{"id":5685,"date":"2012-09-14T08:11:44","date_gmt":"2012-09-14T00:11:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/blog\/?p=5685"},"modified":"2025-03-08T09:06:50","modified_gmt":"2025-03-08T09:06:50","slug":"obama","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/2012\/09\/14\/obama\/","title":{"rendered":"Obama"},"content":{"rendered":"

“In White House jargon this was a meeting of \u201cthe principals,\u201d which is to say the big shots. In addition to Biden and Gates, it included Secretary of State Hil\u00adlary Clinton (on the phone from Cairo), chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen, White House chief of staff William Daley, head of the National Security Council Tom Doni\u00adlon (who had organized the meeting), and U.N. ambassador Susan Rice (on a video screen from New York). The senior people, at least those in the Situation Room, sat around the table. Their subordinates sat around the perimeter of the room. \u201cObama structures meetings so that they\u2019re not debates,\u201d says one participant. \u201cThey\u2019re mini-speeches. He likes to make decisions by having his mind occupying the various positions. He likes to imagine holding the view<\/strong>.\u201d Says another person at the meeting, \u201cHe seems very much to want to hear from people. Even when he\u2019s made up his mind he wants to cherry-pick the best arguments to justify what he wants to do.<\/strong>\u201d<\/p>\n

Before big meetings the president is given a kind of road map, a list of who will be at the meeting and what they might be called on to contribute. The point of this particular meeting was for the people who knew something about Libya to describe what they thought Qad\u00adda\u00adfi might do, and then for the Pentagon to give the president his military options. \u201cThe intelligence was very abstract,\u201d says one witness. \u201cObama started asking questions about it. \u2018What happens to the people in these cities when the cities fall? When you say Qaddafi takes a town, what happens?\u2019\u201d<\/strong> It didn\u2019t take long to get the picture: if they did nothing they\u2019d be looking at a horrific scenario, with tens and possibly hundreds of thousands of people slaughtered. (Qaddafi himself had given a speech on February 22, saying he planned to \u201ccleanse Libya, house by house.\u201d) The Pentagon then presented the president with two options: establish a no-fly zone or do nothing at all. The idea was that the people in the meeting would debate the merits of each, but Obama surprised the room by rejecting the premise of the meeting. \u201cHe instantly went off the road map,\u201d<\/strong> recalls one eyewitness. \u201cHe asked, \u2018Would a no-fly zone do anything to stop the scenario we just heard?\u2019\u201d After it became clear that it would not, Obama said, \u201cI want to hear from some of the other folks in the room.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

Obama then proceeded to call on every single person for his views, including the most junior people. \u201cWhat was a little unusual,\u201d <\/strong>Obama admits, \u201cis that I went to people who were not at the table. Because I am trying to get an argument that is not being made.\u201d<\/strong> The argument he had wanted to hear was the case for a more nuanced intervention\u2014and a detailing of the more subtle costs to American interests of allowing the mass slaughter of Libyan civilians. His desire to hear the case raises the obvious question: Why didn\u2019t he just make it himself? \u201cIt\u2019s the Heisenberg principle,\u201d he says. \u201cMe asking the question changes the answer. And it also protects my decision-\u00admaking.\u201d<\/strong> But it\u2019s more than that. His desire to hear out junior people is a warm personality trait as much as a cool tactic, of a piece with his desire to play golf with White House cooks rather than with C.E.O.\u2019s and basketball with people who treat him as just another player on the court; to stay home and read a book rather than go to a Washington cocktail party; and to seek out, in any crowd, not the beautiful people but the\u00a0old<\/em>\u00a0people.<\/strong> The man has his stat\u00adus needs, but they are unusual. And he has a tendency, an unthinking first step, to subvert established stat\u00adus structures.<\/strong> After all, he became president.<\/p>\n

Asked if he was surprised that the Pentagon had not presented him with the option to prevent Qaddafi from destroying a city twice the size of New Orleans and killing everyone inside the place, Obama says simply, \u201cNo.\u201d Asked why he was not surprised\u2014if I were president I would have been\u2014he adds, \u201cBecause it\u2019s a hard problem. What the process is going to do is try to lead you to a binary decision. Here are the pros and cons of going in. Here are the pros and cons of not going in. The process pushes towards black or white answers; it\u2019s less good with shades of gray.<\/strong> Partly because the instinct among the participants was that \u2026 \u201d Here he pauses and decides he doesn\u2019t want to criticize anyone personally. \u201cWe were engaged in Afghanistan. We still had equity in Iraq. Our assets are strained. The participants are asking a question: Is there a core national-security issue at stake? As opposed to calibrating our national-\u00adsecurity interests in some new way.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

The people who operate the machinery have their own ideas of what the president should decide, and their advice is pitched accordingly. Gates and Mullen didn\u2019t see how core American security interests were at stake; Biden and Daley thought that getting involved in Libya was, politically, nothing but downside. \u201cThe funny thing is the system worked,\u201d says one person who witnessed the meeting. \u201cEveryone was doing exactly what he was supposed to be doing. Gates was right to insist that we had no core national-security issue. Biden was right to say it was politically stupid. He\u2019d be putting his presidency on the line.\u201d<\/p>\n

Public opinion at the fringes of the room, as it turned out, was different.<\/strong> Several people sitting there had been deeply affected by the genocide in Rwanda. (\u201cThe ghosts of 800,000 Tutsis were in that room,\u201d as one puts it.) Several of these people had been with Obama since before he was president\u2014people who, had it not been for him, would have been unlikely ever to have found themselves in such a meeting. They aren\u2019t political people so much as Obama people. One was Samantha Power, who won a Pulitzer Prize for her book\u00a0A Problem from Hell,<\/em>\u00a0about the moral and political costs the U.S. has paid for largely ignoring modern genocides. Another was Ben Rhodes, who had been a struggling novelist when he went to work as a speechwriter back in 2007 on the first Obama campaign. Whatever Obama decided, Rhodes would have to write the speech explaining the decision, and he said in the meeting that he preferred to explain why the United States had prevented a massacre over why it hadn\u2019t. An N.S.C. staffer named Denis McDonough came out for intervention, as did Antony Blinken, who had been on Bill Clinton\u2019s National Security Council during the Rwandan genocide, but now, awkwardly, worked for Joe Biden. \u201cI have to disagree with my boss on this one,\u201d said Blinken. As a group, the junior staff made the case for saving the Ben\u00adgha\u00adzis. But how?<\/p>\n

The president may not have been surprised that the Pentagon hadn\u2019t sought to answer that question. He was nevertheless visibly annoyed. \u201cI don\u2019t know why we are even having this meeting,\u201d he said, or words to that effect. \u201cYou\u2019re telling me a no-fly zone doesn\u2019t solve the problem, but the only option you\u2019re giving me is a no-fly zone.\u201d He gave his generals two hours to come up with another solution for him to consider, then left to attend the next event on his schedule, a ceremonial White House dinner.<\/p>\n

Back on October 9, 2009, Obama had been woken up in the middle of the night to be informed that he\u2019d been given the Nobel Peace Prize. He half thought it might be a prank. \u201cIt\u2019s one of the most shocking things that has happened in all of this,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd I immediately anticipated that it would cause me problems.\u201d<\/strong> The Nobel Prize Committee had just made it a tiny bit harder for him to do the job he\u2019d just been elected to do, as he could not at once be commander in chief of the most powerful force on earth and the face of pacifism. When he sat down some weeks later with Ben Rhodes and another speechwriter, Jon Favreau, to discuss what he wanted to say, he told them he intended to use the acceptance speech to make the case for war.<\/strong> \u201cI need to make sure I was addressing a European audience that had recoiled so badly from the Iraq war, and that may have been viewing the conferring of the Nobel Prize as a vindication of inaction.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

Both Rhodes and Favreau, who have been with Obama since early in his first presidential campaign, are widely viewed as his two most adept mimics when it comes to speeches. They know how the president sounds: his desire to make it seem he is telling a story rather than making an argument<\/strong>; the long sentences strung together by semicolons; the tendency to speak in paragraphs rather than sound bites; the absence of emotion he was unlikely to genuinely feel. (\u201cHe really doesn\u2019t do artifice well,\u201d says Favreau.) Normally, Obama takes his speechwriters\u2019 first draft and works from it. \u201cThis time he just threw it in the garbage can,\u201d says Rhodes. \u201cThe main reason I\u2019m employed here is I have an idea of how his mind works. In this case, I totally screwed up.\u201d<\/p>\n

The problem, in Obama\u2019s view, was his own doing<\/strong>. He\u2019d asked his speechwriters to make an argument he had never fully made and to state beliefs that he had never fully expressed. \u201cThere are certain speeches that I have to write myself,\u201d says Obama. \u201cThere are times when I\u2019ve got to capture what the essence of the thing is.\u201d<\/p>\n

Obama asked his speechwriters to dig up for him writings about war by people he admired<\/strong>: Saint Augustine, Churchill, Niebuhr, Gandhi, King. He wanted to reconcile the non\u00adviolent doctrines of two of his heroes, King and Gandhi, with his new role in the violent world. These writings came back to the speechwriters with key passages underlined and notes by the president to himself scrawled in the margin. (Beside Reinhold Niebuhr\u2019s essay \u201cWhy the Christian Church Is Not Pacifist,\u201d Obama had scribbled \u201cCan we analogize al-Qaeda? What level of casualty can we tolerate?\u201d) \u201cHere it wasn\u2019t just that I needed to make a new argument,\u201d says Obama. \u201cIt was that I wanted to make an argument that didn\u2019t allow either side to feel too comfortable.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

In his Nobel speech he\u2019d argued that in cases such as these the United States should not act alone. \u201cIn these situations we should have a bias towards operating multilaterally<\/strong>,\u201d he says. \u201cBecause the very process of building a coalition forces you to ask tough questions. You may think you are acting morally, but you may be fooling yourself.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

“<\/strong>–http:\/\/www.vanityfair.com\/politics\/2012\/10\/michael-lewis-profile-barack-obama<\/a><\/p>\n

really good read<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“In White House jargon this was a meeting of \u201cthe principals,\u201d which is to say the big shots. In addition to Biden and Gates, it included Secretary of State Hil\u00adlary Clinton (on the phone from Cairo), chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen, White House chief of… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[582],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5685","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reference"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s5gxNz-obama","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5685","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5685"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5685\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14642,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5685\/revisions\/14642"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5685"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5685"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5685"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}