The attempted destruction of an airliner over Michigan has shifted attention to Yemen, an environment even more inhospitable to intervention than Afghanistan and Pakistan. The President finds himself making war in five Muslim nations: Iraq, where little is clear except that Iranian influence has greatly increased, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. He had previously called for increased US involvement in Africa—but instead of a program of development (in which China is already an effective competitor) the US may find itself engaged in a limitless struggle against Islamism there too.

Who, on a daily basis, helps the President in these circumstances? The staff of the National Security Council is quite large and in effect it is a miniaturized intelligence agency and Department of Defense and State, with some domestic security functions as well. It is staffed by a mixture of diplomatic, intelligence and military officers and others recruited from the congressional staffs and the universities. The National Security Advisor, the former NATO commander General Jones, casts himself as a bureaucratic coordinator. The President is his own strategist —with occasional public interventions by the Vice-President, who was the Chair of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, and who thinks (correctly) that most US foreign military and political ventures end either badly or ambiguously.

Senator Kerry, as his successor at the head of the Committee, seeks a large public role but is curiously reluctant to express decided opinions. The Chair of the House International Relations Committee, Congressman Berman of Los Angeles, is a persistent ally of Israel His opposite number, the senior Republican member, Congresswoman Ros-Lethinen of Florida, is the voice of those of the Cuban emigres who wish no opening to Cuba. The Chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Senator Levin, is aware of the need to control both the costs of the military budget and the Napoleonic fantasies of some of the senior officers. What he says is rational and reflective, which accounts for the fact that he is not much listened to, a condition he shares with the Vice-President.

Much of the experience, intelligence and talent in the National Security Council seems often not to rise through a compartmentalized and hierarchic structure to end in the Oval Office,. The President has recurred, clearly, to his domestic political advisers---whose interest is in the immediate domestic consequences of foreign policy decision. The chief of staff, former Illinois Congressman Rahm Emanuel, is a very strong supporter of the right in Israel, from which his family emigrated. The senior political advisor, David Axelrod, appears to have been more skilled at elections than at governance. In any event, he has no foreign policy profile.

Secretary of State Clinton has surprised critics of her conventionalized foreign policy utterances as Senator and Presidential candidate. She has demonstrated not only a grasp of the ambiguity and complexity of issues like human rights, and nuclear proliferation, but a willingness to undertake the education of a public usually exposed to vulgar simplifications. On problems of economic and social development and relations with, variously, China, Iran, Russia, she expresses the multilateralism, the emphasis on collective security and long term negotiation, of the progressive Democrats, It remains to be seen what influence she will have on the President himself. Perhaps she has not abandoned intentions of running again for the Presidency, either in 2012 should Obama decide to retire or in 2016 should he win re-election. If so, she seems to think that the views originally uttered by the President from which he has at times walked or run away might still have political advantages. As long as she is in office, of course, she cannot contravene the President.

His Cairo speech promised reconciliation with the Muslim world. The President’s recent reluctant repetition of the rigid language of the war on terror, if with warnings about the priority of liberty, is evidence of how difficult the project has become. The campaigns of assassination in Afghanistan, Pakistan and now Yemen—whether by attacks from the air or by American special forces and their local allies ---may or may not eliminate important cadres of Al Qaeda. They are certain to inflame broad fronts of resistance. American reflection on the origins of Muslim disaffection amongst the Muslim diaspora communities in Europe and the US is mostly absent—and what there is of it is often marked by shallowness when it is not pure charlatanry. The very language of discussion

assumes that there is a unitary movement against the west which has nothing to do with the imperial European past or expansionist American present.

The American alliance with the Pakistan army is exceedingly troubled, relations with Turkey and even the Saudi royal family are strained. US pressure on Israel to take serious steps toward negotiation with the Palestinians is so ambiguous that different parts of the government do and say different things. Still, the special envoy for Israel and Palestine, Senator Mitchell, has threatened Israel with reductions in economic aid---a step not actually taken by a US government since the senior Bush and Secretary Baker dared to do so two decades ago. US projects to exact flexibility from Israel have usually been sabotaged by Israel’s supporters in the government and the Congress

The situation is different now in three respects. It is difficult to imagine the President, if he wishes to advance his general plan for reconciliation, accepting further rebuffs from Israel The American Jewish community is itself increasingly divided, with the monopoly of leadership hitherto exercised by those who unhesitatingly take instructions from west Jerusalem challenged. Meanwhile, the previously restrained restiveness of other segments of US opinion, particularly in the foreign policy apparatus,.has become more audible: barriers to critical discussion of Israel’s disproportionately influence in the US are being lowered.

It is true that even a full and rapid solution to the problems between Israel and the Palestinians will not end the many conflicts between the US and the Muslim world

Without it, however, other changes remain both improbable and unlikely to last.

Israel’s supporters , meanwhile, are intent on maintaining tensions between the US and the Muslim nations---and on supporting aggressive unilateralism in general.

It is to the President’s credit that he has indeed left open the possibility of treating Israel in terms of independent criteria of our national interest. In a long delaying action, he has held off the demands by Israel (and the entire spectrum of unilateralists) to attack Iran. The delay has allowed Iran’s domestic crisis to surface. China and Russia may profit from an eventual American confrontation with Iran, but a new Mideast conflagration would hardly leave them untouched. It does not follow that they will support sanctions but it is likely that they will assist the President in extending negotiations with Iran (even indirect ones) as ,long as possible.

The President has been bitterly criticised for his supposed recalcitrance to press China and Russia, as well as Iran and Cuba and Venezuela, on human rights. Many of the critics are unconditional apologists for Israel’s occupation of Palestine, many are quite selective in their (feigned or real) moral indignation. Obama’s experience of the world, his Kenyan and Indonesian families (as well as American origins in New Deal Kansas) have taught him, clearly, that the world does not tell time to American clocks. What he has not done, yet, is to embark on a serious and sustained campaign to re-educate the nation. He has not stated with the bluntness of John Kennedy (10 June 1963) that as we share the world with others, we cannot impose our model of society upon all or most of them. He has hinted at this, his omnipresence on the international stage (as in his admirably unscripted intervention at the Copenhagen climate conference) is intended to demonstrate to the nation that there are profound and permanent grounds for responding to the world in ways which mark a rupture with the assumptions that prevailed since 1945---but the nation has not gotten the message.

One reason is, of course, the conviction by many in the foreign policy apparatus (and those who seek to join it) that they can justify their privileges only by accepting (whether they believe these or not) the assumptions of ordinary citizens. It is an interesting question as to why a nation composed of immigrants (still a majority from Europe) should be so ignorant of other nations and their histories. It is unclear, indeed, how much of authentic as opposed to mythicised American history they know. When we add to the elite’s rejection of Burke’s conception of their legislative functions their frequent dependence on ideological and material interest groups of every kind, we can apprehend their anxious immobility in a world escaping their understanding and their control.

It is regrettable that, neither in domestic or foreign policy, has Obama been willing to experiment with calling to government at least a few of our own dissidents—

or even those who take the dissidents seriously. He allowed the Israel lobby to block the appointment as Chair of the National Intelligence Council of Chas Freeman, a former Foreign Service Officer in direct line of descent from Kennan. He allowed his White House staff to force the departure of his own Counsel, the experienced and reflective foreign policy veteran Gregory Craig. His error was to have insisted on more rigorous adherence to the Constitutional protection of freedom than his colleagues thought compatible with the anxious state of public opinion. (Craig, probably, will be called back in some future, and inevitable moment of crisis.)

In explanation, if not defense, of the President –he cannot be expected, alone, to reverse the accumulated errors and illusions of the last century. Our admirals and generals are definitely not fighting the last war: some recognize that they have new ones to lead.(The President is fortunate, in fact, to have as the Chief of the Joint Chiefs of Staff the intelligent Admiral Mullen---who has dared to say on national television that the nation’s financial stringency will compel new forms of military economy.) Many of their civilian colleagues in the foreign policy elite are victims of their own self-importance---and are sufficiently at one with ordinary citizens to share their ethnocentric provincialism. A grotesque peculiarity of American argument has intensified: those most strident in calling for “strength” have never been in the military, whose officers are usually far more restrained. . There is something of moral onanism about the desktop heroes.

The President is constrained, too, by the domestic situation. Unemployment is at a nominal ten and probably an actual thirteen percent, one of eight Americans (and one of four children) are using government food stamps. His majorities in the Senate and House are uncertain, as numbers of Democratic legislators represent districts which voted for McCain and in any case, reject the New Deal’s welfarist and internationalist legacy.

Chinese officials, and not alone they, have called into question the continuing capacity of the US to pay its debts. Severe budget reductions which would reduce our substantial welfare state, however, would increase the present domestic despair and its accompanying tensions with possibly damaging consequences for our democratic institutions.

That the President has not, in the situation, called for a re-evaluation of our costly military and political expansionism (we have one thousand bases in over one hundred countries) is evidence for his caution. In his autobiography, he evoked two learning experiences. As a younger community organizer in Chicago, he learned to admire the older black pastors in an impoverished and under-privileged community: they knew that they could not do much for their congregants, minimal gains apart, but they kept at their tasks. He later reflected on what he had learned of the law at Harvard. Its function, he said, was to inform those at the bottom that things were so arranged that they were bound to remain there. Very occasionally, however, the law could be used to improve matters

Were Obama to act less like a minimalist, his life might be in more danger than it is in already. Given the onslaught of hatred and stupidity he faces, however, he might be led to appeal over the heads of our elites to the majority which a year ago gave him their confidence and is now, clearly, disappointed. In this setting, one would wish for strong support for American alternatives from Europe. Alas, the only European voices recently heard here in Washington were those of Bildt and Rasmussen (in the Washington Post on 8 January) assuring the US of Europe’s inexpungable solidarity with the American Afghanistan invasion. It is possible to imagine an article yet more unrealistic and servile—but only with difficulty.