Obama Administration

The reptilian brain is human kind's link to our primitive ancestors. Millions of years of evolution helped us develop reasoning, shame, and verbal communication. But in the reptilian brain, fight-or-flight survival instincts survive.

The reptilian brain, I think, is what powers the insane ramblings of talking heads whenever a U.S. president bows to a foreign leader. Immediately, the submissive vs. dominant trigger is pulled, and all anyone sees is one dog rolling over for another. 

This outrage is repeated about once every six months. President Obama bowed to The Saudi King earlier this year, and today the internet is buzzing about Obama's bowing to the Japanese emperor on Saturday. The same thing happened when former President Bush nearly locked lips with Saudi royalty. When Richard Nixon was in China he gave a toast to Chairman Mao that included an excerpt of one of Mao's poems.

ThinkProgress points out similar occurrences and links to some photos of President Eisenhower bowing to just about anyone he can find, and I doubt there would have been much speculation about Ike's submissiveness.

In some cultures people kiss on the cheeks, in some they shake hands, in some they bow. All of which have some long anthropological explanation that isn't worth going into. The point being that it isn't a sign of weakness when a world leader understands that when in a different country, it is proper to use their customs. Though next time it might be nice if Obama could at least get the gesture right.

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This afternoon in Shanghai, U.S. President Barack Obama held a townhall-style meeting with university students. It was an event that his staff had worked hard to include on his China trip itinerary. After a brief speech extolling the importance of core values to the success of the United States as a nation and Americans as individuals, Obama took questions from the audience and online.

It has since come to light that not all of the questions came from bonafide students. One questioner was a vice director of daily affairs for the Communist Youth League; another was a young-looking teacher. Obama's answers about Internet freedom weren't heard by most remote audiences because several networks, including CNN, mysteriously cut away for commentary at that moment. The response among expats in China was, by and large, negative -- with many complaining Obama had minced his words, talking for instance of "universal rights" rather than "human rights." If one is looking to be cynical, there's plenty of fodder.

On the other hand, from the point of view of most Chinese I've spoken, these official efforts at censorship might have been silly, or nefarious, but they didn't have much impact. The notion of a president taking questions, not a frequent occurence in China, was itself the point. The symbolism was more arresting, to them, than the content. "Why does he want to talk to Chinese students?" one 29-year-old Chinese woman asked me, without irony. She was puzzled, impressed, and a bit amused at the spectacle. 

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Today, Greg Craig, the White House's top legal advisor, stepped down from the post he once described as his dream job. The speculation over the much-respected lawyer's resignation has been swirling for months, reaching a fever pitch back in October, when the New York Times published a story on the controversy in the White House office of legal counsel.

Craig's resignation comes on the day the administration announced it will    try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed -- among the tougher Guantanamo cases from a prosecutorial stance, given that he was tortured and that the government hopes to seek the death penalty -- in federal court a few blocks from Ground Zero.

The most obvious reason (Craig gave none specifically in his resignation note) is that he was the person charged with closing the facility at Guantanamo Bay, determining how to relocate and try all of the detainees. When Obama came into office, he promised it would be done by Jan. 22, 2010. It will not, likely costing Craig his job. The October Times story explained:

When an administration stumbles, whispers begin and fingers point in search of someone to blame. At a certain point, assumptions can become self-fulfilling, and an official in the cross hairs finds it harder to do the job. In Mr. Craig’s case, friends said he was unfairly being made a scapegoat for decisions supported across the administration.

It is, of course, not a good thing that the administration has stumbled in its goal of closing Guantanamo. But it is worth considering that it isn't really Craig's fault at all.

Gitmo, ultimately, isn't closed because Craig did not take any of the easy ways out. He could have moved all of the prisoners to Bagram or another overseas military facility. He could have tried all of them in military commissions, the legal process jerry-rigged by the Bush administration. Because, in part, of Craig's insistence on taking each case separately and at least trying to conform to U.S. law, Guantanamo remains open.

It is a much lesser sin than what came before it. Craig is stepping down less due to his own failures than due to the extralegal maneuvering of the Bush administration. Lawyers like John Yoo and David Addington made a mockery of due process back then, and their sins are now being revisited upon members of the Obama administration. If anyone should have to answer for Greg Craig's job, it is John Yoo.

A guest post from Foreign Policy contributor and human-rights activist Rebecca Hamilton.

Last week, the State Department partnered with two U.S.-based advocacy organizations (Save Darfur and STAND) to launch AskUS -- a web 2.0 initiative to connect the Obama administration with citizen activists.

More than 500 citizens emailed and used the Twitter hashtag #AskUS to submit questions on Sudan policy that they wanted Save Darfur to ask; students around the country voted online for the questions they wanted answered. The exercise culminated yesterday with a meeting, web-streamed live and cross-posted on the State Department's Facebook page. Leaders from Save Darfur and STAND asked a selection of the citizens' questions to U.S. Special Envoy for Sudan Scott Gration and Director of Multilateral Affairs at the National Security Council Samantha Power.

The event was not quite as "live" as its billing implied. Advocates had to give the administration their questions in advance. One former State Department official I interviewed referred to Darfur activists as "noise we had to manage" -- and I feared that AskUS would be nothing more than a web 2.0 opportunity for the administration to "manage" a vocal and often critical advocacy movement.

As it turned out, the shoe was on the other foot. Activists were given the opportunity to ask follow-up questions, and they pursued that avenue with such vigor that any fear of them being co-opted by their well-publicized access to the White House ceased to be a concern. What was a concern was the administration's inability to provide concrete answers to the advocates' questions.

During the session, Gration explained that there are some aspects of policy that cannot be shared publicly, and presumably no one would disagree that the need to keep some material confidential is inherent in any nation's diplomatic activities. But Gration's backtracking caused confusion among advocates who had eagerly tuned in: Despite the AskUS initiative being promoted as a forum for open dialogue, the administration was cagey on some fairly rudimentary points about its new Sudan policy.

Indeed, the Obama administration's Sudan strategy, rolled out on October 19, focuses on calibrating pressures and incentives on the basis of "verifiable changes in conditions on the ground." Yet during yesterday's meeting, advocates were told that the benchmarks for measuring progress were "a process we're working through."

The best summation of the State Department's first foray into citizen engagement 2.0 is, appropriately enough, encapsulated in a tweet by TechPresident blogger Micah Sifry. Responding to the frustration advocates were expressing in real-time to the vagueness of the administration's answers, he wrote, "Whatever you may think about substance of Gration/Power's answers, State Dept just raised the bar on admin transparency efforts." Indeed. 

It's not by chance that AskUS was launched around an issue that has such a strong U.S.-based constituency. Let's hope the next meeting sees activists on Congo, Burma, Sri Lanka, or any of the other many neglected crises, get an invite to the White House.

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For the past two years, 192 countries have participated in talks on the pressing issue of climate change, which will culminate in the Copenhagen summit next month. So far, more than 40 heads of state have agreed to attend, to act as negotiators and more importantly to demonstrate a firm commitment to ambitious targets. The growing list includes Angela Merkel, Gordon Brown, Nicolas Sarkozy, and Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

But the RSVPs seem lost in the mail for the leaders of the countries considered to be the lynchpins of the deal -- China, the United States, and India. Hu Jintao, Barack Obama, and Manmohan Singh haven't committed yet -- and they should. This summer, Obama indicated he would not attend because Congress has not yet passed climate change legislation. He's since waffled a bit, saying he would if his appearance would close the deal. It's weak tea, and those calling for him to attend include Al Gore and Brazil's da Silva, who used his weekly radio address to implore Obama and Hu to make the trip.

It is less likely that Hu or Singh will attend. Their developing countries have been good negotiators, but reticent to commit to ambitious targets. (China recently called for keeping the Kyoto protocol instead.) If Obama commits, though, they would be a lot more willing -- and that should be reason for the U.S. leader to consider heading across the pond.

In other climate news, the International Energy Agency released its full World Energy Outlook yesterday. One choice doomsday passage:

For every year that passes, the window for action on emissions over a given period becomes narrower -- and the costs of transforming the energy sector increase. We calculate that each year of delay before moving onto the emissions path consistent with a 2°C temperature increase would add approximately $500 billion to the global incremental investment cost...A delay of just a few years would probably render that goal completely out of reach.

The headline on this story reads: "Obama will go to Copenhagen to clinch deal."

That's a touch misleading.

What the headline on this story should really read is: "Obama will go to Copenhagen if and only if his appearance is necessary in order to clinch a deal."

On one hand, this is good news. Even if the United States can't be a strong party in climate change negotiations, it is of vital importance that Obama act as a strong diplomat and negotiator on this issue. The whole world is at stake.

On the other hand, isn't this a bit rich? The U.S. slow-walk on this issue is part of the reason the Copenhagen negotiations have been so fraught. If a comprehensive agreement falters in December, the United States will be in no small part to blame. But its leader might parachute in at the last moment to save the day? Sigh.

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The Obama administration, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in particular, seems to have developed a bit of a "mission accomplished" problem when it comes to diplomatic breakthroughs. Last week Clinton hailed Benjamin Netanyahu's "unprecedented" concessions on settlement construction, when it was fairly clear that Palestinians didn't see evidence of any concessions and touted a "historic agreement" to end the ongoing political standoff in Honduras, though it should have been obvious that neither side had any incentive to follow through on the terms of the deal. 

Today, it's fairly obvious that Clinton was overselling both developments with Mahmoud Abbas announcing that he will quit (true or not) and Manuel Zelaya declaring, "the accord is dead."

The administration has had a number of diplomatic "breakthroughs" that didn't pan out lately. Hamid Karzai's agreement to hold a runoff election in Afghanistan was followed by Abdullah Abdulla's decision to pull out. Dmitry Medvedev's seeming openness to Iran sanctions was contradicted by his own foreign minister. And the Iranian negotiators who agreed to a deal on nuclear enrichment, apparently didn't check with the bosses back in Tehran.

This isn't to say that these efforts were a waste of time or that the setbacks were the fault of the U.S., but out of desire for a tangible foreign policy victory, the administration seems to be developing a tendency to oversell diplomatic tactical victories before it's clear if the other parties will follow through on their commitments. 

I agree with Dan Drezner, that no one with reasonable expectations of what U.S. foreign policy can accomplish should be shocked by the fact that the Obama team hasn't achieved major breakthroughs on any of these challenges, but it would be nice if they didn't keep telling us we were witnessing history in the making. 

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Tom Ricks shares an interesting theory from researcher Kyle Flynn about why the Obama administration is delaying a decision on a new Afghanistan strategy:

Nov. 3, gubernatorial elections in both Virginia and New Jersey. The latter of which is my reasoning why the decision was delayed this long. Corzine is in the fight of his life and Obama is going to piss people off either way. 

I'm not sure I buy this. I doubt most voters have Afghanistan on the mind when they decide whether they should pull the lever for Jon Corzine or his Virginia counterpart Creigh Deeds. It's possible that there could be some protest votes from people infuriated with the White House's decision, but while Afghanistan is increasingly becoming "Obama's war," I don't think most people see it as the "Democrats' war."  If anything, most of the opposition to an increased U.S. commitment comes from within Obama's own party.

Looking ahead to 2010, this raises the quesiton of how big a campaign issue Obama's Afghan strategy will be. Because this debate doesn't divide easily along party lines, the political questions are pretty complicated.

If Obama to go along with the McChrysrtal plan, it seems unlikely that the majority of Americans who oppose the war would vote for Republicans as a result. Some antiwar voters might choose to stay home out of apathy but it seems like the partisan fury brought on by the healthcare debate alone should be enough to drag them to the polls. If Obama chooses a more limited strategy, I can't image there are that many voters who would have gone Democrat but see Afghanistan as a dealbreaker.

I'm also not convinced that, despite the increased concern, Afghanistan will a dominant politicial issue in U.S. politics in 2010. Even with 40,000 more troops, the total number will be nowhere near the half million that were deployed at the height of the Vietnam war. Unless you know someone in combat, the war in Central Asia is still a farily abstract concept compared with, say, healthcare. And given that it's much more clear what side everyone's on, healthcare makes much better material for attack ads.  

So while it's probably true, as it is frequently pointed out, that there's no political upside to the war in Afghanistan, the downside may not actually be that big. Whether or not that's a good thing is a whole other question. 

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