What intervention in Libya tells us about the neocon-liberal alliance
http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/03/21/what_intervention_in_libya_tells_us_about_the_neocon_liberal_alliance
How Obama turned on a dime toward war
http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/03/18/how_obama_turned_on_a_dime_toward_war
Why the U.S. Went to War: Inside the White House Debate on Libya
http://swampland.blogs.time.com/2011/03/20/why-the-u-s-went-to-war-inside-the-white-house-debate-on-libya/?hpt=C2
Why Obama’s Libya war coalition is the smallest in decades
http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/03/25/why_obama_s_libya_war_coalition_is_the_smallest_in_decades
The Bahrain Crisis and Its Regional Dangers
http://www.brookings.edu/opinions/2011/0323_bahrain_shaikh.aspx
U.S. treats the Libya mission like a hit-and-run accident
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/features/u-s-treats-the-libya-mission-like-a-hit-and-run-accident-1.352006
Is Syria reaching the point of no return?
http://www.haaretz.com/blogs/mess-report/is-syria-reaching-the-point-of-no-return-1.351893
A New Lease on Life for Humanitarianism
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/print/67516
Libya and the Responsibility to Protect
http://www.cfr.org/libya/libya-responsibility-protect/p24480
United States Must Take Sides to Keep the Arab Spring from Islamist Takeover
http://www.cfr.org/middle-east/united-states-must-take-sides-keep-arab-spring-islamist-takeover/p24468
Obama’s Unconstitutional War
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/03/24/obama_s_unconstitutional_war
Gaddafi's Endgame: How Will the U.S. Get Out of Libya?
By Fareed Zakaria
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2061106,00.html
Obama's 'Poorly Conceived' Libya Intervention
http://www.cfr.org/libya/obamas-poorly-conceived-libya-intervention/p24494
The Middle East Is Changing, But Is U.S. Policy?
http://www.democracyjournal.org/arguments/2011/03/despite-uprisings-realpolitik-still-reigns.php
Showing posts with label United States. Show all posts
Showing posts with label United States. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
Saturday, March 26, 2011
Obama Takes Hard Line With Libya After Shift by Clinton
NYtimes
March 18, 2011
By HELENE COOPER and STEVEN LEE MYERS
WASHINGTON — In a Paris hotel room on Monday night, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton found herself juggling the inconsistencies of American foreign policy in a turbulent Middle East. She criticized the foreign minister of the United Arab Emirates for sending troops to quash protests in Bahrain even as she pressed him to send planes to intervene in Libya.
Only the day before, Mrs. Clinton — along with her boss, President Obama — was a skeptic on whether the United States should take military action in Libya. But that night, with Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s forces turning back the rebellion that threatened his rule, Mrs. Clinton changed course, forming an unlikely alliance with a handful of top administration aides who had been arguing for intervention.
Within hours, Mrs. Clinton and the aides had convinced Mr. Obama that the United States had to act, and the president ordered up military plans, which Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, hand-delivered to the White House the next day. On Thursday, during an hour-and-a -half meeting, Mr. Obama signed off on allowing American pilots to join Europeans and Arabs in military strikes against the Libyan government.
The president had a caveat, though. The American involvement in military action in Libya should be limited — no ground troops — and finite. “Days, not weeks,” a senior White House official recalled him saying.
The shift in the administration’s position — from strong words against Libya to action — was forced largely by the events beyond its control: the crumbling of the uprising raised the prospect that Colonel Qaddafi would remain in power to kill “many thousands,” as Mr. Obama said at the White House on Friday.
The change became possible, though, only after Mrs. Clinton joined Samantha Power, a senior aide at the National Security Council, and Susan Rice, Mr. Obama’s ambassador to the United Nations, who had been pressing the case for military action, according to senior administration officials speaking only on condition of anonymity. Ms. Power is a former journalist and human rights advocate; Ms. Rice was an Africa adviser to President Clinton when the United States failed to intervene to stop the Rwanda genocide, which Mr. Clinton has called his biggest regret.
Now, the three women were pushing for American intervention to stop a looming humanitarian catastrophe in Libya.
Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, one of the early advocates for military action in Libya, described the debate within the administration as “healthy.” He said that “the memory of Rwanda, alongside Iraq in ’91, made it clear” that the United States needed to act but needed international support.
In joining Ms. Rice and Ms. Power, Mrs. Clinton made an unusual break with Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates, who, along with the national security adviser, Thomas E. Donilon, and the counterterrorism chief, John O. Brennan, had urged caution. Libya was not vital to American national security interests, the men argued, and Mr. Brennan worried that the Libyan rebels remained largely unknown to American officials, and could have ties to Al Qaeda.
The administration’s shift also became possible only after the United States won not just the support of Arab countries but their active participation in military operations against one of their own.
“Hillary and Susan Rice were key parts of this story because Hillary got the Arab buy-in and Susan worked the U.N. to get a 10-to-5 vote, which is no easy thing,” said Brian Katulis, a national security expert with the Center for American Progress, a liberal group with close ties to the administration. This “puts the United States in a much stronger position because they’ve got the international support that makes this more like the 1991 gulf war than the 2003 Iraq war.”
Ever since the democracy protests in the region began three months ago, the Obama administration has struggled to balance America’s national security interests against support for democratic principles, a struggle that has left Mr. Obama subject to criticism from all sides of the political spectrum. And by taking a case-by-case approach — quickly embracing protesters in Tunisia, eventually coming around to fully endorse their cause in Egypt, but backing the rulers in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Yemen — the administration at times has appeared inconsistent. While calling for Colonel Qaddafi’s ouster, administration officials indicated Mr. Obama was more concerned with unfolding events in Yemen, Bahrain and Egypt than with removing the Libyan leader.
There was high drama right up to the surprising Security Council vote on Thursday night, when the ambassador for South Africa, viewed as critical to getting the nine votes needed to pass the resolution, failed to show up for the final vote, causing Ms. Rice to rush from the chamber in search of him.
South Africa and Nigeria — along with Brazil and India — had all initially balked at authorizing force, but administration officials believed they had brought the Africans around. Mr. Obama had already been on the phone pressing President Jacob Zuma of South Africa to support the resolution, White House officials said. Eventually, the South African representative showed up to vote yes, as did the Nigerian representative, giving the United States one vote more than required. Brazil and India, meanwhile, joined Russia, China and Germany in abstaining.
The pivotal decision for Mr. Obama came on Tuesday though, after Mrs. Clinton had called from Paris with news that the Arab governments were willing to participate in military action. That would solve one of Mr. Gates’s concerns, that the United States not be viewed on the Arab street as going to war against another Muslim country.
Mrs. Clinton “had the proof,” one senior administration official said, “that not only was the Arab League in favor, but that the Emirates were serious about participating.”
During a meeting with Mr. Obama and his top national security aides — Ms. Rice was on video teleconference from New York; Mrs. Clinton from Paris — Ms. Rice sought to allay Mr. Gates’s concern that a no-fly zone by itself would not be enough to halt Colonel Qaddafi’s progress, recalled officials attending the meeting.
“Susan basically said that it was possible to get a tougher resolution” that would authorize a fuller range of options, including the ability to bomb Libyan government tanks on the road to Benghazi, the rebel stronghold in the east, administration official said.
“That was the turning point” for Mr. Obama, the official said. The president was scheduled to go to a dinner with military veterans that night; he told his aides to draw up military plans. And he instructed Ms. Rice to move forward with a broader resolution at the Security Council.
She already had one ready — drawn up the week before, just in case, officials said. Besides asking for an expanded military campaign, Ms. Rice loaded up the resolution with other items on the American wish list, including the authorization to use force to back an arms embargo against Libya. “We knew it would be a heavy lift to get any resolution through; our view was we might as well get as much as we could,” Ms. Rice said in a telephone interview.
On Wednesday at the Security Council, Russia put forward a competing resolution, calling for a cease-fire — well short of what the United States wanted. But the French, who had been trying to get a straight no-fly resolution through, switched to back the tougher American wording. And they “put it in blue” ink — U.N. code for calling for a vote.
“It was a brilliant tactical move,” an American official said. “They hijacked the text, which means it could be called to a vote at any time.”
On Thursday, the South Africans, Nigerians, Portuguese and Bosnians — all of them question marks — said they would support the tougher resolution.
Even after getting the Security Council endorsement, Mr. Obama made clear that the military action would be an international effort.
“The change in the region will not and cannot be imposed by the United States or any foreign power,” the president told reporters at the White House on Friday. “Ultimately, it will be driven by the people of the Arab world.”
March 18, 2011
By HELENE COOPER and STEVEN LEE MYERS
WASHINGTON — In a Paris hotel room on Monday night, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton found herself juggling the inconsistencies of American foreign policy in a turbulent Middle East. She criticized the foreign minister of the United Arab Emirates for sending troops to quash protests in Bahrain even as she pressed him to send planes to intervene in Libya.
Only the day before, Mrs. Clinton — along with her boss, President Obama — was a skeptic on whether the United States should take military action in Libya. But that night, with Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s forces turning back the rebellion that threatened his rule, Mrs. Clinton changed course, forming an unlikely alliance with a handful of top administration aides who had been arguing for intervention.
Within hours, Mrs. Clinton and the aides had convinced Mr. Obama that the United States had to act, and the president ordered up military plans, which Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, hand-delivered to the White House the next day. On Thursday, during an hour-and-a -half meeting, Mr. Obama signed off on allowing American pilots to join Europeans and Arabs in military strikes against the Libyan government.
The president had a caveat, though. The American involvement in military action in Libya should be limited — no ground troops — and finite. “Days, not weeks,” a senior White House official recalled him saying.
The shift in the administration’s position — from strong words against Libya to action — was forced largely by the events beyond its control: the crumbling of the uprising raised the prospect that Colonel Qaddafi would remain in power to kill “many thousands,” as Mr. Obama said at the White House on Friday.
The change became possible, though, only after Mrs. Clinton joined Samantha Power, a senior aide at the National Security Council, and Susan Rice, Mr. Obama’s ambassador to the United Nations, who had been pressing the case for military action, according to senior administration officials speaking only on condition of anonymity. Ms. Power is a former journalist and human rights advocate; Ms. Rice was an Africa adviser to President Clinton when the United States failed to intervene to stop the Rwanda genocide, which Mr. Clinton has called his biggest regret.
Now, the three women were pushing for American intervention to stop a looming humanitarian catastrophe in Libya.
Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, one of the early advocates for military action in Libya, described the debate within the administration as “healthy.” He said that “the memory of Rwanda, alongside Iraq in ’91, made it clear” that the United States needed to act but needed international support.
In joining Ms. Rice and Ms. Power, Mrs. Clinton made an unusual break with Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates, who, along with the national security adviser, Thomas E. Donilon, and the counterterrorism chief, John O. Brennan, had urged caution. Libya was not vital to American national security interests, the men argued, and Mr. Brennan worried that the Libyan rebels remained largely unknown to American officials, and could have ties to Al Qaeda.
The administration’s shift also became possible only after the United States won not just the support of Arab countries but their active participation in military operations against one of their own.
“Hillary and Susan Rice were key parts of this story because Hillary got the Arab buy-in and Susan worked the U.N. to get a 10-to-5 vote, which is no easy thing,” said Brian Katulis, a national security expert with the Center for American Progress, a liberal group with close ties to the administration. This “puts the United States in a much stronger position because they’ve got the international support that makes this more like the 1991 gulf war than the 2003 Iraq war.”
Ever since the democracy protests in the region began three months ago, the Obama administration has struggled to balance America’s national security interests against support for democratic principles, a struggle that has left Mr. Obama subject to criticism from all sides of the political spectrum. And by taking a case-by-case approach — quickly embracing protesters in Tunisia, eventually coming around to fully endorse their cause in Egypt, but backing the rulers in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Yemen — the administration at times has appeared inconsistent. While calling for Colonel Qaddafi’s ouster, administration officials indicated Mr. Obama was more concerned with unfolding events in Yemen, Bahrain and Egypt than with removing the Libyan leader.
There was high drama right up to the surprising Security Council vote on Thursday night, when the ambassador for South Africa, viewed as critical to getting the nine votes needed to pass the resolution, failed to show up for the final vote, causing Ms. Rice to rush from the chamber in search of him.
South Africa and Nigeria — along with Brazil and India — had all initially balked at authorizing force, but administration officials believed they had brought the Africans around. Mr. Obama had already been on the phone pressing President Jacob Zuma of South Africa to support the resolution, White House officials said. Eventually, the South African representative showed up to vote yes, as did the Nigerian representative, giving the United States one vote more than required. Brazil and India, meanwhile, joined Russia, China and Germany in abstaining.
The pivotal decision for Mr. Obama came on Tuesday though, after Mrs. Clinton had called from Paris with news that the Arab governments were willing to participate in military action. That would solve one of Mr. Gates’s concerns, that the United States not be viewed on the Arab street as going to war against another Muslim country.
Mrs. Clinton “had the proof,” one senior administration official said, “that not only was the Arab League in favor, but that the Emirates were serious about participating.”
During a meeting with Mr. Obama and his top national security aides — Ms. Rice was on video teleconference from New York; Mrs. Clinton from Paris — Ms. Rice sought to allay Mr. Gates’s concern that a no-fly zone by itself would not be enough to halt Colonel Qaddafi’s progress, recalled officials attending the meeting.
“Susan basically said that it was possible to get a tougher resolution” that would authorize a fuller range of options, including the ability to bomb Libyan government tanks on the road to Benghazi, the rebel stronghold in the east, administration official said.
“That was the turning point” for Mr. Obama, the official said. The president was scheduled to go to a dinner with military veterans that night; he told his aides to draw up military plans. And he instructed Ms. Rice to move forward with a broader resolution at the Security Council.
She already had one ready — drawn up the week before, just in case, officials said. Besides asking for an expanded military campaign, Ms. Rice loaded up the resolution with other items on the American wish list, including the authorization to use force to back an arms embargo against Libya. “We knew it would be a heavy lift to get any resolution through; our view was we might as well get as much as we could,” Ms. Rice said in a telephone interview.
On Wednesday at the Security Council, Russia put forward a competing resolution, calling for a cease-fire — well short of what the United States wanted. But the French, who had been trying to get a straight no-fly resolution through, switched to back the tougher American wording. And they “put it in blue” ink — U.N. code for calling for a vote.
“It was a brilliant tactical move,” an American official said. “They hijacked the text, which means it could be called to a vote at any time.”
On Thursday, the South Africans, Nigerians, Portuguese and Bosnians — all of them question marks — said they would support the tougher resolution.
Even after getting the Security Council endorsement, Mr. Obama made clear that the military action would be an international effort.
“The change in the region will not and cannot be imposed by the United States or any foreign power,” the president told reporters at the White House on Friday. “Ultimately, it will be driven by the people of the Arab world.”
Saturday, March 12, 2011
Obama Seeks a Course of Pragmatism in the Middle East
By MARK LANDLER and HELENE COOPER
WASHINGTON — In the Middle East crisis, as on other issues, there are two Barack Obamas: the transformative historical figure and the pragmatic American president. Three months after a Tunisian fruit vendor set himself aflame and ignited a political firestorm across the Arab world, the president is trumping the trailblazer.
With the spread of antigovernment protests from North Africa to the strategic, oil-rich Persian Gulf, President Obama has adopted a policy of restraint. He has concluded that his administration must shape its response country by country, aides say, recognizing a stark reality that American national security interests weigh as heavily as idealistic impulses. That explains why Mr. Obama has dialed down the vocal support he gave demonstrators in Cairo to a more modulated call for peaceful protest and respect for universal rights elsewhere.
This emphasis on pragmatism over idealism has left Mr. Obama vulnerable to criticism that he is losing the battle for the hearts and minds of the Arab street protesters. Some say he is failing to bind the United States to the historic change under way in the Middle East the way that Ronald Reagan forever cemented himself in history books to the end of the cold war with his famous call to tear down the Berlin Wall.
“It’s tempting, and it would be easy, to go out day after day with cathartic statements that make us feel good,” said Benjamin J. Rhodes, the deputy national security adviser, who wrote Mr. Obama’s soaring speech in Cairo to the Islamic world in 2009. “But ultimately, what’s most important is achieving outcomes that are consistent with our values, because if we don’t, those statements will be long forgotten.”
On Thursday, Mr. Obama’s national security adviser, Thomas E. Donilon, deflected calls for more aggressive action in Libya, telling reporters what American officials have been saying privately for days: despite pleas from Libyan rebels for military assistance, the United States will not, at least for now, put its pilots in harm’s way by enforcing a no-flight zone over the country.
Not only is intervention risky, officials said, but they also fear that in some cases, it could be counterproductive, provoking a backlash against the United States for meddling in what is a homegrown political movement.
A senior administration official acknowledged the irony of Mr. Obama’s dilemma; he is, after all, the first black president, whose election was hailed on the Arab street, where many protesters identify their own struggles with the civil rights movement.
“There is a desire for Obama — not the American president, but Obama — to speak to their aspirations,” the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. But, he added, “his first job is to be the American president.”
So Mr. Obama has thrown his weight behind attempts by the royal family of Bahrain, the home of the Navy’s Fifth Fleet, to survive, although protesters say their demands have not been met. He has said little about political grievances in Saudi Arabia, a major oil supplier, where there were reports on Thursday of a violent dispersal of Shiite protesters. And he has limited White House critiques of Yemen, where the government is helping the United States root out a terrorist threat, even after that government opened fire on demonstrators.
The more cautious approach contrasts sharply with Mr. Obama’s response in North Africa, where he abandoned a 30-year alliance with Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and has demanded the resignation of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi in Libya. But Mr. Obama is balancing his idealistic instincts against his reluctance to use military action in Libya, where the United States does not have a vital strategic interest. Mr. Donilon noted that the administration needed to keep its focus on the broader region, where allies like Egypt loom large.
The time is coming, administration officials said, for Mr. Obama to make another major speech taking stock of the upheaval. But its central message is not yet set, and there is likely to be lively debate about questions like whether the president should admit American complicity in propping up undemocratic governments in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere.
“I don’t honestly think it would change much,” said a second senior official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. “It isn’t going to change the perception of the United States one way or the other. What will continue to affect the perception of the United States is what we do now.”
The White House will send Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to Egypt and Tunisia next week, where officials said she would congratulate the protesters for sweeping out their leaders peacefully and offer aid to revive the nations’ economies. She had planned to stop in Riyadh, the Saudi capital, but canceled, officials said, because King Abdullah is too ill to meet her.
This underscores one of the difficulties the United States faces in dealing with Saudi Arabia, a crucial ally that is run by an aging, infirm ruling family that has refused to open the political system. Instead, the king tried to mollify his people by doling out $36 billion worth of pay raises, unemployment checks and housing subsidies.
Bahrain poses a different problem. There, King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa has pledged to enter a dialogue with the protestors, after having unleashed its security forces on them. Officials said Mr. Obama persuaded King Hamad to pull back his forces, which they said won the United States goodwill from the mostly Shiite demonstrators. But the talks have failed to get off the ground, and now some Shiites feel the Americans have sided against them.
“There is a sense among many Bahraini reformers that the U.S. is a bit too eager to praise progress toward dialogue and reform that has not yet happened, and that the premature praise is easing pressure on the government,” said Tom Malinowski, the head of the Washington office of Human Rights Watch.
“Striking a very balanced, and in many ways, neutral approach is recognized by many people in the region as not being with them, or on their side,” said J. Scott Mastic, the head of Middle East and North Africa for the International Republican Institute. “It’s very important that we be seen as supporting the demands of the people in the region.”
How Mr. Obama manages to do that while also balancing American interests is a question that officials acknowledge will plague this historic president for months to come. Mr. Obama has told people that it would be so much easier to be the president of China. As one official put it, “No one is scrutinizing Hu Jintao’s words in Tahrir Square.”
With the spread of antigovernment protests from North Africa to the strategic, oil-rich Persian Gulf, President Obama has adopted a policy of restraint. He has concluded that his administration must shape its response country by country, aides say, recognizing a stark reality that American national security interests weigh as heavily as idealistic impulses. That explains why Mr. Obama has dialed down the vocal support he gave demonstrators in Cairo to a more modulated call for peaceful protest and respect for universal rights elsewhere.
This emphasis on pragmatism over idealism has left Mr. Obama vulnerable to criticism that he is losing the battle for the hearts and minds of the Arab street protesters. Some say he is failing to bind the United States to the historic change under way in the Middle East the way that Ronald Reagan forever cemented himself in history books to the end of the cold war with his famous call to tear down the Berlin Wall.
“It’s tempting, and it would be easy, to go out day after day with cathartic statements that make us feel good,” said Benjamin J. Rhodes, the deputy national security adviser, who wrote Mr. Obama’s soaring speech in Cairo to the Islamic world in 2009. “But ultimately, what’s most important is achieving outcomes that are consistent with our values, because if we don’t, those statements will be long forgotten.”
On Thursday, Mr. Obama’s national security adviser, Thomas E. Donilon, deflected calls for more aggressive action in Libya, telling reporters what American officials have been saying privately for days: despite pleas from Libyan rebels for military assistance, the United States will not, at least for now, put its pilots in harm’s way by enforcing a no-flight zone over the country.
Not only is intervention risky, officials said, but they also fear that in some cases, it could be counterproductive, provoking a backlash against the United States for meddling in what is a homegrown political movement.
A senior administration official acknowledged the irony of Mr. Obama’s dilemma; he is, after all, the first black president, whose election was hailed on the Arab street, where many protesters identify their own struggles with the civil rights movement.
“There is a desire for Obama — not the American president, but Obama — to speak to their aspirations,” the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. But, he added, “his first job is to be the American president.”
So Mr. Obama has thrown his weight behind attempts by the royal family of Bahrain, the home of the Navy’s Fifth Fleet, to survive, although protesters say their demands have not been met. He has said little about political grievances in Saudi Arabia, a major oil supplier, where there were reports on Thursday of a violent dispersal of Shiite protesters. And he has limited White House critiques of Yemen, where the government is helping the United States root out a terrorist threat, even after that government opened fire on demonstrators.
The more cautious approach contrasts sharply with Mr. Obama’s response in North Africa, where he abandoned a 30-year alliance with Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and has demanded the resignation of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi in Libya. But Mr. Obama is balancing his idealistic instincts against his reluctance to use military action in Libya, where the United States does not have a vital strategic interest. Mr. Donilon noted that the administration needed to keep its focus on the broader region, where allies like Egypt loom large.
The time is coming, administration officials said, for Mr. Obama to make another major speech taking stock of the upheaval. But its central message is not yet set, and there is likely to be lively debate about questions like whether the president should admit American complicity in propping up undemocratic governments in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere.
“I don’t honestly think it would change much,” said a second senior official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. “It isn’t going to change the perception of the United States one way or the other. What will continue to affect the perception of the United States is what we do now.”
The White House will send Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to Egypt and Tunisia next week, where officials said she would congratulate the protesters for sweeping out their leaders peacefully and offer aid to revive the nations’ economies. She had planned to stop in Riyadh, the Saudi capital, but canceled, officials said, because King Abdullah is too ill to meet her.
This underscores one of the difficulties the United States faces in dealing with Saudi Arabia, a crucial ally that is run by an aging, infirm ruling family that has refused to open the political system. Instead, the king tried to mollify his people by doling out $36 billion worth of pay raises, unemployment checks and housing subsidies.
Bahrain poses a different problem. There, King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa has pledged to enter a dialogue with the protestors, after having unleashed its security forces on them. Officials said Mr. Obama persuaded King Hamad to pull back his forces, which they said won the United States goodwill from the mostly Shiite demonstrators. But the talks have failed to get off the ground, and now some Shiites feel the Americans have sided against them.
“There is a sense among many Bahraini reformers that the U.S. is a bit too eager to praise progress toward dialogue and reform that has not yet happened, and that the premature praise is easing pressure on the government,” said Tom Malinowski, the head of the Washington office of Human Rights Watch.
“Striking a very balanced, and in many ways, neutral approach is recognized by many people in the region as not being with them, or on their side,” said J. Scott Mastic, the head of Middle East and North Africa for the International Republican Institute. “It’s very important that we be seen as supporting the demands of the people in the region.”
How Mr. Obama manages to do that while also balancing American interests is a question that officials acknowledge will plague this historic president for months to come. Mr. Obama has told people that it would be so much easier to be the president of China. As one official put it, “No one is scrutinizing Hu Jintao’s words in Tahrir Square.”
Tuesday, March 1, 2011
Gates warns against future land wars like Iraq, Afghanistan
The Defense secretary, who leaves office this year, says the U.S. must not forget the lessons it learned since 2001 and that government must try to solve 'festering problems' before they become crises.
Reporting from Washington — Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates warned Friday that the U.S. should avoid future land wars like those it has fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, but should not forget the difficult lessons it has learned from those conflicts.
"In my opinion, any future Defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should 'have his head examined,' as General MacArthur so delicately put it," Gates said in a speech to cadets at West Point.
"In my opinion, any future Defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should 'have his head examined,' as General MacArthur so delicately put it," Gates said in a speech to cadets at West Point.
His words are likely to carry special weight, because Gates was chosen as Defense secretary by former President George W. Bush and given the job of rescuing the military from what many saw an unwinnable war in Iraq. Retained by President Obama, Gates has presided over a large buildup of ground forces in Afghanistan.
Gates did not mention Bush or Donald H. Rumsfeld, his predecessor who presided over the invasion of Iraq. Rather than explicitly passing judgment on their decisions, he appeared to be aiming to sum up his tenure and position the Pentagon for the future before he leaves office.
Gates has said he will step down later this year, though he has not said when.
The odds that the U.S. would repeat "another Afghanistan or Iraq — invading, pacifying and administering a large, Third World country" were low, he said.
Instead, future conflicts involving the U.S. military were more likely to be fought with air and sea power, instead of the large ground forces like those that invaded Iraq in 2003 and are now deployed in Afghanistan, he said.
With the defense budget growing tighter, the Army faces growing pressure to justify continued spending on large mechanized formations. Instead, he said, the Army and the rest of the government needed to focus more on preventing "festering problems from growing into full-blown crises which require costly — and controversial — large-scale American military intervention."
With the U.S. role in Iraq ending and troops due to begin coming out of Afghanistan later this year, Gates warned against forgetting the lessons U.S. ground forces have learned since 2001.
Instead of focusing exclusively on conventional combat, ground units would have to be prepared for a range of future missions, including counterterrorism, disaster response and training foreign forces to fight insurgencies, he said.
"Potential adversaries, be they terrorists, insurgents, militia groups, rogue states or emerging powers, will seek to frustrate America's traditional advantages, in particular, our ability to shoot, move and communicate with speed and precision," he said.
Thursday, February 10, 2011
In the Middle East, a Catch-22 for the CIA
Washington Post
By David Ignatius
Thursday, February 10, 2011;
The CIA uses the term "liaison" to describe its contacts with foreign intelligence services. And in Arab capitals such as Tunis, Cairo and Amman, these relationships can be so seductively beneficial that they limit the CIA's ability to run its own "unilateral" operations to learn what's going on inside the host country.
This conundrum - how to work with your hosts and also spy on them - is one of the difficulties facing the CIA as it tries to understand the youth revolution spreading across the Middle East. The agency has cultivated its relationships with people such as Gen. Omar Suleiman, Egypt's chief of intelligence and now vice president, but it has not done as well understanding the world of the protesters.
It's a Catch-22 of the intelligence business, especially over the past decade, when counterterrorism became the CIA's core mission: The agency needed good relationships with Arab intelligence services to collect information about al-Qaeda, but to maintain those relationships, the agency sometimes avoided local snooping. The CIA did recruit some long-term contacts within the Egyptian establishment who are said to have provided crucial intelligence in recent days. But it's a far cry from the early 1980s, when the Cairo station chief would regularly meet the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood and other opposition groups.
"We pulled back more and more, and relied on liaison to let us know what was going on," says one former station chief who's a veteran of the CIA's Near East Division.
These have been trying days for that fabled division, which runs clandestine operations from Morocco to Bangladesh. One agency veteran remembers how "NE" officers would boast to trainees at "the farm": "We are the elite of the operations directorate! We have the most important targets."
But this elite status gradually morphed: Not only were the division's targets important, but so were its liaison partners. Careers were made on a station chief's rapport with the head of Jordan's General Intelligence Department or Egypt's General Intelligence Service. An ambitious officer couldn't afford to have strained relations with his local host.
The problem of dependency became acute after Sept. 11, 2001, when the agency spent many hundreds of millions of dollars bolstering friendly services - especially from authoritarian, pro-American regimes such as Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan, Yemen and Pakistan. Those are the countries now shaken by protest.
Egypt posed a special problem. The military-backed regime was paranoid about foreign spies who might be meeting with domestic opposition figures. The Egyptians maintained such aggressive surveillance that every CIA officer sent there took a special six-week class, known as the "Hostile Environment Tradecraft Course," to learn how to operate in "denied areas."
It was a paradox worthy of the sphinx: Even though the United States was spending billions of dollars to assist Egypt and its military, the CIA had to treat Cairo the same way it did Beijing or Moscow. Thanks to extensive military-to-military contacts and other links, supplemented by clandestine polling, the agency did keep tabs on Egypt - but as the current crisis developed, the United States seemed behind the information curve.
Modern communications technology has aided spying, but it put station chiefs on an electronic leash, limiting the unconventional contacts that might warn what was ahead. Headquarters was now able to micromanage operations: One chief of the Near East Division sent so many nit-picking messages that he became known as "The Mailman."
The CIA's defenders say the agency can juggle liaison and unilateral operations, or as one senior official puts it, "walk and chew gum at the same time." This official notes that since January 2010, more than 400 of the agency's 1,700 intelligence reports on the Middle East and North Africa have focused on issues related to stability.
The revolution in Tunisia was a surprise, says this CIA defender, because it "wasn't clear even to President Ben Ali that his security forces would quickly choose not to support him." As for Egypt, he says, "analysts anticipated and highlighted the concern that unrest in Tunisia might spread well before demonstrations erupted in Cairo. They later warned that unrest in Egypt would likely gain momentum and could threaten the regime."
Here's the bottom line: The CIA is caught in a jam that's emblematic of America's larger problem in the Middle East. The agency has been so focused on stopping al-Qaeda that it has been distracted from other questions. America depends on good intelligence as never before, and the simple truth is that the CIA has to lift its game.
By David Ignatius
Thursday, February 10, 2011;
The CIA uses the term "liaison" to describe its contacts with foreign intelligence services. And in Arab capitals such as Tunis, Cairo and Amman, these relationships can be so seductively beneficial that they limit the CIA's ability to run its own "unilateral" operations to learn what's going on inside the host country.
This conundrum - how to work with your hosts and also spy on them - is one of the difficulties facing the CIA as it tries to understand the youth revolution spreading across the Middle East. The agency has cultivated its relationships with people such as Gen. Omar Suleiman, Egypt's chief of intelligence and now vice president, but it has not done as well understanding the world of the protesters.
It's a Catch-22 of the intelligence business, especially over the past decade, when counterterrorism became the CIA's core mission: The agency needed good relationships with Arab intelligence services to collect information about al-Qaeda, but to maintain those relationships, the agency sometimes avoided local snooping. The CIA did recruit some long-term contacts within the Egyptian establishment who are said to have provided crucial intelligence in recent days. But it's a far cry from the early 1980s, when the Cairo station chief would regularly meet the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood and other opposition groups.
"We pulled back more and more, and relied on liaison to let us know what was going on," says one former station chief who's a veteran of the CIA's Near East Division.
These have been trying days for that fabled division, which runs clandestine operations from Morocco to Bangladesh. One agency veteran remembers how "NE" officers would boast to trainees at "the farm": "We are the elite of the operations directorate! We have the most important targets."
But this elite status gradually morphed: Not only were the division's targets important, but so were its liaison partners. Careers were made on a station chief's rapport with the head of Jordan's General Intelligence Department or Egypt's General Intelligence Service. An ambitious officer couldn't afford to have strained relations with his local host.
The problem of dependency became acute after Sept. 11, 2001, when the agency spent many hundreds of millions of dollars bolstering friendly services - especially from authoritarian, pro-American regimes such as Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan, Yemen and Pakistan. Those are the countries now shaken by protest.
Egypt posed a special problem. The military-backed regime was paranoid about foreign spies who might be meeting with domestic opposition figures. The Egyptians maintained such aggressive surveillance that every CIA officer sent there took a special six-week class, known as the "Hostile Environment Tradecraft Course," to learn how to operate in "denied areas."
It was a paradox worthy of the sphinx: Even though the United States was spending billions of dollars to assist Egypt and its military, the CIA had to treat Cairo the same way it did Beijing or Moscow. Thanks to extensive military-to-military contacts and other links, supplemented by clandestine polling, the agency did keep tabs on Egypt - but as the current crisis developed, the United States seemed behind the information curve.
Modern communications technology has aided spying, but it put station chiefs on an electronic leash, limiting the unconventional contacts that might warn what was ahead. Headquarters was now able to micromanage operations: One chief of the Near East Division sent so many nit-picking messages that he became known as "The Mailman."
The CIA's defenders say the agency can juggle liaison and unilateral operations, or as one senior official puts it, "walk and chew gum at the same time." This official notes that since January 2010, more than 400 of the agency's 1,700 intelligence reports on the Middle East and North Africa have focused on issues related to stability.
The revolution in Tunisia was a surprise, says this CIA defender, because it "wasn't clear even to President Ben Ali that his security forces would quickly choose not to support him." As for Egypt, he says, "analysts anticipated and highlighted the concern that unrest in Tunisia might spread well before demonstrations erupted in Cairo. They later warned that unrest in Egypt would likely gain momentum and could threaten the regime."
Here's the bottom line: The CIA is caught in a jam that's emblematic of America's larger problem in the Middle East. The agency has been so focused on stopping al-Qaeda that it has been distracted from other questions. America depends on good intelligence as never before, and the simple truth is that the CIA has to lift its game.
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