‘When your top foreign policy adviser tells an overseas interviewer that you do not really mean something you have put at the center of your campaign, well, Chicago, you have a problem’, wrote Mark Halperin in Time last week. You may think the ‘problem’ is that Barack Obama does ‘not really mean’ his Iraq policy. You would be wrong. The real problem, according to Halperin, is that a political ‘neophyte’, Samantha Power, admitted this in public. The cynicism is breathtaking, the politics are unprincipled, and both tell us why the Democrats might yet lose in November: the lingering doubt that they can be trusted on national security.
Here is the exchange between the BBC’s Stephen Sackur and Samantha Power on Hardtalk:
Steven Sackur: ‘[Obama] says, “I will end the war in Iraq. All US combat forces will be out within 16 months”. Simple as that?’
Samantha Power: ‘Ola! Just like that! One of the most complicated foreign policy challenges in American history will not be solved ‘just like that’ by any means’ … What he’s actually said, after meeting with the generals and with intelligence professionals, is that you – best case scenario – will be able to withdraw one to two combat brigades each month …’
SS: ‘So what the American public thinks is a commitment, to get combat forces out within 16 months, isn’t a commitment is it?’
SP: ‘You can’t make a commitment in March 2008 about what circumstances will be like in January of 2009 … it would be the height of ideology to sort of say “Well, I said it, therefore I’m going to impose it on whatever reality greets me”. [Sixteen months] is a best case scenario.’
Halperin’s reaction was typical. The New Statesman had already advised Power to ‘learn to deliver the odd fib more persuasively’ while Gideon Rachman of the FT was shocked that she discussed her doubts about Iraq on the record. Everyone rushed to remind Power of Oscar Wilde’s warning: ‘If one tells the truth, one is sure, sooner or later, to be found out.’
I think they all have it back-to-front. The real problem is that Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton ‘do not mean’ their Iraq policies. The neophytes are those who think the voters will forgive the Democrats for running two foreign policies at a time of war. Come November, and the appeal of John McCain, that may turn out to be the real ‘gaffe’.
In short, Obama’s real problem is not Samantha Power but Howard Dean, whose antiwar insurgency in the 2002-3 primaries moved the Democrats decisively into the orbit of the antiwar movement and its pathologies. Since then the grown-ups develop the real foreign policy off-stage, while a very different ‘foreign policy’ – rooted for some in the ‘heights of ideology’ and for others in low domestic partisan advantage – is presented to the public. The surge isn’t working, defund the war, withdraw the troops, whatever the conditions on the ground.
Power’s ideas – a humanitarian hawk and a brilliant advocate of hard-headed democratic internationalism – could yet address the Democrats’ national security problem. A winner of the Pulitzer Prize for her magisterial 600-page call for prudential humanitarian interventionism, A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide, she is a centrist democrat brimful with ideas for crafting a progressive 21st-century response to our enemies.
Contra MoveOn.org, Power praises the ‘landmark’ U.S Army/Marine Counterinsurgency Field Manual authored by General David Petraeus as a ‘paradigm-shattering’ document. Unlike Hillary Clinton, who echoed the Move.On.org advert by disparaging Gen Petraeus and his September 2007 Report as requiring ‘the willing suspension of disbelief’, Power praised Petraeus for his emphasis on economic and political development in Iraq, and for asking his soldiers, ‘What have you done for the people of Iraq today?’
Referring to 9/11, Power insists on the ‘moral difference between setting out to destroy as many civilians as possible and killing civilians unintentionally and reluctantly in pursuit of a military objective’. But Power also has proposals to tackle the suspicion that there is no such moral difference, to improve America’s image in the world, and to challenge the EU to start pulling its weight.
Unguarded she may be, but Power is anything but a political neophyte. By understanding the necessity of closing the chasm that exists between rhetoric and reality in the Democrat’s Iraq policy, and of doing so now, ahead of the white heat of the general election, Samantha Power showed herself to be one of the political grown-ups of the Democratic party.