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Jacob Heilbrunn

Is Obama An Enabler of Tyranny in Egypt?

When President Obama visited Cairo on June 4, 2009, he made a special point of declaring that he had come to establish a new beginning between the United States and the Arab world. This beginning, he said, would be based "upon mutual interest and mutual respect; and one based upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive...they overlap, and share common principles—principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings." Now, in Egypt, an authoritarian government, headed by the military, is slaughtering followers of Islam, and what does Obama have to say?


Instead of protesting the Egyptian military's actions, or even threatening to cut off military aid, the administration is refusing to deem the events in Egypt a coup. The Washington Post editorial page says that the administration is "complicit" with the military's actions. It adds,


If a serious case could be made that Egpyt is headed towards stable, authoritarian rule, it would be one thing. In that instance, it might be plausible to invoke Henry Kissinger's famous comment about Chile and add that a country shouldn't be allowed to go hardline Islamist. But the problem is this: Is Obama being a realist when it comes to Egypt? Or is he being utterly unrealistic about what the future holds for Washington's ties with Cairo? America's track record, when it comes to supporting corrupt and authoritarian regimes, particularly in the Middle East, is a mixed one. Obama, you could even say, is inadvertently doing what he said he wanted to end in his Cairo speech: "empower those who sow hatred rather than peace, and...promote conflict rather than the cooperation that can help all of our people achieve justice and prosperity."

For Egypt appears to be headed toward, at best, an armed truce, and, at worst, a civil war. The Islamists are being further radicalized. America will be blamed. How does this end the "cycle of suspicion and discord" that Obama identified and lamented in June 2009?



There may not be much that America can do to calm Egypt, but Obama doesn't even seem to be trying. Leon Trotsky once remarked, "You may not be interested in the dialectic, but the dialectic is interested in you." Obama could be about to learn that he may not be interested in foreign affairs, but foreign affairs is interested in him.

The Presidency
United States

A Defiant Obama Press Conference

Russian president Vladimir Putin slouches like a "bored schoolboy in the back of the schoolroom"? That was just one of the feisty and rather undiplomatic statements that President Obama made during his press conference made today. It must have made Putin sit bolt upright. Obama did everything but call Putin a lout. As the Washington Post notes, it isn't even true. Putin is about as buff as it gets. With all the crunches and judo he practices, his posture is great. Engaging in a smackdown of Putin's figure is about as low a blow as Obama could deliver. So who was being childish?

Maybe Obama was channeling the spirit of George W. Bush. Obama wasn't willing to concede much ground to any of his questioners. He did come close to admitting that he made a mistake when it came to talking about surveillance programs, then drew back and simply said that the virulence of the public debate showed that his take had been "undermined." Yes, it has. Obama's response to the uproar over surveillance was to offer a few token concessions. When it comes to surveillance, he announced that he would back tweaking the way the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court operates, create a few safeguards. But that was about it. And when the matter of Edward Snowden was raised, Obama bristled. He didn't say Snowden slouches but he did declare that the former National Security employee was no "patriot." OK. But it remains the fact that he triggered a debate about something that Obama doesn't want to be debating. Obama announced,


But, Mr. President, how could it be otherwise? Obama himself either fibbed or misspoke on the Jay Leno show on Tuesday night when he once more claimed that massive surveillance is not taking place of e-mails and phone calls. It is. The kind of "lawful process" that Obama is outlining would never have occured. Had the administration fessed up from the outset, or sought to have a discussion about surveillance, then maybe something on the lines of what Obama proposed in his press conference might have occurred. But the blunt fact is that neither the intelligence services nor the White House has a smidgen of interest in discussing its proclivity for scooping up as much information as possible about average Americans.

In discussing these matters Obama was stony, obdurate, refractory. It was only when healthcare came up that he became impassioned. He regards questions about national security as a pesky intrusion. Not so when it comes to healthcare. He defined his battle with the congressional Republicans as a choice between cavalierly destroying the economy or providing thirty million Americans with health benefits. Republicans, by contrast, will contend that the health of the economy can only be restored by focusing on government spending and shutting down Obama's ambitious new program.

This, not questions about Benghazi or Russia or Syria, is what will determine the course of his presidency. The next few months will form a crucible for both Obama and the GOP. If the president's defiant mood is anything to go by, the fall will feature a battle royale that will make the frictions with Russia look mild by comparison. The 2014 midterm elections will ride on the outcome. Who will blink first?

The Presidency
United States

Obama's Petulant Snub of Putin

President Obama prides himself on being cool, calm, and collected. But his latest move—cancelling a summit meeting with Russian president Vladimir Putin—suggests that he is having a hissy fit, succumbing to peevishness. It's wholly counterproductive. In attempting to cow Russia into releasing Edward Snowden, he isn't showcasing American power but its limitations. The more Obama seeks to challenge Putin, the stiffer Russian resistance will become. Obama's persecution of Snowden is singlehandedly transforming him into a Russian hero.







The Presidency
United States

Newt Gingrich (Sort Of) Abandons Neoconservatism









United States

From Russia With Love: Snowden Gets Asylum

With its decision to grant Edward Snowden temporary asylum, Russia is once again demonstrating its independence from America and handing a big victory to WikiLeaks. The Obama administration has gone into overdrive to attempt to capture Snowden, promising Moscow that Snowden would neither be tortured nor subjected to the death penalty if he is returned. But in the wake of the treatment of Bradley Manning, who was apparently subjected to prolonged isolation and other maltreatment, those promises are necessary but hardly sufficient. America's track record when it comes to dealing with dissent—for that is what Snowden represents—is a parlous one, from the incarceration of Eugene Debs during World War I to the latest batch of whistleblowers. So Moscow has blown a giant raspberry at President Obama.

The problem is really of his own making. The appropriate response to Snowden would have been to promise him immunity from prosecution and allow him to return to America, where he could have testified to Congress. From a practical standpoint, the administration would have been better off with Snowden in America rather than back in Russia, where he can dribble out embarrassing information. Everything that Snowden has said appears to be accurate. The latest revelation concerns a computer program called XKeyscore that is one more step towards the omnicompetent state. It permits government officials to snoop wherever and whenever they please, to trawl through your internet activities, chats, emails, and so on. The indispensable James Bamford, writing in the New York Review of Books, reports that "with the arrival of the Obama administration, the NSA's powers continued to expand at the same time that administration officials and the NSA continued to deceive the American public on the extent of the spying."

So far, Snowden is on a roll. The Washington Post notes today that "Obama administration officials faced deepening political skepticism Wednesday about a far-reaching counterterrorism program that collects millions of Americans' phone records, even as they released newly declassified documents in an attempt to spotlight privacy safeguards." Indeed they do. Apart from the privacy questions, there is also the one of practicality, as Senate Judiciary Committee head Patrick Leahy made abundatly clear in questioning NSA officials yesterday. How effective are these programs? Do they testify more to bureaucratic aggrandizement than common sense? What confidence does anyone have that the NSA is able to use this massive amount of information in a clear and coherent fashion that promotes American national security? Little of this would be occurring absent Snowden's release of documents about the NSA's activities. Instead, the Obama administration would continue stealthily to assemble information about the activities of American citizens.

What will become of Snowden? He can go live in a dacha outside Moscow and surf the internet to his heart's content. He could even live the life of an Oblomov, putting off everything until another day. But his father says he is an avid reader and he could employ himself learning Russian and steeping himself in the classics, as the New York Times suggests—"His Russian lawyer earlier this week left him a shopping bag with books by Dostoyevsky, Chekhov and Nikolai Karamzin to help him learn about Russian reality." In the meantime, his father's lawyer Bruce Fein might be able to reach an accommodation with the Obama administration that would allow Snowden to return to America without facing draconian punishment for his actions. The frenzied hunt for Snowden is itself further evidence of the misplaced priorities of the American intelligence services.

Image: Flickr/Thierry Ehrmann. CC BY 2.0.

Civil Society

GOP Fight Club: Christie vs. Paul

Welcome to the GOP fight club. It's becoming increasingly apparent that a debate is brewing in the Republican party over foreign policy, one that will not be conducted politely over brandy and cigars in an oak-lined room but, rather, with knuckledusters. The latest sign was the dustup between New Jersey governor Chris Christie and Senator Rand Paul. Christie, in an effort to burnish his conservative credentials, which came into some contention when he became palsy-walsy with President Obama at the finish line of the 2012 presidential race, to the consternation of many on the right, has voiced his own disquiet at what he sees as backpedaling by the GOP about the battle against terrorism.

At an Aspen Institute forum, Christie said that libertarians such as Rand Paul are endangering American national security: “This strain of libertarianism that’s going through parties right now and making big headlines I think is a very dangerous thought."

Now Paul is striking back.

On Monday Paul said to Sean Hannity on Fox News,

It’s really, I think, kind of sad and cheap that he would use the cloak of 9/11 victims and say, I’m the only one who cares about these victims. Hogwash. If he cared about protecting this country, maybe he wouldn’t be in this "give me, give me, give me all of the money" that you have in Washington or don’t have and he would be more fiscally responsive and know the way we defend our country.

This debate is overdue. It gets to the core of what amounts to an identity crisis for the GOP. This past Sunday the New York Times featured a piece of mine that reviewed two excellent books—Those Angry Days by Lynne Olson and 1940 by Susan Dunn—on the debate over isolationism in the 1930s over entry into World War II. The historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., said that the debabte over intervention was the "most savage political debate in my lifetime," even more impassioned than ones over McCarthyism and the Vietnam War. Many on the left were opposed to intervention because they felt burned by the outcome of World War I when Woodrow Wilson promised the war to end all wars. Instead, the punitive Treaty of Versailles, which laid the groundwork for a new one, was the result. On the right a number of figures such as Charles Lindbergh became admirers of the Nazi movement. The Wall Street Journal stated in June 1940 that Hitler had "already determined the broad lines of our national life for at least another generation" and that there was no point in trying to challenge him. Fortunately, Franklin Roosevelt saw it differently.

Yet the debate over intervention was not entirely stilled within the GOP. After World War II the Robert Taft wing of the party was opposed to entangling alliances abroad such as NATO. Schlesinger, in an illuminating essay in the Atlantic in 1952, distinguished between left and right isolationism. Schlesinger argued that left isolationism was rooted in idealism about America, that it should serve as a model for the world. On the right he diagnosed a fear of the old world—the belief that America would become corrupted by its dark mores: "An image of Europe began to haunt the isolationist consciousness—an image of a dark and corrupt continent, teeming with insoluble feuds, interminable antagonisms; senseless and malevolent wars. Europe was morally and politically diseased and scabrous; and contact with it would bring the risk of fatal infection." What Schlesinger deemed the old "affirmative isolationism" gave way to "negative isolationism." Schlesinger also concluded that figures such as Senators Robert Taft and Joseph McCarthy were attempting to disguise their opposition to intervention abroad by backing anti-Communist witch hunts at home. (Still, as the case of Alger Hiss showed, there was some subversion in America itself, though Hiss never had any position of real consequence. And it was none other than Richard Nixon who believed Whittaker Chambers' accusations and exposed Hiss.)

In the end, the Taft wing lost out. It was the moment of the moderate, internationalist Republican such as Nixon. By 1952 had allied himself with Eisenhower. For decades the internationalists were at the helm of the GOP. Then came the rise of the neocons who supplied a more militant edge. The libertarian wing of the party had lapsed into desuetude. But over a decade after September 11, the debate is starting all over again over about the extent to which America should intervene abroad.

It is a debate, however, that the GOP is likely to find very unsettling, at least if it is conducted by Rand Paul and Chris Christie. Neither appeals fully to the party. The neocon wing is virulently opposed to the doctrines that Paul endorses, which is why Sen. John McCain spoke of "wacko birds." But at the same time, conservatives will also have a difficult time cottoning to Christie, who is in many ways the classic Northeast moderate Republican. Unlike many of his political ancestors, however, Christie is not a patrician figure who shrinks from a fight. He is a brawler. A divisive battle over foreign affairs does not loom before the GOP. It has already begun.

Image: Left: Flickr/Gage Skidmore. CC BY-SA 2.0. Right: Flickr/Bob Jagendorf. CC BY 2.0.

United States

Congress Challenges the NSA

Edward Snowden is winning. He may be holed up in a transit lounge in Russia, but Snowden, view him as a traitor or hero, is having a profound effect on the debate in America over the extent of spying conducted by the National Security Agency. The most telling sign is the House’s rejection Wednesday of a bill impeding the agency’s collection of phone records by a vote of 205-217. The interesting thing is not that the bill, which was drafted by Rep. Justin Amash and Rep. John Conyers, Jr., failed. It is how close it came to passing.

Only a furious effort by the Obama administration and the Republican leadership, including John Boehner, ensured that it did not. Here was true bipartisanship but perhaps not in the service of a greater goal, or at least one that mounting numbers of Americans, worried about the intrusiveness of federal government spying efforts, are likely to applaud. Lawmakers such as Jerrold Nadler who have long been critical of the NSA and the expansive counter-terrorist measures instituted after September 11 are seizing the opportunity to press their case with renewed vigor; others like James Sensenbrenner, one of the authors of the Patriot Act, say that it is being contorted to justify policies they never envisioned. Revulsion over elastic interpretations of surveillance by the government is prompting Democratic and Republican lawmakers to revolt.

President Obama is clearly hopeless when it comes to this issue. He doesn’t seem to challenge the panjandrums of the intelligence services, but reflexively accedes to their demands. For whatever reason—passivity, cravenness, fear?—the man who once voiced anger and skepticism about the excesses of the Bush administration’s approach to civil liberties has become complicit with the vast bureaucracy that purports to defend American liberties even as it undermines them. Yes, the balance between liberty and surveillance will always be a treacherous one. But we know that when the government is scooping up every telephone record that there cannot even be a pretense of balance but, rather, the attempt to construct an omnicompetent state that vigilantly scrutinizes the behavior of the most innocuous citizen. Professor David Bromwich of Yale University, one of our most trenchant critics of the sprawling apparatus that has arisen since September 11, notes that the Obama administration is endorsing a policy of snatching up private information that can be likened to stocking a vast fishpond:


The new protocol allows the government to vacuum up the entire pond, while preserving a posture quite innocent of trespass, since it means to do nothing with the contents just then. The test comes when a discovery elsewhere calls up an answering glimmer of terror or a terror-link from somewhere in your pond; at which point the already indexed contents may be legally poured out, dissected and analysed, with effects on the owner to be determined.

As James Bamford shows in the August 15 issue of the New York Review of Books, the government has, more or less, been lying about its efforts to fill that pond. After September 11, the Bush administration decided to flout the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. According to Bamford, it “decided to illegally bypass the court and began its program of warrantless wiretapping.” At the same time, George W. Bush announced in 2004, “Anytime you hear the United States government talking about a wiretap, it requires—a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the way. When we’re talking about chasing down terrorists, we’re talking about chasing down terrorists, we’re talking about getting a court order before we do so.” Since then, misleading statements from key figures have proliferated. General Keith Alexander of the NSA declared at an Aspen Institute conference, “To think we’re collecting on every US person…that would be against the law.” Snowden's documents remind us that this is not true. Yes, there are genuine threats against America. But it is statements such as Alexander's that induce a sense of vertigo—the sense that America's leaders are misleading the public rather than telling the truth about the scope and nature of their own work, not to mention the number and gravity of the plots that they boast about having uncovered.

There is not necessarily anything consciously nefarious about the efforts of the intelligence agencies to expand their reach and influence. If you want to get a glimpse of what the government is up to then you apparently need to travel to a nine-story building at 611 Folsom Street in San Francisco. There AT&T has its regional switching center and there in 2003 the NSA, Bamford writes, “established a “secret room…and filled it with computers and software from a company called Narus,” which specializes in “equipment that examines both the metadata—the names and addresses of people communicating on the Internet—and the content of digital traffic such as e-mail as it zooms past at the speed of light.” The sense one derives from the Bamford article is that one computer program—PRISM, UPSTREAM, and so on—is leading to the next, that the desire to obtain information, in whatever form, has become an end in itself, which is what is leading to the construction of a massive electronic records holding facility in the desert in Utah, one that will likely become a monument to future generations of the folly of the current one.


The Presidency
United States

When A Former Shin Bet Chief Denounces Netanyahu

Bret Stephens is bored. Bored, that is, by the Palestinians. They're tedious, hapless, pathetic. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Stephens colorfully announces:

for all its presumed importance, the Palestinian saga has gotten awfully boring, hasn't it? The grievances that remain unchanged, a cast of characters that never alters, the same schematics, the clichés that were shopworn decades ago. If it were a TV drama, it would be "The X-Files"—in its 46th season. The truth is out there. Still. We get it. We just don't give a damn anymore.

Well, not everyone shares Stephen's ho-hum attitude. Not everyone, in other words, is tuning out from a saga that continues to hold great peril for Israel's future even if a veneer of placidity exists currently between the Palestinians and Israelis. Europe, for one, is worried about what is, or is not, taking place. So even as the idea of peace talks goes nowhere, Israel is coming under increasing pressure over the West Bank. The European Union has just promulgated new guidelines that interdict any cooperation with Israeli institutions in territory in the West Bank and that will be enacted next year. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is livid. He's responded by saying Israel will "not accept external dictates." But this move is consistent with the increasing and inexorably antipathy toward Israeli intransigence on the West Bank among Europeans and a new willingness to act to pressure the Jewish state to alter it. To dismiss such actions as an instance of inveterate European hostility towards Jews may be emotionally satisfying but does not account for the very real fear among European foreign policymakers that Israel has embarked upon a course that is inimical to its own security, with dangerous consequences for Europe as well.

Someone else who isn't lulled into a state of torpor by the relations between Palestinians and Israelis is former Shin Bet chief Yuval Diskin. In a column in the Jerusalem Post, he says don't be fooled. Israeli is reaching a point of no return that could have catastrophic effects upon its security: "Anyone who wants can see the data of the Research and Information Center Division (based on a study by Prof. Arnon Sofer and Prof. Sergio DellaPergola), suggesting that at the end of the year 2010, the share of Jews – if you add up the total population between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River – was only 53%."

Diskin notes that complacency is unwarranted because these demographic trends mean that Israel may well be headed toward a binational state. The current complacency is deceptive:

this subject has a place in our essence, in our identity, in our souls, in our security, and in our perception of morality – as a society or nation that has come to rule another nation. The relative security calm that we have recently enjoyed creates a dangerous illusion that our problems have been solved, and maybe worse – that we have “frozen the situation”: a kind of de facto strategy in the face of the “Arab Spring” that is raging all around us. But it is clear that it is impossible to truly freeze the situation as social, economic, political and other processes are never frozen in time. Unfortunately, we have yet to find a strategy or the technology that can freeze frustration.

What is needed, he says, is long-term straetegic thinking. In a democracy this is always difficult because the incentive is to placate various constituencies to retain power, which is what Netanyahu has been doing. Nor are Diskin's observations new. They have been propounded ad nauseam by a variety of commentators. But coming from the ex-chief of Shin Bet they, of course, carry a certain weight. They also indicate that it is not anti-Israeli to make such observations. On the contrary, they are pro-Israeli. They seek to help prevent the country from jeopardizing its future in a futile quest to satisfy the rapacious demands of settlers on the West Bank who are indifferent to anything but their own comforts or ideological aspirations.

Diskin expresses the hope that Netanyahu will have the fortitude to break with the current impasse. He could do it. But as my colleague Paul Pillar has observed, the dispatching of Ron Dermer, an ardent neocon, as ambassador to America is eyebrow-raising. J Street, the counterpart of AIPAC, expresses its own hope in Haaretz that Dermer will reach out to all sections of the American Jewish community:

In recent years, a pernicious idea has gained currency among some pro-Israel groups, especially on the far right. They seem to believe that anyone who does not agree 100 percent of the time with every action the Israeli government takes is no friend of Israel. Some go further and claim that anyone expressing even mild criticism should be treated as an adversary. This intolerance is divisive, self-defeating and foreign to our Jewish and American traditions. It needs to be squashed and Ambassador Dermer would be doing Israel and American Jews alike a big favor by disassociating himself from such views.

Will he?


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The Presidency
United States

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April 16, 2014