OBAMA'S FIRST HUNDRED DAYS

As he approaches the 100 day mark, we now know three things about Barack Obama that were not clear before. First, he is a war president, not a peace president. Second he wants to reform capitalism, not to transform it. Third, he is almost as much on his own, struggling with a world which is hostile, indifferent, or simply seeking advantage, as was George W.Bush. Obama's style, elegance, and intelligence are obviously in marked contrast with his predecessor, and the quality of his advisors higher, and there is a warmth of feeling toward him in almost every quarter which is unprecedented since Kennedy. Yet the combination of the weight of the Bush legacy and the conservatism of Obama and his team means that he is mapping out his presidency along lines which show a strong continuity with the Bush years. The key question for the future is whether he will become more or less radical as that presidency develops.

A War President
When Obama outlined his plans for Iraq in February, he significantly chose to do so before a military audience. He spoke first to American soldiers because he knew he was not going to be announcing an end to their exposure to the dangers of combat but forecasting a considerable extension of it. His speech was supposedly about withdrawal, but it was in truth about nothing of the kind. Instead, it sketched out the wider war, in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, which Obama has been honest enough to outline to the American people, and brave or foolhardy enough to take on. The speech did indeed contain details of a progressive reduction in the number of American troops in Iraq, but on a longer timetable than Obama had envisaged when campaigning, and with caveats and conditions which could lead to further delays. Even though 2011 is supposedly the date for full withdrawal, few of the soldiers and diplomats involved imagine this will prove to be a real cut-off point, instead envisaging American troops continuing, if in smaller numbers, in Iraq for many years beyond that.

In taking his Iraq decisions Obama has been a prisoner of the surge, the injection of extra troops which, along with the raising and arming of Sunni militias, shifted the political and military balance in Iraq in 2007 and 2008, although how decisively we cannot yet know. When Obama first formulated his views on what should be the end game in Iraq, the war was being lost, and many American politicians were coming to the conclusion that the best thing would be to depart and leave the country to sink or swim on its own. But the surge, initially widely derided, opened up the possibility that a sort of success, even a sort of victory, might after all be possible in Iraq. It is this possibility that Obama has been almost forced to embrace, even though he must know that such a "success" is both a distant and an uncertain prospect. Thomas E. Ricks, the author of the best book on the surge (1), concludes his account by saying that "no matter how the war ends it appears today we may be only halfway through it", and that "the events for which the Iraq war will be remembered probably have not yet happened."

Obama's hand has been forced not only in Iraq, but on a much larger and more frightening scale in Afghanistan and Pakistan. When Obama first began to call for an intensified effort in Afghanistan, the conflict in that country was seen as much more manageable than that in Iraq. Afghanistan had been neglected, it was believed, but it could be rescued, perhaps quite easily rescued. It was the same sort of understanding which led the British military, at about the same time, to argue for a withdrawal from the impossible war in Iraq in order to pay concentrated attention to the winnable war in Afghanistan. Yet what Obama and others overlooked at that stage was that the war was spreading into Pakistan, hitherto seen only as a difficult country which sometimes helped and sometimes hindered the Afghanistan effort. In fact, Pakistan was becoming a battlefield, one in which the United States had neither the ability or the will to directly engage but which it still had to strive to influence. The winnable little war in Afghanistan had become a complex and dangerous cross-border conflict in two countries. What was certain was that no success would endure in Afghanistan unless the Pakistanis, with or without American help, dealt with their own insurgencies. Even if Afghanistan could be halfway settled, a breakdown in Pakistan, a far larger country and one with nuclear weapons, would be a bigger threat than even the worst developments imaginable in Afghanistan and Iraq combined. Obama's commendable readiness to reduce America's stocks of nuclear weapons in concert with other nuclear armed states, as he said himself, is related more to the growing dangers of proliferation, including the possibility of nuclear weapons falling into the hands of terrorists, than it is to the now wholly unrealistic prospect of a nuclear exchange between established powers. The North Korean satellite launch in early April underlined that danger, for North Korea is a proliferator of nuclear weapons technology rather than a believable nuclear aggressor against another state.

In General David Petraeus, head of Central Command, and Richard Holbrooke, special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Obama has two unusually able advisors. They and Obama undoubtedly believe that better diplomacy in the region at large, and civic action in the conflict countries, which the Bush administration often neglected or even derided, have an important part to play. But these are a vital complement rather than a substitute for hard power. In the long run, if Obama's overtures to Iran and Syria were to prove successful, and if Israel could be pushed into meaningful negotiations with the Palestinians, there would presumably be a beneficial effect on how those conflicts play out. But we have yet to learn how soft the Obama administration is going to be with Iran and how tough it is going to be with Israel. In both cases there could be more continuity with the failed policies of the past than some Obama supporters, both inside and outside America, hope. Iran and the United States are engaged in serious covert action against each other, while Israel, up to now with American support, is always in potential conflict with Hizbollah and Hamas in Lebanon and Gaza. These are in fact two further fronts in the larger Middle Eastern war. Obama wants to shut them down, and appears to be ready to go further than Bush in trying to do so. Whether he is ready to give enough or shove enough, is another question. At this point in his presidency, in other words, from Gaza to Lahore, peace is an aspiration, and a multi-front war in the Middle East and South West Asia the unhappy reality.

A Reforming President, not a Revolutionary President
Three important factors have constrained Obama in his approach to the economic crisis. The first is ignorance, the second the need to prop up the very business elite which caused the crisis, the third is fear of the word "socialism" and of what that word represents to Americans who, for all their anger at bankers, are nevertheless still steeped in the dominant market ideology of our era. Ignorance is the common condition of leaders across the world as they face problems which are new both in nature and scale. Nobody, in any country, really knows how to get their economies moving again, or how to dispose of the mass of toxic "assets" which decades of irresponsible manipulation of the markets have created. Obama's administration has chosen to emphasise fiscal stimulus, borrowing large sums to get people lending and spending again. The spending will also sustain important social programmes, notably a reform of the American health system. Some of his critics at home think the stimulus is too small, while some of his critics both at home and abroad think it too large. But everybody is guessing. What Obama has been good at, nevertheless, is projecting confidence, the sense that somebody intelligent and reactive is in charge. This was, for instance, his most important contribution to the recent meeting of the G-20 nations. While the co-ordination of different national policies there was in fact very ragged, Obama managed, with some help from Gordon Brown. to create a reassuring atmosphere. Since confidence is the most important currency in an economic crisis this is an achievement that should not be underestimated.

The need to retain confidence is one reason why Obama has entrusted the direction of economic policy to men and women from the American business elite, including former bankers who were until recently were dealing in the very securities which blew up the financial system, regulators who were until recently ignoring the risks those securities represented, and managers who were running American industry in ways which, it now seems obvious, were unsustainable. The arguments in America about nationalisation are, at bottom, about whether the higher business class can be trusted to reform itself. Obama faces a degree of popular anger at financiers and corporate managers which is much greater than that in Britain and Europe, and yet public opinion is not in favour of "socialistic" measures. The American middle class, combining professionals, workers, and small and middle sized businessmen, is perhaps at this stage more interested in revenge than regulation. Obama's choices so far, of both personnel and policies, suggest he has no intention of seriously disrupting the balance of power in American society, or of limiting the continual interchange between the economically and the politically influential which is at the heart of the American system. He is clearly going to put back in place the regulatory framework which American business managed, with the help of successive administrations from that of Ronald Reagan onwards, to largely dismantle. And some banks and failing car companies may be bullied into reducing the salaries and bonuses of their executives. But Obama has to date not directly addressed the larger problem of inequality in American society or suggested, for instance, that it is not only the pay of unsuccessful executives which should be curbed but that of successful ones as well. He has not yet looked forward to what may happen if, when banks do start to lend, raiders begin using borrowed money to once again hijack established companies, proceeding to pay off their loans by sacking workers, selling assets, and running down pension funds. Banks must begin lending again, that is a given. But what should the lending be for? Obama has not yet, to put it another way, looked at whether American capitalism needs to be transformed rather than merely reformed.

In one area it looks as if Obama is looking for more fundamental change, and that is in the relationship between an indebted United States and the countries which supply it with goods which in truth America cannot afford, or can only afford because the exporting nations stash their profits in American government bonds. The dependent relationship between China and America, in which China's growth is fed by America's debt, is the most glaring example. Constant emphasis on the need to maintain the principles of free trade and steer clear of protectionism conceals the fact that most governments, very much including that of the United States, believe that world trading relations are badly skewed. China's anxiety at the prospect that in the future, even after recovery, America will find ways of buying significantly smaller quantities of Chinese goods was evident in the run up to the G-20 meeting. Obama's welcome emphasis on ecology may also shape future trade policy. Manufacturing which pollutes Chinese air and rivers, then uses scarce fuel to get the product to the American -- or European -- market, where it undercuts local industry and employment, does not make ecological or social sense. Whether there could be a kind of "managed protectionism" is one of the hard questions for the future. But it seems likely that Obama will at some stage try to dig America out of its unhealthy trading relationships. 

A Lonely President
The goodwill, admiration, and respect widely felt for Obama has not translated into any great readiness to heed his appeals, grant his requests, or share his aspirations. At home, the Republican party has spurned his efforts to be bipartisan, ignored his readiness to include Republicans on his team, and resisted his argument that the emergency is so great that all must pull together for the good of the country. They seem intent on painting him as a wastrel, a socialist or even a communist, and as a man who has already exposed the country to a greater risk of terrorist attack than under Bush. This last is a particular specialty of former vice-president Richard Cheney. Although Obama avoids the intemperate rhetoric of the Bush team, he has dismantled little of the country's new security architecture, and is pursuing most of the former administration's policies abroad, while at the same trying to render them more coherent. Yet the Republican party hard core will have none of it. The wider constituency of Republican voters, as opposed to registered Republicans, may, polls suggest, take a different and much more sympathetic view. But in purely party terms, America is more polarised under Obama than under Bush, and he faces an opposition in the legislature determined to obstruct and undermine him.

Abroad, Obama's problem is that there is almost no support for his policies in the Greater Middle East, and less than complete support for his proposals to deal with the economic crisis. The view of his Nato allies is that war in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan is an American responsibility. Americans set off this spiral of interlinked conflicts, so let them unwind it, if it can be unwound. That seems to be the underlying point of view. There is an assymetry here that Obama himself does not, at least publicly, recognise. He conceives his mission as pulling the United States out of the mess which earlier administrations created in the region, and restoring American power and influence in the process. The US armed forces are concerned about their own prestige, and the American public at large is ready to make some, although not endless, sacrifices. The other Nato countries have far less at stake, far less faith in a successful outcome, and far, far less readiness to absorb casualties. This is the reason why Obama's pleas at the recent Nato summit fell on politely deaf ears. He secured a few troops for the coming elections in Afghanistan, but no serious permanent commitments except perhaps from Britain. Outside the ranks of America's close allies, the attitude toward US policy in the Greater Middle East ranges from the actively hostile to the simply watchful. This latter group will wait to see what events bring, and what dangers or opportunities that will present for them. This applies to countries like India, China, and especially Russia. Russia's appetite for American failure is not unlimited, but it sees opportunities to reassert itself in Central Asia and Europe that American weakness will allow it to exploit. The best guess is that Moscow will continue to respond to Obama's overtures -- including his readiness to reconsider missile deployments in Eastern Europe, his broader disarmament proposals, and his requests for more co-operation on Iran -- in a reasonable but also a prevaricating way. They will not be repudiated but they will not be taken up with vigour or speed. Moscow will wait out the Iran game, in particular, without putting its full weight on the scales.

On the economic front, Obama faces a world which is inclined to blame "Anglo-American" capitalism for the crisis, downplaying the fact that every major economy was complicit in it to some extent. This allows politicians to present themselves as fighting the crisis but not responsible for it, and taps into anti-American feeling. It is allied with a reluctance to embrace to the full extent the stimulus measures on which the United States wanted the world to agree. At its most cynical this amounts to a readiness to see the United States go massively into debt to energise its economy, while hoping to benefit from the resulting expansion of American demand to refloat their own economies without having paid anything like as high a price in public spending. But it can more reasonably be seen as arising from natural caution and from different national attitudes toward debt, as is certainly the case with Germany. Whatever the reason the result is a world which is reluctant to do America's bidding.

Before Obama's inauguration, it was commonplace to point out the extraordinarily difficult challenges he would face as president, and to forecast that, if any man could overcome them, he was that man. Now, three months or so into his first year, that opinion would not change as to the difficulties, except that they now seem even greater, or on his character, except to say that it is still unclear whether Obama sees himself as restoring the American system more or less as it was before Bush or as a man who will go down in history as having fundamentally changed it. Meanwhile we have the paradox of a man who is liked and even in a way loved by the world, but who does not command it.

Martin Woollacott

(1) The Gamble. Thomas E. Ricks. Allen Lane, London, 2009

"In November 2005 we produced a special report "Shafting al Jazeera," based on a leaked memo from the office of Prime Minister Blair of a conversation between him and President George.W Bush.

Just about now, the British civil servant David Keogh, and political researcher Leo O'Connor are due to go on trial under the Official Secrets Act, for allegedly leaking the document.

We forecast that the story would "run and run, well into this century," but we got that wrong, because the British Government threatened dire consequences to any of the media that published the leaked memo, which of course we have not seen.

Various explanations of Bush's comments have been offered and rebutted, as can be seen in our background below.

BACKGROUND

Extract from "The War On Al Jazeera" from "The Nation"

Nothing puts the lie to the Bush Administration's absurd claim that it invaded Iraq to spread democracy throughout the Middle East more decisively than its ceaseless attacks on Al Jazeera, the institution that has done more than any other to break the stranglehold over information previously held by authoritarian forces, whether monarchs, military strongmen, occupiers or ayatollahs. The United States bombed its offices in Afghanistan in 2001, shelled the Basra hotel where Al Jazeera journalists were the only guests in April 2003, killed Iraq correspondent Tareq Ayoub a few days later in Baghdad and imprisoned several Al Jazeera reporters (including at Guantánamo), some of whom say they were tortured. In addition to the military attacks, the US-backed Iraqi government banned the network from reporting in Iraq.

Then in late November came a startling development: Britain's Daily Mirror reported that during an April 2004 White House meeting with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, George W. Bush floated the idea of bombing Al Jazeera's international headquarters in Qatar. This allegation was based on leaked "Top Secret" minutes of the Bush-Blair summit. British Attorney General Lord Goldsmith has activated the Official Secrets Act, threatening any publication that publishes any portion of the memo (he has already brought charges against a former Cabinet staffer and a former parliamentary aide). So while we don't yet know the contents of the memo, we do know that at the time of Bush's meeting with Blair, the Administration was in the throes of a very public, high-level temper tantrum directed against Al Jazeera. The meeting took place on April 16, at the peak of the first US siege of Falluja, and Al Jazeera was one of the few news outlets broadcasting from inside the city. Its exclusive footage was being broadcast by every network from CNN to the BBC.

WIKIPEDIA ON AL JAZEERA
On April 8, 2003 Al Jazeera's office in Baghdad was hit by a U.S. missile, killing reporter Tareq Ayyoub and wounding another.[48] Al Jazeera, in order to avoid coming under US fire, had informed the U.S. of the office's precise coordinates prior to the incident. Dima Tareq Tahboub, the widow of Tareq Ayyoub, continues to seek justice for her husband's death and has among other things written for the Guardian and participated in a documentary broadcast on Al Jazeera English.
On January 30, 2005 the New York Times reported that the Qatari government, under pressure from the Bush administration, was speeding up plans to sell the station. However, as of 2007, the station/network has not been sold and it is unclear whether there are still any plans to do so.

Al Jazeera bombing memo
On November 22, 2005, the UK tabloid The Daily Mirror published a story claiming that it had obtained a leaked memo from 10 Downing Street saying that U.S. President George W. Bush had considered bombing Al Jazeera's Doha headquarters in April 2004, when U.S. Marines were conducting a contentious assault on Fallujah.
In light of this allegation, Al Jazeera has questioned whether it has been targeted deliberately in the past - Al Jazeera's Kabul office was bombed in 2001 and another missile hit its office in Baghdad during the invasion of Iraq, killing correspondent Tariq Ayoub. Both of these attacks occurred subsequent to Al Jazeera's disclosure of the locations of their offices to the United States.

Details of the memo
The five-page memorandum is said by the Mirror to be a record of the meeting between the two leaders which took place on 16 April 2004 at the height of Operation Vigilant Resolve, an assault on Fallujah by U.S. Marines and Iraqi security forces. Al Jazeera reporters were in the city providing video footage of the conflict. The day before the meeting, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld described Al Jazeera's coverage as "vicious, inaccurate and inexcusable." Al Jazeera reporters defended their live broadcasts of the civilian casualties by stating "the pictures do not lie".
The White House has dismissed the allegations made in the article. Given that Qatar is an ally of the United States and the United Kingdom in the Iraq War, many commentators have speculated that even if the reports of the memorandum are accurate, they may simply be recording a statement which the President did not intend to be taken seriously. A White House official told CNN "We are not going to dignify something so outlandish with a response," and a Pentagon official called the Daily Mirror report "absolutely absurd."[3] A BBC News correspondent has suggested that if President Bush did indeed make the comments they were intended as "some kind of joke."[4]
Writing in The Independent on 28 November Andreas Whittam Smith countered, observing that "official note takers don't normally record jokes". He also pointed to the alleged leaker's "25 years' experience of tough postings in place such as Islamabad and Khartoum, ... often involved in intelligence work" and concluded that he "must have felt exceptionally troubled by what he was seeing."[5]
According to a report in The Daily Telegraph[6]:

"People who have seen the document say the real reason that it is being suppressed by the Government is because it contains a potentially damaging private discussion between the two leaders about the controversial United States attack on the Iraqi city of Fallujah last year."

The report also stated that, when questioned about the matter at the Commonwealth conference in Malta, Blair branded the claims a "conspiracy theory."
David Keogh, a civil servant at the Cabinet Office, and Leo O'Connor, a research assistant to former Labour MP Tony Clarke, have been charged under the Official Secrets Act for the unauthorised disclosure of the memo (Keogh under section three, O'Connor under section five). When O'Connor gave the memo to Clarke, Clarke returned it to Downing Street. All news organizations in the United Kingdom have been warned by Attorney General Lord Goldsmith against further publication of information from the leaked memo; Goldsmith has mentioned the possibility of prosecution under section five of the Official Secrets Act, 1989 if published details from the memorandum are considered to damage interests of the United Kingdom abroad[7]. On 29 November 2005, Keogh and O'Connor appeared in Bow Street magistrates' court in central London


FROM CBS NEWS 22 NOVEMBER 2005:

Did Bush Want Al Jazeera Bombed?
(LONDON, Nov. 22, 2005)
London Paper Alleges Blair Urged Bush Not To Bomb Arab TV Station

"If the report is correct then this would be both shocking and worrisome not only to Al-Jazeera but to media organizations across the world," it said.

The network said that if true the report would "cast serious doubts" on the Bush administration's explanations of earlier incidents involving Al-Jazeera journalists and the American military.

An Al-Jazeera journalist died in April 2003 when the channel's Baghdad office was struck during the U.S. bombing campaign. The State Department said the strike was a mistake.

Al-Jazeera's office in Kabul, Afghanistan, was destroyed by a U.S. missile in November 2002. None of the crew was inside. U.S. officials said they believed the target was a terrorist site and did not know it was Al-Jazeera's office.

Britain's tabloids are known for their aggressive, but not always accurate, reporting. The Daily Mirror lost some of its credibility after it printed photos last year that purported to show British troops abusing Iraqi detainees. The pictures turned out to be fake, the Mirror apologized and its top editor resigned.

The document was described as a transcript of a conversation between Bush and Blair.

Cabinet Office civil servant David Keogh is accused of passing it to Leo O'Connor, who formerly worked for former British lawmaker Tony Clarke. Both Keogh and O'Connor are scheduled to appear at London's Bow Street Magistrates Court next week.

Peter Kilfoyle, a former defense minister in Blair's government, called for the document to be made public.

"I think they ought to clarify what exactly happened on this occasion," he said. "If it was the case that President Bush wanted to bomb Al-Jazeera in what is after all a friendly country, it speaks volumes and it raises questions about subsequent attacks that took place on the press that wasn't embedded with coalition forces," the newspaper quoted Kilfoyle as saying.

Sir Menzies Campbell, foreign affairs spokesman for the opposition Liberal Democrats, said that, if true, the memo was worrying.

"If true, then this underlines the desperation of the Bush administration as events in Iraq began to spiral out of control," he said. "On this occasion, the prime minister may have been successful in averting political disaster, but it shows how dangerous his relationship with President Bush has been."