Barack Obama and the uses of doubt
Nearly all major American candidates for high office share common foreign policy objectives, provided one speaks very generally. For example, they all wish to protect America from great harm, and they all, I assume, would prefer to see Israel survive in one form or another.
Thus, it is valid, if trite, to observe that the main difference among competing candidates often comes down to “means” rather than “ends.” But there's more to it than that. For example, a telling difference among candidates is how they resolve doubt.
Doubt is a constant in life. This is especially true in foreign affairs, where reliable information is quite difficult to come by, as recent intelligence failures remind us.
The doctrine of preemption is one way of dealing with doubt. In effect, it resolves doubt about the intentions of hostile and dangerous powers by assuming the worst and not waiting around to find out if the assumption is correct.
A less extreme form this kind of the same thinking entails generally resolving doubt in favor of our friends (whose intentions are presumed to be mostly benign) and against our enemies. Of course, this begs the doubt-resolving question to some degree because there may be doubt as to who our friends are. Indeed, since it’s natural to resolve doubt in favor of one’s friends, how a candidate resolves doubt may reveal the extent to which he or she considers a power to be a friend.
In important instances, Barack Obama seems more inclined resolve doubt in favor of Iran, a country nearly every American considers hostile, than in favor of Israel, a country most Americans consider a friend. Consider this exchange between Obama and Tim Russert:
Russert: Senator Obama, would Israel be justified in launching an attack on Iran if they felt their security was jeopardized?Obama: I think it's important to back up for a second, Tim, and just understand, number one, Iran is in a stronger position now than it was before the Iraq war because the Congress authorized the president to go in. And so it indicates the degree to which we've got to make sure, before we launch attacks or make judgments of the sort, that we actually understand the intelligence and we have done a good job in sorting it through.
Now, we don't know exactly what happened with respect to Syria. We've gotten general reports, but we don't know all the specifics. We got general reports in the run-up to the Iraq war that proved erroneous, and a lot of people voted for that war as a consequence.
Now, we are a stalwart ally of Israel, and I think it is important to understand that we will back them up in terms of their security. But it is critical to understand that until we have taken the diplomatic routes that are required to tighten economic sanctions - I have a plan right now to make sure that private pension funds in this country can divest from their holdings in Iran. Until we have gathered the international community to put the squeeze on Iran economically, then we shouldn't be having conversations about attacks in Iran. And I think what Mayor Giuliani said was irresponsible, because we have not yet come to that point. We have not tried the other approach.
Russert: So you would not offer a promise to the American people, like Giuliani, that Iran will not be able to develop and become a nuclear power?
Obama: I make an absolute commitment that we will do everything we need to do to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. One of the things we have to try, though, is to talk directly to Iran, something that we have not been doing. And, you know, one of the disagreements that we have on this stage is the degree to which the next president is going to have to engage in the sort of personal diplomacy that can bring about a new era in the region. And, you know, that means talking to everybody. We've got to talk to our enemies and not just our friends.
This exchange is notable for several reasons, but I want to focus on the way Obama treats Israel’s preemptive attack on what was widely reported to be a Syrian nuclear plant. That attack received widespread support either expressly or, in the case of portions of the Arab world, implicitly through silence. Yet Obama seems to equivocate on the question of whether Israel acted properly. He invokes doubt about the quality of intelligence as a general matter (pointing to our intelligence failure in Iraq) as a basis for agnosticism about Israel's justification for taking action against Syria.
Obama, in short, was unwilling to give Israel the benefit of the doubt with respect to its action against what it thought was a nuclear plant in a neighboring country.
Does Obama apply the same level skepticism to reports that cast our enemies in a favorable light or that provide an argument for not taking military action against them? It seems not. Here’s what Obama said about the National Intelligence Estimate’s assessment that Iran has halted work on developing a nuclear weapons capability (from which the director of national intelligence has already backed away):
By reporting that Iran halted its nuclear weapon development program four years ago because of international pressure, the new National Intelligence Estimate makes a compelling case for less saber-rattling and more direct diplomacy.
Doubt seems not to come into play here. The NIE, the same intelligence exercise that proved less than highly reliable with respect to Iraq, is treated by Obama as “compelling” when it paints Iran as more benign than previously thought, and where it can be used as a basis for eschewing military action in favor of talk.
The last point is probably the most salient. Obama doesn’t necessarily favor Iranian interests over Israel’s per se; he favors military inaction against Iran and Syria over military action. But when that bias leads to a double standard under which Israeli intelligence that counsels in favor of military action is discounted on principle, while intelligence that counsels against military action towards a power that threatens to destroy Israel gets a pass, Israel and its supporters are justified in doubting Obama’s claim that he is “a stalwart ally of Israel.”
To comment on this post, go here.
