I will never desert you, one recalls, is the message that Barack Obama conveyed to Secretary of the Treasury Hank Paulson (when Obama was still a candidate); to the banks and financial firms (in February 2009); to Dick Cheney and the torture lawyers (in his National Archives Speech of May 2009); to General David Petraeus (in the months preceding the 2009 administration review of the Afghan War); to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu via the Israeli defense minister Ehud Barak (in the summer of 2009); and to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (in February 2011).
The need to give assurance seems to be an inseparable trait of Obama's character. He deals with big decisions by first moving to cement a secure alliance with the powers-that-be, no matter how discredited they are, no matter how resounding his previous contempt for them may have been. Yet this is a reflex that often prematurely cedes control to the powerful over whom he might otherwise be in a position to exert leverage. That fight, however, is not for him.
To say it another way, Obama visibly hates crisis. He is so averse to the very idea of instability that he seems unable to use a crisis to his advantage. Seldom, to judge by the evidence thus far, is he the first, second, or third person in the room to recognize that a state of crisis exists. The hesitation that looked like apathy and the hyper-managerial tone of his response to the BP oil spill offered a vivid illustration of this trait. Egypt brought out the same pattern.
How did the statements and actions of the president and his advisers strike Egyptian demonstrators who were risking their lives for freedom? A February 6th story in the New York Times by Kareem Fahim, Mark Landler, and Anthony Shadid concluded that "the moves amounted to a rebuff to the protesters," and added that this was the way things looked to those in Tahrir Square: "By emphasizing the need for a gradual transition, only days after emphasizing that change there must begin immediately, the Obama administration was viewed as shifting away from the protesters in the streets and toward stronger backing for Mr. Mubarak's hand-picked elite."
To capture the zig-zag path of American policy over the 18 days before Mubarak fell is not an easy task; but it is fair to say that the administration went from thinking the protests signified next to nothing, to pleading for an orderly transition, to emphasizing the necessary slowness of an orderly transition, to upbraiding Mubarak for so obviously standing in place, to rejoicing at the triumph of liberty. All this, in the course of just over two weeks.
Why could the U.S. not speak with a single voice? We say the word "democracy" and invoke its prestige with such careless fluency that we are surprised when we see its face. But here, the embarrassment was not only public and diplomatic, it was also personal and sentimental. A dictator through long acquaintance may become a familiar and comforting associate. In the second week of February, it emerged that Wisner's law firm, Patton Boggs, had handled arbitration and litigation on behalf of Mubarak's government, and that Secretary of State Clinton had said as recently as March 2009: "I really consider President and Mrs. Mubarak to be friends of my family."
Our Empire and Our Election Cycles
If American officials looking at Egypt felt themselves "cabined, cribbed, confined," anyone who knew the history of our Middle East policy could see the immediate cause. There was also a mediate cause, so ubiquitous as to be easily forgotten. This was, of course, Israel and the constant presence of Israel in American politics. In the last three months alone, Sarah Palin made public plans for a trip to Israel, and the Christian Zionist Mike Huckabee said that the U.S. ought to "encourage the Israelis to build as much as they can and as rapidly as they can" on the West Bank and in East Jerusalem.
Nor has Barack Obama been indifferent to such pressures. In earlier years, he expressed unmistakable sympathy for the cause of Palestinian independence; but the story changed in 2008, as he entered the last leg of the race for president. In a speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), in June of that year, Obama made an astonishing pledge with religious overtones: the American commitment to Israeli security was, he said, "sacrosanct." On his way to the White House, Obama purged his advisorate of figures like Robert Malley and Zbigniew Brzezinski who were deemed unsuitable by the Israel lobby.
Then, in June 2009, he made his celebrated Cairo speech, with its message of hope and sympathy for the progress of a liberal Muslim society. There at Cairo University, Obama called for a halt both to Palestinian terror and the Israeli occupation. Soon after, Hillary Clinton reiterated the demand that Israel enforce a complete stop to the building of settlements, with no exceptions for "outposts" or "natural growth."
Benjamin Netanyahu simply defied these grave utterances; and he soon found he could do so with impunity. By the end of that summer, Obama had been persuaded to let pass in quiet disapproval anything Israel chose to do. The mid-term elections were now drawing close; and Obama apparently judged it expedient to have his Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and family photographed on a visit to the Golan Heights.
Yet the ascent of the administration to that perfection of embarrassment was gradual and its stages deserve to be remembered. When, in March 2010, Vice President Joe Biden paid a visit to Israel (saying "It's good to be home"), he was greeted by an announcement from the interior ministry that it had approved the construction of 1,600 new building units for Jews in East Jerusalem: a calculated insult to President Obama. This led Biden to issue a public rebuke of Netanyahu, and Hillary Clinton to restate the administration's anti-settlement policy. A request by Netanyahu to visit the White House was subsequently refused.
Netanyahu, however, realized that such embarrassment would eventually work to his advantage. By the end of May, thoughts of the mid-term election were coming to the fore in Washington. Without Israeli policy having changed in any way, the Obama administration began to warm up. The election-sensitive nature of this thaw was borne out by the revelation, in January 2011, that the White House had been dealing with Ehud Barak in preference to Netanyahu; that it had been charmed by his competence, seduced by his promises, and was now "furious" at his non-performance in the peace process.
So the pattern has been: a step toward pressure on Israel, followed by a step back into the arms of the Israel lobby -- the second step coinciding with an upcoming election cycle. The 2012 election and its financing are already much on Obama's mind. Unhappily for him, Turkey, Brazil, and other countries sympathetic to the Palestinian cause chose this moment to put forward a U.N. resolution condemning the Israeli occupation of conquered lands and designating Israel's settlements there "illegal."
Again, there was an embarrassed phone call from Obama, this time to Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority. Could the PA put off the vote? Or, if there had to be a U.N. statement, did it have to commit the U.S. to a legally binding resolution? But Abbas himself had lost confidence in Obama and his own reputation had recently been badly tarnished by WikiLeaks revelations of the PA's capitulation to past American requests. The settlements were in any case in violation of international law, specifically article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention which states: "The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies." Abbas accordingly rebuffed Obama's entreaty for a milder resolution and the American president suffered the embarrassment of issuing his first veto in the U.N. in utter defiance of the hopes expressed so eloquently in his Cairo speech.
But the interlude was not over. For Obama could not bear to stand as the sole obstacle (alongside Israel) to a unanimous vote in favor of the resolution without making it clear that he did so with a bad conscience. The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, offered the explanation in public in a speech that managed to concede almost every particular the resolution had specified: "Continued settlement activity violates Israel's international commitments, devastates trust between the parties, and threatens the prospects for peace."
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