BY GEORGE PACKER
CREDITPHOTOGRAPH BY YOUSSEF BOUDLAL/REUTERS
In his first year in office, President Obama gave two speeches—one in Cairo, the other in Oslo—that bear directly on the crisis in the Middle East today.The Cairo speech, in June, 2009, offered a message of peace and coöperation between America, the West, and the Muslim world. It sketched an optimistic vision of the future based on principles of mutual respect, tolerance, human development, and democracy. It quoted verses of the Koran to claim Islam as a religion devoted to these principles. The Cairo speech, coming just five months into his Presidency, depended heavily on Obama’s rhetorical power—and on the very fact of his Presidency as a world-changing event. Not only was he not George W. Bush, he was a black President with the middle name Hussein, who had opposed the Iraq War and spent time in places like Indonesia and Pakistan. It was like a campaign speech directed at Muslims. There was very little follow-up in the way of policies and programs. Today, from Tripoli to Raqqa, from Mosul to Ghazni, from Karachi back to Cairo, that speech is in tatters.
It turned out that the winding down of the American war in Iraq, and the end of the Bush torture policy, and a hands-off approach toward internal conflict in countries like Egypt, Syria, and Iran, did not create the space for a new partnership between the United States and the Muslim world, or allow for positive change within those societies. It’s hard to think of a worse year in modern history for the life conditions of Muslims internationally than 2014 (and there’s been plenty of competition). This has very little to do with what Obama and the United States have done this year—or, more often, failed to do. It turned out that there were violent, intolerant, destabilizing forces within Muslim societies that go deeper and farther back than recent American actions and policies.
It’s very hard for Americans to accept that we are not the root cause of all the world’s good or evil. A kind of nationalistic narcissism joins the left and the right in a common delusion: the first believes that American support for Israel and the invasion of Iraq are behind all the turmoil in the Middle East today; the second sees American ideals and military might as the answer to that turmoil. If only we’d stay the hell out; if only we’d go all in. Both views have a piece of the truth but far from the whole thing, and they share the mistake of denying people in the region their own agency. It’s undeniable that the invasion of Iraq created the vacuum in which Al Qaeda has flourished, and that American support for dictators, from the Shah of Iran to the Saudi royal family, has stoked discontent around the region. It’s also the case that, without American leadership, there would be no international coalition against the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham like the one Obama has belatedly formed.
But the original sources of the extreme violence and social disintegration in North Africa, the Middle East, and South and Central Asia are bad government (autocratic, sectarian, corrupt); marginalized, undereducated, economically deprived publics; and homegrown or imported religious ideas within Islam that turn mass murder into an obligation of the faithful. The first two are common enough around the world. It’s the third that turns ordinary misery into the region’s brand of endless horror.
In December of 2009, Obama gave another major foreign-policy address, when he received the Nobel Prize for Peace. Everyone knew at the time that the prize had not been earned, and the President said as much in his acceptance speech. It was a case of Europeans allowing their hopes and affections to get the better of them—they loved Obama; they were thrilled that Bush was gone, and that the nightmare of the post-September 11th years seemed to be ending. Almost five years later, what do those members of the Norwegian parliament now think of their decision? Perhaps the first seeds of regret began to grow even as the President was still speaking.
Obama’s Nobel address was one of the best speeches of his Presidency—perhaps the best. It had eloquence and depth, philosophical reach and political force. It was not a peace speech. It was a speech about war, and the tragedy of war. Following the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, Obama told his audience in Oslo that, in a fallen world, force and the evil it brings are sometimes inescapable. He identified himself at the outset as his country’s Commander-in-Chief, and he reminded his audience of the role of the American military in upholding international norms and global security in the decades since the end of the Second World War. He offered a classic paradox: “The instruments of war do have a role to play in preserving the peace. And yet this truth must coexist with another—that no matter how justified, war promises human tragedy. The soldier’s courage and sacrifice is full of glory, expressing devotion to country, to cause, to comrades in arms. But war itself is never glorious, and we must never trumpet it as such.”
If Obama had left it at this, the speech would have amounted to a provocative essay. But he went on to outline conditions and justifications for the use of force. He spoke of international laws and institutions, humanitarian grounds for war (“Inaction tears at our conscience and can lead to more costly intervention later”), proportion and self-restraint, force as a last resort, and the need for universal principles of human rights to guide choices. He admitted that the U.S. had not always lived up to these ideas, which takes nothing away from their validity or the power of his articulation. It was, in the strict sense of the term, a tragic speech. It acknowledged difficult trade-offs, moral complexities, irresolvable conflicts, and a positive vision for action in spite of these.
That speech in Oslo, from the beginning of Obama’s Presidency, is the one that now has to guide him through to its end. His remarks last week at the United Nations were given in its sombre light, saturated with a sense of unwelcome but inescapable responsibility. Many of the themes from Oslo were repeated in the specific context of the current war in the Middle East. Obama spoke directly and at length to the Muslim world, as in his Cairo speech, but without the naïve confidence, and with more true understanding. It’s as if the President returned to the themes of that earlier speech with the more realistic spirit of his Nobel address and the hard experience of the intervening years.
It’s completely fair to blame Obama for many sins of omission and commission, past, present, and prospective. Whether or not his intelligence agencies foresaw with clarity the spectre of ISIS rising, the President let them and the rest of the world know that he didn’t want to go back into Iraq or get entangled in Syria—not even to the extent of flying regular surveillance drones over the region. His policies were often murky, but his preferences were clear enough: he didn’t want to know too much about this latest incarnation of terror. So he waited too long, and now the U.S. is using air power defensively while ISIS sets the pace and continues its aggressions.
Beyond these mistakes of the recent past, there’s a worrying lack of strategic thinking about the future. What do we do if the new Iraqi government fails to free itself from the sectarian hold of the Shia militias and their Iranian backers? What is the desired end state in Syria, and how will air strikes help bring it about? What is the rationale for hitting other groups, however extreme—such as the Al Nusra Front—which still have ties to the so-called moderate rebels that we’re going to fund, arm, and train in Saudi Arabia, while allowing ISIS to besiege a Kurdish town on the Syrian-Turkish border and force thousands more people to become refugees? What leverage can we use in the nuclear talks with Iran to push the increasingly intransigent regime there to contemplate a Syrian future without its client Bashar al-Assad? It’s clear that the U.S. is making it up as it goes along, the result of being caught off guard.
But these criticisms and questions are essentially peripheral to the main story. The Middle East and other regions of the Muslim world are going through an agony of largely self-inflicted destruction. Though exacerbated by outside intrusion and neglect, it wasn’t caused by the U.S.—but it’s our inescapable problem, as well as the rest of the world’s. The means we use, including violence of our own, will be based on inadequate information and will bring unintended consequences. We will almost certainly overreact or underreact—most likely both. In or out, we will not come away with clean hands. But ultimate responsibility and a lasting solution begin and end with Muslims themselves, who have free will. That’s the nature of tragedy.
http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/obamas-two-speeches-tragedy
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