Killing Machine (15 page)

The Speech Itself

So what did Obama actually say in his Nobel speech?

“I would be remiss,” the president began, “if I did not acknowledge the considerable controversy that your generous decision has generated.” That remark was greeted with laughter.

He noted that there were many people around the world struggling and suffering for having committed acts of courage. Of past prize recipients, he acknowledged especially his debt to the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., whose resistance to segregation and commitment to peace and nonviolent mass protests drew upon Gandhi’s writings and example.

What came next in the speech showed how much difference there was between King’s post-award actions and Obama’s sense of his duties to the United States and the world. King’s path had taken a sharp turn from previous causes when he expanded his concerns to include public criticism of American foreign policy and the war in Vietnam. On April 4, 1967, King had delivered a message from the pulpit of a well-known New York church that caused tremors among his allies and infuriated his enemies. He said that the award he had received commanded its recipient to work harder than ever for peace. “I cannot forget that the Nobel Peace Prize was also a commission, a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for ‘the brotherhood of man.’ This is a calling that takes me beyond national allegiances.”
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Obama’s path from his antiwar protests in 2002 before the invasion of Iraq through his speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention and then into the 2008 presidential campaign had gone in a very different direction. It was evident in the acceptance speech, as Brooks and Widmer understood, that his true mentor on foreign policy was not King but the über-realist of the Cold War years, another theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr. He did not invoke Niebuhr by name, but he insisted it was his duty as the American
president to recognize that evil existed in the world and to meet its threat to the United States. These were words perfectly pitched to appeal to those who doubted his West Point speech actually meant a serious commitment to defeating the insurgency in Afghanistan. Nearly all comments on his lengthy decision-making process suggested—indeed, insisted—that it had been a soul-searching time for the president, who only came around to a conclusion to send more troops reluctantly and without full conviction because there was no other alternative. Those who had doubts, on the other hand, that he was a master of assessing mood and political temperature were well taught a lesson by the Oslo speech.

Perhaps the most profound issue surrounding my receipt of this prize is the fact that I am the Commander-in-Chief of the military of a nation in the midst of two wars. One of these wars is winding down. The other is a conflict that America did not seek, one in which we are joined by 42 other countries—including Norway—in an effort to defend ourselves and all nations from further attacks.

Invoking the forty-three-nation alliance, it will be remembered, had been his opening image at West Point, and here he used it again as the launching pad for an exploration of just-war theory. Even if the image echoed aspects of Bush’s “coalition of the willing” or even LBJ’s “many flags” campaign for Vietnam, Obama was employing it here to bolster the idea of a just war by counting up the numbers. Indeed, after the initial reference to King’s work and accomplishments, Obama turned almost immediately to just-war theory, emphasizing that even in World War II the number of civilian casualties exceeded the number of soldiers who perished. In that most just war in the modern era, there was no escaping the limitations of the human situation. “As a head of state sworn to protect my nation, I cannot be guided by [King’s and Gandhi’s] examples alone. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people.” He asserted the right to act unilaterally, if need be, to protect the nation. That was to be his key
observation: the human condition itself was the cause of wars, and no leader could escape the requirement to meet evil with force.

Make no mistake: Evil does exist in the world. A nonviolent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism—it is a recognition of history: the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.

I raise this point, I begin with this point because in many countries there is a deep ambivalence about military action today, no matter what the cause. And at times, this is joined by a reflexive suspicion of America, the world’s sole military superpower.

A little later on, in describing American leadership after the end of World War II, Obama suggested that the American role had always been one of enlightened self-interest: “We have borne this burden not because we seek to impose our will.” This statement seemed to imply that the world’s sole military power was also the world’s sole exception to the constant struggle between good and evil. Then, a few paragraphs later, came another troubling statement that confused the message he sought to convey. “So part of our challenge is reconciling these two seemingly irreconcilable truths—that war is sometimes necessary, and war at some level is an expression of human folly.”
Folly?
The whole emphasis in Obama’s Nobel lecture was on the need to accept just-war theory, as it had evolved from the Middle Ages, to combat evil.
Folly
is defined as a foolish act, such as a strike against the world’s sole military superpower? It was an odd word to choose.

What was the basis for juxtaposing the al Qaeda challenge with Hitler? Surely there were questions of scale involved, to say the least. But it was a familiar rallying cry from the time of the first Gulf War, when George H.W Bush compared Saddam Hussein to Hitler. Such comparisons risked flattening out the complex historical experience Obama wished to call upon into a two-dimensional world where just-war theory disintegrated into name-calling. But
there was a rationale based on the threat to a structure of peace that held evil at bay. After World War II, Obama said, the world had been led by American efforts in “constructing an architecture to keep the peace.” The American-inspired architecture was both a material and (within the limits of human imperfectability) moral fortress against evil. A decade into the new century, however, “this old architecture is buckling under the weight of new threats.” In other words, while al Qaeda and/or other terrorist groups did not have the Wehrmacht to threaten the world, the challenge was just as great. The threat of nuclear war between superpowers might have faded, “but proliferation may increase the risk of catastrophe.” Bunched together here were references to the Iranian nuclear program and a rationale for the Afghan War. “Terrorism has long been a tactic, but modern technology allows a few small men with outsized rage to murder innocents on a horrific scale.”
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Al Qaeda might be few in numbers, small men with outsized rage, but they were linked to the Taliban insurgency in a synergetic fashion that made it essential to prevent the defeat of the Karzai regime in Kabul, for there was no third alternative available. Here then was the motive for the American-led coalition, the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), which he had just increased by thirty thousand troops to bring Washington’s contribution to a hundred thousand. The objective was to deny al Qaeda any space in Afghanistan to prepare new terrorist attacks on the United States, but Obama’s speech might just as easily be taken to mean future campaigns beyond those already being carried out by the ISAF in Afghanistan, to include not only Pakistan but Yemen and Somalia—or anywhere else where a few small men with outsized rage might gain access to modern technology such as box cutters. That might be the way Jon Stewart would put it, of course, but the speech itself challenged belief in the ability of any nation, however powerful, to maintain a global watch sufficient to deny determined terrorists a base of operations.

Therefore, despite all the energy it put into just-war theory, the Nobel speech did not answer serious questions about the purpose of the Afghan War. Instead, Obama said that the world had rallied
around the United States after 9/11 “and continues to support our efforts in Afghanistan, because of the horror of those senseless attacks and the recognized principle of self-defense.” Military force could be justified, he said, on humanitarian grounds. “That’s why all responsible nations must embrace the role that militaries with a clear mandate can play to keep the peace. . . . And sadly, it will continue to be true in unstable regions for years to come.” Still, it was necessary always for the United States to be “a standard bearer in the conduct of war. That is what makes us different from those whom we fight. That is the source of our strength. That is why I prohibited torture. That is why I ordered the prison at Guantanamo Bay closed.”

Meanwhile, in the Oval Office

At the time of the Nobel Prize speech, of course, the decision not to pursue the closing of Guantánamo Bay had not yet been made. Two accounts of his presidency blame congressional opposition, mixed with a failure to do prior analysis of what it would take to close the facility. In the Nobel speech he had said that he had to face the world as it was—a very dangerous place, as he pictured it, requiring all nations to join in the effort in Afghanistan. One commentator, James Mann, also blamed the apathy of public opinion, which no longer felt the urgency it once had for closing the facility: “Sometimes, bringing about change takes more than a president.” Another suggested that caring about Guantánamo and other international issues had slipped because of something much deeper in American history: “Obama finds himself fighting an undercurrent of isolationism in his own party—that has driven America, once again, to look away from a number of the global challenges it faces.”
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So according to those views, the people who voted for Obama in 2008 either had grown apathetic about moral questions or were really isolationists, following in the footsteps of those who were responsible for all the mistakes made in American foreign policy from the time of Wilson’s League of Nations fight at the end of World
War I to (in the Republican view) losing the war in Vietnam and hampering the president’s power to do good and protect the American people at the same time. Blaming unreal expectations became a major theme of the Obama administration whenever it stepped back from a confrontation over Guantánamo or, on the other hand, adopted the habit of justifying its actions on the basis of the immediate post–9/11 Authorization to Use Military Force. But at the same time he was deciding he could not do anything about Guantánamo Bay, the president was engaged in expanding the drone war in Pakistan and other “unstable countries” he had referred to vaguely in the Nobel Prize speech. Reporters for the
New York Times
interviewed three dozen of the president’s current and former advisers to write their story about his evolution. “They describe a paradoxical leader who shunned the legislative deal-making required to close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, but approves lethal action without hand-wringing.” Dennis Blair, for example, the director of national intelligence until he was fired in May 2010, told the reporters that long-term strategy against al Qaeda was sidelined by the intense focus on drone strikes. “The steady refrain in the White House was, ‘This is the only game in town’—reminded me of body counts in Vietnam.” White House officials dismissed the former admiral’s criticism as sour grapes at being let go. Thomas E. Donilon, the national security adviser, remarked that what surprised him the most about Obama in office was that “he’s a president who is quite comfortable with the use of force on behalf of the United States.”
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From his first days in office, then, one was supposed to believe that Obama was always “a realist who, unlike some of his fervent supporters, was never carried away by his own rhetoric. Instead, he was already putting his lawyerly mind to carving out the maximum amount of maneuvering room to fight terrorism as he saw fit.” The reporters’ conclusion was that he had succeeded in reaching out to conservatives with an argument about evil as an abstraction, the favorite theme of conservatives.
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Barack Obama’s soul-searching about authorizing signature strikes will be examined in
chapter 5
. But back in May 2010, even
as the program remained unacknowledged officially, the president made a jaw-dropping drone-related joke at the annual White House correspondents dinner: “The Jonas Brothers are here; they’re out there somewhere. Sasha and Malia are huge fans. But boys, don’t get any ideas. I have two words for you: ‘Predator drones.’ ”
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4

ON TO MARJA!

It doesn’t matter how stupid your thesis is as long as you have the right adviser
.

—General David Petraeus giving the punch line to a joke, November 2010

We have to be careful not to believe our own bullshit
.

—David Axelrod, adviser to President Obama

Professing themselves in testimony before Congress to be fully satisfied with the president’s decision to commit more troops, and fully unified among themselves, the three generals—Karl Eikenberry, the former commander and now American ambassador to Afghanistan; Stanley McChrystal, the current commander on the ground; and David Petraeus, Iraq War hero and now head of Central Command and future commander in Afghanistan—prepared for the “momentum-changing” campaign that would begin with an assault on Marja. The ultimate object, everyone said, however, was to clear out the area around Kandahar, a city founded in the fourth century BCE by Alexander the Great. Through succeeding ages Kandahar became a trading center on key routes across Central Asia, making it a strategic target for all future would-be empire builders. In 1747 Ahmad Shah Durrani, an Afghan empire builder, made it the capital of modern Afghanistan. Although Kabul eventually won out on that matter, Kandahar never lost its significance as a crucial objective for Afghan supremacy, symbolically and materially.