[NOTE: Even though this is somewhat of an old topic, I’m taking it up because of the revival of the “Obama, fool or knave?” argument the other day.]
We all know that Obama called ISIS the “jayvee” back when it had already taken over quite a bit of territory and was slaughtering great numbers of innocent people. It was so transparent an error even back then that it’s become nearly legendary in its ignorant, arrogant, wrongheaded condescension.
The time was January, 2014. The interviewer was a friendly admirer, David Remnick of The New Yorker. The article describes Obama as doing a number of things that—had they been, for example, done by President George W. Bush—would have been spun and criticized for weeks. For example, Obama says he never watches any Sunday news shows, although on the day of the interview those shows were showing reactions to Iran’s agreement to freeze its nuclear program for six months. Instead, Obama played basketball. After that, he embarked on a three-day fundraising trip to hobnob with rich donors. The Remnick interview is a long one, and it took place on Air Force One at the outset of that trip.
When Remnick goes to the front of the plane to talk to Obama, the president is watching a football game on TV, and Remnick adds, without any emphasis:
As we talked, mainly about the Middle East, his eyes wandered to the game.
I repeat: imagine if George W. Bush has done all of this. Imagine.
The Remnick interview started with some small talk about the game, while Obama chewed some Nicorette. At this point in the article, Remnick digresses to mention the following:
When Obama leaves the White House, on January 20, 2017, he will write a memoir. “Now, that’s a slam dunk,” the former Obama adviser David Axelrod told me. Andrew Wylie, a leading literary agent, said he thought that publishers would pay between seventeen and twenty million dollars for the book””the most ever for a work of nonfiction””and around twelve million for Michelle Obama’s memoirs. (The First Lady has already started work on hers.) Obama’s best friend, Marty Nesbitt, a Chicago businessman, told me that, important as the memoir might be to Obama’s legacy and to his finances, “I don’t see him locked up in a room writing all the time. His capacity to crank stuff out is amazing. When he was writing his second book, he would say, ”˜I’m gonna get up at seven and write this chapter””and at nine we’ll play golf.’ I would think no, it’s going to be a lot later, but he would knock on my door at nine and say, ”˜Let’s go.’
“The most money ever for a work of nonfiction”—no wonder Obama thinks he’s the most amazing, competent, and smartest guy on the planet. And whether he writes his own books or not (and think how Marty Nesbitt’s story might reflect on that question), I have to say that the excerpts I’ve read from The Audacity of Hope certainly read as though someone (perhaps Obama himself) wrote the chapters in less than 2 hours.
Note again the emphasis on quick work and then off to play golf. And that was when Obama was a senator.
As I said, the Remnick article is long. Along the way there are a lot of the obligatory digs at Republicans and respect for Obama, but one passage that struck me as ironic (and which I doubt that subsequent events have ever caused Remnick to revisit) is this one:
Toward the end of Obama’s speech, Ju Hong, a Berkeley graduate, broke in, demanding that the President use his executive powers to stop deportations.
Obama wheeled around. “If, in fact, I could solve all these problems without passing laws in Congress, then I would do so, but we’re also a nation of laws,” he said, making his case to a wash of applause.
Later Obama is about to address another crowd, and this exchange occurs:
Obama turned to his aides and said, “How many we got out there?”
“Five hundred. Five-fifty.”
“Five-fifty?” Obama said, walking toward the wings of the stage. “What are we talking about? Politics? Can’t we talk about something else? Sports?”
Is it a joke? Hard to say; Remnick doesn’t indicate, but I’ll assume so, because Obama goes on to make an impromptu speech of some length that once again defends the rule of law and separation of powers, with passages like this:
A man in the balcony repeatedly shouted out, “Executive order!,” demanding that the President bypass Congress with more unilateral actions. Obama listened with odd indulgence. Finally, he said, “I’m going to actually pause on this issue, because a lot of people have been saying this lately on every problem, which is just, ”˜Sign an executive order and we can pretty much do anything and basically nullify Congress.’ ”
Many in the crowd applauded their approval. Yes! Nullify it! Although Obama has infuriated the right with relatively modest executive orders on gun control and some stronger ones on climate change, he has issued the fewest of any modern President, except George H. W. Bush.
“Wait, wait, wait,” Obama said. “Before everybody starts clapping, that’s not how it works. We’ve got this Constitution, we’ve got this whole thing about separation of powers. So there is no shortcut to politics, and there’s no shortcut to democracy.” The applause was hardly ecstatic. Everyone knew what he meant. The promises in the second inaugural could be a long time coming.
That’s a fascinating passage to me for two reasons. The first is that Remnick chooses to pretend (and a pretense it is) that the number of executive orders has some meaning, when of course it’s their content and seriousness that matters. The second is that Obama uses the rhetorical device of whipping the crowd up to demand he abuse his powers and then saying he can’t (at least, not yet, because we all know he later did, and I have little doubt it was already something he planned to do when the “politics” allowed it).
Remnick then goes off on a long riff in which he criticizes people who say Obama is cool and removed and then Remnick goes on to describe Obama in such a way that the reader can only conclude that he is very cool and very removed.
Later in the piece when the discussion of the situation in Syria begins, Obama sets up one of his favorite defenses, which is that any alternatives to what he did that were proposed by his critics were “magical thinking.” In other words, his way was the best possible way, even though it didn’t turn out quite as planned or desired. And then he adds this:
…[O]ur best chance of seeing a decent outcome at this point is to work [in Syria] the state actors who have invested so much in keeping Assad in power””mainly the Iranians and the Russians””as well as working with those who have been financing the opposition to make sure that they’re not creating the kind of extremist force that we saw emerge out of Afghanistan when we were financing the mujahideen.”
Well, he’s right; in Syria we didn’t create “the kind of extremist force that we saw emerge out of Afghanistan when we were financing the mujahideen.” We created one that’s far worse.
At this point in the interview, even the admiring Remnick challenges Obama with the obvious:
I pointed out that the flag of Al Qaeda is now flying in Falluja, in Iraq, and among various rebel factions in Syria; Al Qaeda has asserted a presence in parts of Africa, too.
And here it comes. You’ll notice in the following that the “jayvee” part alone is nothing compared to the profound misjudgment of the whole [emphasis mine]:
The analogy we use around here sometimes, and I think is accurate, is if a jayvee team puts on Lakers uniforms that doesn’t make them Kobe Bryant,” Obama said, resorting to an uncharacteristically flip analogy. “I think there is a distinction between the capacity and reach of a bin Laden and a network that is actively planning major terrorist plots against the homeland versus jihadists who are engaged in various local power struggles and disputes, often sectarian.
“Let’s just keep in mind, Falluja is a profoundly conservative Sunni city in a country that, independent of anything we do, is deeply divided along sectarian lines. And how we think about terrorism has to be defined and specific enough that it doesn’t lead us to think that any horrible actions that take place around the world that are motivated in part by an extremist Islamic ideology are a direct threat to us or something that we have to wade into.”
You have a schism between Sunni and Shia throughout the region that is profound. Some of it is directed or abetted by states who are in contests for power there. You have failed states that are just dysfunctional, and various warlords and thugs and criminals are trying to gain leverage or a foothold so that they can control resources, populations, territory. . . . And failed states, conflict, refugees, displacement””all that stuff has an impact on our long-term security. But how we approach those problems and the resources that we direct toward those problems is not going to be exactly the same as how we think about a transnational network of operatives who want to blow up the World Trade Center.”
Obama’s analysis of and predictions about the entire situation are about as wrong as they can be. He misreads not just the size and the strength of ISIS (which would be a bad enough error on his part) but he misreads ISIS’ intent towards the west, which is the more fatal error.
So, what did we actually know about ISIS at the time Obama made these remarks? The interview seems to have occurred in late November of 2013; here’s a paper written the September before that, and these are some excerpts of what we already knew:
…[On]ne can see a number of images from Syria circulated among pro-ISIS circles that openly affirm the goal of establishing a Caliphate, which should eventually encompass the entire world.
The paper shows an image from ISIS propaganda that shows a map of the entire world under the ISIS flag. On page 6, the article features a video it says was an official ISIS video series entitled “Those who believe, emigrate and wage jihad.” In it, the desire to take over the world is explicitly stated, and waging jihad in order to do that is that goal. This is noted to have been virtually identical with the message of al Qaeda before it.
The article differentiates between the behavior of ISIS in Syria, where it already had a great deal of power, and in Iraq, where it was still consolidating its power. In the former it was secure enough to be open about its worldwide ambitions; in the latter it was keeping them hidden and concentrating on a more local message for now.
Here’s an article written a few weeks before the Remnick interview. It makes it clear that ISIS is composed mainly of al Qaeda members and, far from being a jayvee, it has established its power in record time.
THis article written a few weeks before the interview, describes the route jihadis take to enter Syria for what they belive will be an end-of-the-world battle. One of them makes clear that:
Our fight is with the West now too, as their silence means they are complicit,” he says, listing the “international community” alongside Iran, Russia and the Assad regime as an enemy…ISIS is linked to al Qaeda; it seeks an Islamic caliphate, it blames the West for what is happening, and it is sitting on NATO’s border.
Shouldn’t have been hard to connect those dots. And it wasn’t; many, many people did. Here’s an article from October 2013, about a month before the interview:
A U.S. counterterrorism official said Syria poses a “two-pronged terrorist threat” to Western nations.
“There is continuing concern that some of the foreigners fighting in Syria with the Nusra Front and other extremist factions could leave the battlefield and mount attacks in their home countries,” the official said on the condition of anonymity to discuss security issues. “At the same time, we are watching for signs that the al Qaeda-affiliated groups present in Syria could shift some of their focus from toppling [President Bashar Assad] to launching external operations against the West.”
Significant parts of the country are controlled by jihadi groups, and the U.S. doesn’t have any strategy,” said Barak Mendelsohn, a researcher at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. “It’s weird to me that the U.S. went to take out the safe haven in Afghanistan, went to Iraq for the fear of a safe haven, and now you have a safe haven in Syria.”
According to some estimates, more than 1,000 opposition groups such as the Nusra Front and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant are fighting alongside ”” and sometimes with ”” Syrian rebels in a conflict in which more than 100,000 have been killed since March 2011. Groups affiliated with al Qaeda have provided the most effective fighters because of their superior organization, equipment and funding.
Mr. Rogers said more than 10,000 “committed” al Qaeda members are operating along Syria’s eastern border with Iraq ”” more than the number of jihadists in Iraq during the U.S.-led occupation or in Afghanistan during the Soviet invasion of the 1980s. Jihadists in Syria are “talking about conducting external operations, which is exactly what happened in Afghanistan, which led to 9/11,” Mr. Rogers said.
Oh, what’s the use? Even if Obama never read or heard a word of this, common sense should have suggested that it was the case. Since when are extremist Middle Eastern jihadi groups composed of al Qaeda members going to limit their ambitions to the locals?
By the way, this post does not answer the question of whether Obama is fool or knave, because for many years I have thought it to be a false choice in Obama’s case. He sometimes sounds like a fool (although never to his many supporters) or acts foolishly. But there is way too much pattern to his seeming foolishness, which is not the least bit random. So my verdict is: knave sometimes dressing in fool’s clothing.
