Iraq intelligence: how hawks repent

Two repentant Iraq War hawks will probably be on the final ballot for the next president of the United States. Both Hillary Clinton and the cluster of plausible Republican nominees finesse their support for a very bad war by insisting that they were seduced by the “intelligence” community (that benign cyst on Washington’s body politick) and that, if elected, each will be better brief-readers than George W. Bush.  

Canadians, French intellectuals and Senator Rand Paul interject that they weren’t much impressed by the public arguments and testimony offered before the war even started. Still, repentant hawks insist that the private briefings about Saddam Hussein’s WMD program and, I suppose, his suicidal character profile were compelling. The war was all about the “intelligence.”

It’s easy today to not be George W. Bush in 2002. But confessing it isn’t terribly informative. Knowing Iraq’s history—and its dogged experts—inside out won’t tell her or him what to do or not do—there or anywhere else in the world. A better-briefed hawk won’t necessarily do what’s right or what works.

Fortunately, there are other benchmarks for assessing the candidates that would update the race and, hopefully, avoid making the future more dangerous than it already is: for instance, the temperament of each candidate and their distance from the temperament of the incumbent, Barack Obama.

Being against the Iraq War now is meaningless. Being against Obama’s conduct abroad is noteworthy.

Obama knows more now about America and the world than he did in Chicago when he came out against launching a second war with Iraq. Most recently, he opted for being called a hypocrite rather than going to war with Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad. He’s not generous with his country’s resources merely for the sake of his legacy.

Intelligence will keep accumulating to support the next president, but modesty doesn’t grow naturally in Washington. There is every chance that the next president will have a good mind and be as ruthless as Barack Obama. It would be reassuring, however, if even a couple of the front-runners embrace rather than run away from his sense of limits.

Is Obama too presidential to be a great president?

Undaunted by Barack Obama’s landslide victory last November, Peggy Noonan has returned to her abiding complaint: Barack Obama is not likeable, he’s too formal, and too self-important to fill the boots of men like Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and now even George Bush. Last week, in her column "The Presidential Wheels Turns", Noonan compared Obama unfavorably against all four former presidents still alive and able to attend the opening of George Bush’s Library. Here’s how she compares the two star performers:

“He (George Bush) thought he was luckily born, quick but not deep, and he famously trusted his gut but also his heart. He always seemed moved and grateful to be in the White House. Someone who met with Mr. Obama during his first year in office, an old hand who'd worked with many presidents, came away worried and confounded. Mr. Obama, he said, was the only one who didn't seem awed by his surroundings, or by the presidency itself.”

Barack Obama, too, spoke sincerely of Bush’s likeability at the Library proceedings, "To know the man is to like the man, because he's comfortable in his own skin.”

Setting aside the saccharine screed Noonan employs in her partisan columns, is she making a serious point? Are presidents usually more relaxed than Barack Obama? Has his presidency been diminished by his spotty ability to help other self-important people feel comfortable?

(First, we should clear something up. Obama was describing past-president George Bush—a man seemingly enjoying his retirement—when he used that tired cliché about being comfortable in his own skin. Of course, we can’t really know George Bush’s state of mind when he was actually making presidential decisions. Today, memoirs from old White Houses uniformly contain only lawyered regrets and assurances that every one slept peacefully when there was time.)

The appearance of self-assurance is important in public, especially in dangerous times. When a president is speaking to Congress or just one of those Washington gossips that Noonan calls “old hands,” he daren’t show nervousness. Can you imagine a young president in the spring of 2009, asking strangers whether he ought to nationalize the banks or reintroduce the Gold Standard? And whether anyone in the room understood what Larry Summers was talking about?

We say leaders should be relaxed and we note approvingly that leadership is a lonely business. Politicking may be as relaxing as golf. But decision-making isn’t. Getting to the right decision isn’t relaxing work. And it’s lonely—for one thing, because leaders can’t show their misgivings in public.  

After just one panic attack in the House of Commons in the mid-20s, Winston Churchill never spoke in public again without speaking notes. He would have loved the teleprompter. Also, he acknowledged that he had misgivings every time he committed British forces to action. President Dwight Eisenhower smoked 4 packs of cigarettes a day during his tenure as commander of Allied Forces.

These nervous gentlemen were not nervous in public. However, those who miss the style of the Reagan and Bush presidencies should at least accept that governance isn’t the same as horseback-riding. Helping the helpers relax isn’t the job of productive executives or presidents.

Finally, would Obama have been more successful in his first term and now in his second term if he were less formal—less presidential—in his dealing with his opponents in Congress and with disaffected journalists?

America is definitely ready for a female president. However, was America ready in 2008 to elect, ready in 2012 to re-elect, and ready in any time in the foreseeable future to elect a black politician noted for being “comfortable with his own skin”? A man, for instance, as inarticulate and as teary as George Bush, as promiscuous as Bill Clinton, or as vulgar and as manipulative as Lyndon B. Johnson?

Would he even win an affectionate rating from Peggy Noonan? 

Terrorism, sociology, and personal freedom

It’s human to look for connections. We do it when we hear that a friend has cancer. And we do it every time an individual—or two brothers in Boston—go out and succeed in killing total strangers. Raising concern for the “root” causes of violence if you’re a Canadian Liberal, or the possibility of bureaucratic negligence if you’re an American Republican, is unsurprising; it’s human nature, it sounds constructive, and it is widely associated with analytical and sophisticated thinking.  

Nevertheless, liberal-minded people as well as libertarians should actually be comforted by Barack Obama and Stephen Harper’s focus on the crime of terrorism and the resolve of their governments to punish those individuals found guilty of willfully taking their politics out on the lives of others.

Harper’s complaint about “practicing sociology” was partisan and, consequently, politically untimely. And Obama’s reluctance to talk about “radical Islamists” is being exploited by his opponents. Nevertheless, is it reasonable—and, more importantly, is it safe—to imply that the bombings at the Boston Marathon on April 15 just might not have happened: if our national governments paid greater attention to minority-group individuals, their politics, and their grievances, or, on the other hand, if they more aggressively monitored edgy individuals and damned extreme rhetoric and radical movements?

Should our governments connect what people think and how they express themselves peacefully—in a free society—with acts of premeditated violence?

The implications of choosing "yes" are not any safer than lashing out emotionally.

Should we contemplate shifting our alliances in the Middle East in the hope of mollifying potential domestic terrorists? If America drives some individuals crazy, should Canada try to be less American? Should all of us be less hostile toward the political and religious points of view we despise in order to avoid terrorist violence?

In democracies, minorities—gays and French Canadians, for instance—can persuade majorities to retreat from and surrender old policies by persuading them that those old policies are unjust. Is terrorism simply politics on speed?

Senator Lindsey Graham wonders whether the US security behemoth “let its guard down” in Boston because it did nothing about the Tsarnaev brothers even though the older brother, Tamerlan, had already said hateful things on YouTube about living in a nation of “Christian infidels.” Yesterday, the New York Times ran a profile of his younger brother, Dzhokhar. It found hints of a “dark side”; a smart, promising, popular 19-year-old who’d, nevertheless, “alluded to disaffection with his American life and the American mind-set.”

Keep digging. He may also be hooked on Wire and Mad Men.

Should Obama and Harper hire more sociologists, political psychologists, and computer engineers to daily monitor the private utterances and activities of a far higher percentage of American radicals and landed immigrants? If radical Islamist thinking causes middle-class North Americans to commit murder, do we make radical political utterances a crime too?

In a free country, a young man needn’t mask his “dark side.” Our governments shouldn’t be told by us to respect our privacy and, at the same, be expected to know what everyone is thinking—if they don't happen to think like us.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky spent a lifetime struggling to understand how individuals decide to commit cold-blooded murder. We shouldn’t ask our politicians, their scientists, or their unbelievably powerful computers to try to figure us out now.

Keystone XL Project (cont.): Next move is yours, Mr. President

Yesterday, in Houston, Texas, Canada’s Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver promised that Canada will soon announce tough climate change regulations for its oil and gas sector. Following Ambassador Jacobson’s script, Oliver asserted:

“'Canada is the largest supplier of heavy oil to the U.S., and soon to be one of the few with stringent oil and gas GHG [greenhouse gas] regulations,' Mr. Oliver told a friendly crowd at the CERAWeek energy conference. 'In contrast, other suppliers are doing little or nothing to manage GHG emissions.'

“As a result, Canada represents 'the most and perhaps only responsible choice' for the United States to meet its oil import needs, he said.”

Will this ease Barack Obama’s decision-making on the Keystone XL pipeline? Is it even relevant? Not likely. Here, in the same story, is the response of a key anti-Keystone lobby:

“'We need a credible system that actually reduces absolute emissions,' Gillian McEachern, campaign director for Environmental Defence, said in an interview from Toronto.

“Ms. McEachern said Canada lags oil producers such as Norway, the United Kingdom and Australia in imposing climate regulations.”

These terms for agreeing to the pipeline, unsurprisingly, are impossible.

It’s quite feasible that Canada (and, hey, the United States, too) could significantly cut greenhouse gas emissions in absolute terms, nationally or in a continental deal. However, to expect Canada to cut emissions absolutely in its strongest export sector is, for the foreseeable future, an intolerable idea. Why not simply insist on a Western Canadian recession?

Furthermore, why should Norway’s off-shore environmental standards—whatever their supposed technical relevance—get into a decision about the responsible extraction of heavy oil in landlocked Alberta? What do they have to do with maintaining free trade in North America? Why isn’t it good enough for Canadian standards to be as good as—and improve in tandem with—environment standards within the US energy market?

It’s a safe bet that the climate change movement will never be cornered into going along with the Keystone XL pipeline.

Why let this decision fester on your desk, Mr. President?

By Canadian standards of good manners: Wouldn’t it be nice if—before you go to Israel to puff up a difficult conservative Prime Minister—you cleared up this pipeline question with a conservative Prime Minister in Canada, one who has caused you not a single serious worry in four years?  

Barack Obama’s Second Inaugural Speech

For those of us who see Barack Obama as an exceptional President, it’s grating to listen to claims that he’s a “liberal Reagan” or possibly another Roosevelt. FDR’s inaugural performances made no serious effort to prepare America for war or world leadership. And Reagan’s rhetoric assured that all the big problems were simple and had been over-intellectualized.

It will take time to feel sure that Obama’s speech was effective politically, and that it intelligently spoke to our times. Yesterday, however, may have given us a real flavor of the relaxed affability and hopefulness that reigned in Washington when Jack Kennedy spoke on January 20, 1961.

Obama’s Camelot doesn’t include a famous biographer and liberal historian, a Boston machine, a demanding father, or a team of technical advisors brainstorming just north of Cuba and in South Vietnam. Nevertheless, a beautiful family again occupies the White House; another impeccably dressed hipster is convinced that good things can be done in government.

Obama’s planners, the polls, and nearly a million citizens on the National Mall confirm that the clouds are thinning, that purposeful reform rather than constant fire-fighting may now be possible.

Michael Kinsley caught a touch of Kennedy over-reach:

“The president said, ‘This generation of Americans has been tested by crises that steeled our resolve and proved our resilience.’ It has? If so, it sure caught me napping. I think we are fairly untested, and it’s hard to share the president’s optimism. But he gets paid to be optimistic."

Lincoln spoke of America’s “better angels” in the midst the industrial world’s first gigantic blood bath. It’s wise for a President to complement the people when he can. And not just warn that he’ll be testing them again.

Kennedy insisted extravagantly that Americans would “pay any price” to assure the survival and success of liberty. Shortly, he introduced the biggest tax cut in US history. Obama only asked that they keep taking their medicine in good cheer. After all, he knows that more will be asked of them.

Newt Gingrich offered the most significant praise so far:

“I thought it was very, very good,” said former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), who ran unsuccessfully for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination. “I didn’t think it was very liberal. There were one or two sentences obviously conservatives would object to, but 95 percent of the speech I thought was classically American, emphasizing hard work, emphasizing self-reliance, emphasizing doing things together. I thought it was a good speech. My newsletter tomorrow, I’m actually going to send out the whole text of the speech.”

Gingrich is even-handed: he doesn’t like other Republican leaders any less than he doesn’t like Democrats. What may have impressed him was how furiously Obama keeps provoking Republican extremists while, at the same time, offering shelter to that crucial minority of Republican moderates in Congress, dress-rehearsing for the 2014 Congressional and the 2016 Presidential elections.

Whether big deals on immigration, social benefits, guns, and tax loopholes are cut in Congress or not, Obama has delivered to Tea Partiers and Neo-Cons a whole series of policy statements that appeal to majorities in swing states and districts—positions they’ll insist, nevertheless, on decrying. 

America is “ending,” and not trying to win two wars. America will not act only according to its own conscience. Rather, it will “remain the anchor of strong alliances in every corner of the globe.” 

How tedious.

Obama goes beyond talking about equality of opportunity and asserts that the “country cannot succeed when a shrinking few do very well and a growing many barely make it.” Wow. There’s an observation that prophets of revolution and now profiteers in America’s greatest business both accept.

A few months ago, Mitt Romney and other Republican pragmatists thought they could get away with calling that "socialism." Today, they’ll keep quiet and probably underline numerous passages in Obama’s speech that offer “partial” victories that they could share in as moderate conservatives.