In response to my column on the Bush-Obama foreign policy convergence, Andrew Sullivan runs down what he sees as the five fundamental discontinuities between the two administration’s approaches:
The first is competence. Think of the fiasco of the Iraq occupation – which remained unfixed for years while tens of thousands died. Now think of the superlative, careful management of the killing of bin Laden, a man Bush had said he’d stopped thinking about.
I hold no brief for Bush’s competence, though I’d like to see how the Libyan war turns out before I give the current president a gold star for “superlative” wartime management. And as much blame as Bush deserves for the fiasco in Iraq, it was his team that eventually brought some kind of stability to that country — a team that Obama basically carried over into his presidency, and then charged with overseeing a similar counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan. The Bush presidency did not end in 2006, and the continuity between the Petraeus-Gates phase of the Bush era and the Petraeus-Gates phase of the Obama era has been almost seamless.
More importantly, though, I wasn’t ever trying to argue that Bush and Obama have been equally competent. I was making an argument about the parallels between the overall architecture of their foreign policies, not the skill with which those policies have been implemented. Here Sullivan’s second point is more germane:
The second is torture. For the United States to have more success without torture than with it marks a turning point in history’s assessment of the war crimes committed by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, et al.
I don’t know about that “turning point,” since it seems like we’re just having the same argument all over again about the role that Bush-era interrogations might or might not have played in mapping the trail that led to Bin Laden. But otherwise, I agree: The official repudiation of waterboarding, etc., marks the Obama White House’s most significant break with Bush’s approach to the War on Terror.
Sullivan goes on:
The third is multilateralism. It is inconceivable that Bush would have ceded the initiative on Libya to Britain, France and the Arab League. That humility – which Bush promised in 2000 – was only realized after he had left office. (Ross acknowledged this not so long ago.)
Yes, I suppose “humility” is one way to describe getting buffaloed into war by Bernard Henri-Levy …
Snark aside, where the Libyan war is concerned the Obama White House has displayed both continuities and discontinuities with Bush-era interventionism. On the one hand, our North African campaign has been justified by the same broad worldview and the same kind of arguments that gave us the Iraq invasion. On the other hand, it’s implementation has owed more to Clintonian liberal internationalism than to the neoconservative foreign policy vision. On the other other hand, if you look at military commitments rather than U.N. resolutions, the Libyan campaign arguably less multilateral than the war in Iraq — and it’s a more striking manifestation of the imperial presidency, in a sense, because we’re fighting it with barely a nod to the need for congressional approval.
My sense is that the overall continuities between Obama’s interventionism and Bush’s are both important and surprising. But reasonable people can disagree.
Onward:
The fourth is a limited executive branch. There is no longer any claim of total supremacy over the laws of the land and the other branches of government in warfare. Yes, classic executive actions – like the killing of OBL – remain in the president’s unique authoritah. But elsewhere, the administration has gone to some lengths in vesting its war powers in all three branches of government.
O.K., but again, the most extreme Cheneyite claims of executive power had either been abandoned or rebuffed in court by the middle of Bush’s second term, so there was never any plausible way for the next administration to carry them forward. Almost every claim that could be carried forward, though, has been. (Eli Lake’s “The 9/14 Presidency” is the piece to read on this front.) Meanwhile, the Obama White House has pushed the executive-power envelope in ways that Bush did not — by taking us to quasi-war in Libya without a vote in Congress, for instance, and by actually trying to assassinate American citizens overseas (a power that the Bush White House claimed, but never put to use). Are these really just “classic executive actions”? They seem rather more imperial than that to me.
Finally:
The fifth is a transformation in the propaganda war.
Bush’s unilateralism, false pretenses for the Iraq war and embrace of torture gave us one teetering, blood-stained chaotic and still fragile transition to democracy in Iraq. Obama’s multilateralism, outreach to the Muslim world, and distance from indigenous movements have given us democratic revolutions from below in Egypt, Tunisia, Syria, Iran, Bahrain and Libya. Only the first two have succeeded. But the shift in what’s possible, while by no means primarily due to Obama, has certainly been marked since the cowboy left the Oval Office.
Oh, come on. “Have given us”? Please explain the mechanism whereby President Obama’s policies “gave us” any of these revolutions. You could just as easily argue that President Bush “gave us” the Cedar Revolution by championing democracy in Iraq, or for that matter that the example of Iraqi democracy ultimately played some role in inspiring the current round of protests and upheavals. That argument would be presumptuous and wrong, but it’s no more obviously ridiculous than crediting Obama’s “multilateralism” with inspiring Iranian protestors, or crediting his “outreach to the Muslim world” with inspiring Egyptian resistance to their (American-backed) dictator, or Bahraini resistance to their (American-backed) king. And where is the evidence that this president has won great victories in the propaganda war? In Egypt, where he delivered his much-touted address to the the Muslim world, the United States is more unpopular today than it was during the Bush era.
Sullivan concludes by praising me for “urging vigilance of the war machine directed by the president,” but dismissing what he calls my attempt “to rescue the failure of the Bush-Cheney years from the historical dustbin they deserve.” Again, I have no interest in “rescuing” the Bush-Cheney years, which were defined by a large foreign policy blunder and many smaller ones as well. But we can’t have an honest conversation about foreign policy in the age of Obama if we pretend that the Bush-Cheney vision of America’s role in the world, how to fight the war on terror, and so on just went into the dustbin in January of 2009 — rather than still being with us, in good ways and bad, deep into a presidency that promised to repudiate it.
