The mystery of the Obama administration's foreign policy has always been whether President Barack Obama has two separate strategies: one "above the table" waving his arms and talking tough like Official Washington's arm-chair warriors do - and another "below the table" where he behaves as a pragmatic realist, playing footsy with foreign adversaries.
From the start, Obama surrounded himself with many hawkish advisers - such as Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Gen. David Petraeus, National Security Council aide Samantha Power, etc. - and mostly read the scripts that they wrote for him. But then he tended to drag his feet or fold his arms when it came to acting on their warmongering ideas.
Friday's decision to tank the hapless $500 million training program for "moderate" Syrian rebels is a case in point. Obama joined in the hyperbolic rhetoric against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, lining up with the neocons and liberal interventionists demanding "Assad must go," but Obama has remained unenthusiastic about their various wacky schemes for overthrowing Assad.
In 2012, Obama resisted plans from Petraeus, Clinton and other hawks to invest significantly in a program for training and arming rebels and to impose a no-fly zone over rebel-controlled territory inside Syria, which would require destroying Syria's air defenses and much of its air force. In other words, it would have been a major act of war with the prospect of the kind of bloody chaos that a similar "responsibility to protect" strategy -- pushed by Clinton and Power -- unleashed on Libya in 2011 and that continues to the present.
Among other problems of the Petraeus-Clinton scheme for Syria - such as being a gross violation of international law - the plan would have amounted to support for international terrorism given the thorough terrorist infiltration of the Syrian rebel movement. And it almost certainly would not have achieved the goal of a moderate "regime change." The far more likely outcome would have been even worse sectarian bloodshed and quite possibly a victory for Al Qaeda or a related terrorist band.
In one candid moment, Obama told New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman that it was "a fantasy" to think that such a U.S.-backed "moderate" rebel force could do much good. Nevertheless, Obama eventually caved in to political/media pressure and agreed to a "covert" CIA training mission and later to the $500 million program which, the Pentagon says, put about "four or five" fighters into the field in Syria.
Besides the obvious failure to field a significant Pentagon-trained "moderate" force, there was the additional problem that the "moderate" CIA-trained rebels kept sharing their military skills and weapons with coalitions of Syrian rebels dominated by Al Qaeda's Nusra Front and/or the Islamic State. Many U.S.-supplied weapons ended up in the hands of Nusra fighters who used U.S. TOW anti-tank missiles against the Syrian army around the city of Idlib.
Whether intentionally or not, the U.S. policy was advancing the prospects of a Sunni terrorist victory in Syria, which could lead to a bloodbath of Christians, Alawites, Shiites and other "infidels" - as well as driving millions more Syrian refugees into Turkey and Europe, thus spreading the destabilization of the Middle East into the middle of Europe.
So, by pulling the plug on the $500 million training program, Obama was finally facing up to reality - that it would be a humanitarian and strategic disaster if Al Qaeda and/or the Islamic State defeated Assad's Syrian army. At his press conference on Oct. 2, Obama even blurted out that most of the "half-baked ideas" for intervening in Syria were just "a bunch of mumbo jumbo."
But Obama could not fully bring himself to repudiate the U.S. military interference, replacing the failed training program with another scheme that would simply give weapons and ammunition to some rebel leaders considered reliable in the battle against the Islamic State - a compromise approach that even the hawkish New York Times editorial page deemed "hallucinatory."
A Schizophrenic Approach
In essence, these inconsistencies between Obama's words and deeds reflect the schizophrenic nature of Obama's "above-the-table" and "below-the-table" split personality.
While the "above-the-table" Obama continues to rant against Assad and Russia's decision to step up its support for his government, the "under-the-table" Obama appears to recognize that the Russian entrance into the war is not the catastrophe that Official Washington, including Obama and his advisers, have made it out to be. Indeed, despite the fiery rhetoric from Obama and his aides, there is a logical correlation between Obama's core interests in Syria and those of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Obama has resisted the idea of committing hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops to another full-scale war in the Middle East, which might well be the inevitable result of a victorious Islamic State engaging in mass executions of "infidels" in Damascus or of Al Qaeda transforming Syria into a new more central location to plot terror attacks on the West.
The prospects for a terrorist victory are diminished if the Russian air support - and Iranian ground assistance - can help the Syrian military roll back the gains of the Islamic State and the Army of Conquest, which is dominated by Al Qaeda's Nusra Front.
So, the logical move for the "under-the-table" Obama would be to cooperate with Putin on a peace initiative that shelves the "Assad must go" rhetoric in favor of practical cooperation with Russia in arranging a political power-sharing government between Assad and the "moderate" Sunni politicians who have lived off U.S. largesse and thus are susceptible to American pressure.
Even more importantly, Obama could finally get serious about clamping down on Saudi, Qatari, Turkish and Israeli support for the extremist Syrian rebels, finally putting some teeth into the theory that support for terrorism is indistinguishable from acts of terrorism.
But the "above-the-table" Obama seems frightened by the domestic political repercussions if he were to make such rational moves, so he continues to rant about Assad as "a brutal, ruthless dictator" who "drops barrel bombs to massacre innocent children" - as if these crude bombs are some uniquely diabolical weapons and as if Assad were targeting "innocent children" when there is no evidence of that. Such crude propaganda is then used to justify Obama repeating his dubious mantra: "Assad must go!"
Obama also fears neocon Sen. John McCain, the former Republican presidential nominee whom Obama defeated in 2008 but who is still invited onto all the U.S. news shows to berate the President for not escalating the Syrian, Ukrainian and other conflicts around the globe.
Plus, Obama sees himself surrounded by his own neocons like Defense Secretary Ashton Carter and liberal interventionists like Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power. He must realize that such ideologues won't shake their commitment to "regime change" in Syria.
Fear of 'Softness'
Clearly, Obama is to blame for his administration's appointees, whether it was the misguided "Team of Rivals" at the start of his presidency or the current mix of mostly non-entities and neocon-lites in his second term. But the low quality of these officials is also a comment on how thin the Democratic foreign-policy bench is after three-and-a-half decades of cowering before Republican and media accusations about the Democrats showing "un-American" softness.
Today's Democrats are not able to formulate a foreign policy argument that separates enlightened American interests from imperialist adventures. They generally accept the neocon narratives about "bad guys" and then either acquiesce to another "regime change" operation, as Obama and others did in Libya in 2011, or they drag their heels to slow or obstruct the most dangerous schemes.
The vast majority of the Democratic foreign policy "experts" who have survived politically either have become "me-too" echoes of the Republican neocons (the likes of Hillary Clinton) or have adopted a militant "humanitarianism" favoring either coups or war in the name of "human rights" (the likes of Samantha Power).
You do have some establishment Democrats, such as Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of State John Kerry, who probably know better but have grown accustomed to accommodating to neocon and liberal-hawk pressures. Biden and Kerry both overrode their better judgments to vote for the Iraq War in 2002 and they have echoed the neocon tough talk about Syria and Ukraine.
But Biden and Kerry probably represent the most realistic of the mainstream Democrats, the most in line with the "under-the-table" Obama. Biden opposed the pointless but bloody Afghan War "surge" in 2009; he also battled Secretary of State Clinton over her desires for military intervention in Libya and Syria. For his part, Kerry as Secretary of State executed Obama's negotiation of a nuclear deal with Iran, an approach that Clinton had resisted.
Still, the foreign policy realism of Biden and Kerry is spotty at best. Both have run with the neocon/liberal-hawk pack in escalating tensions with Russia over Ukraine, and Kerry rushed to dangerous judgments blaming Assad for the Aug. 21, 2013 sarin gas attack outside Damascus and Russia for the July 17, 2014 shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine.
Not even a progressive like Sen. Bernie Sanders articulates sensible alternatives to the neocon/liberal-hawk narratives, though he did vote against the Iraq War and generally has favored less aggressive actions overseas. Still, no one of prominence in the Democratic Party has charted a comprehensive strategy for a non-imperialist U.S. foreign policy, an incoherence that helps explain the contradictory aspects of Obama's approach to the world.
Whereas the dominant ideology among the Republicans remains neoconservatism, the primary approach of the Democrats is "liberal interventionism," but there really isn't much difference between the two in practical terms. Indeed, arch-neocon Robert Kagan has said he is comfortable calling himself a "liberal interventionist."
Loving 'Stratcom'
Both neocons and liberal interventionists favor "regime change" strategies as a principal feature of U.S. foreign policy, whether through "color revolutions" or "responsibility to protect" military invasions. They also rely heavily on "strategic communications" or "Stratcom," a blend of psy-ops, propaganda and P.R., to bring both the American people and the global public into line.
That's why once a propaganda theme is developed - such as blaming Assad for the sarin attack and Russia for the MH-17 shoot-down - there are no revisions or corrections even when the evidence leads in a different direction. The false narrative must be maintained because it is useful as a Stratcom weapon to discredit and damage an adversary in the eyes of the public.
Even when Obama knows better, he sticks with the Stratcom, too, all the better to beat up "an enemy." Obama may drop the false allegations from future speeches, but he won't retract what he has said before. Note that he has said little or nothing about either the sarin case or the MH-17 incident after initially wielding them as propaganda clubs against Assad and Putin, respectively.
So, instead of telling the whole truth to the American people, Obama just replaces the old attack lines with new ones. Obama's latest comments about the Russians in Syria sounded like premature gloating over the prospect of a Russian "quagmire" in Syria, staking out an early "I-told-you-so" position as if being proved right were more important than resolving the crisis.
But does Obama really want the Russian-backed offensive against Al Qaeda's Nusra Front and the Islamic State to fail and for the terrorists to win?
That outcome might make for a great talking point at the think tanks and on the op-ed pages, but a terrorist victory would be a humanitarian catastrophe for the people of Syria and a strategic disaster for the West, where Europe is already under strain from the flood of Syrian refugees.
One might think that a more mature and responsible approach would be for the United States and the European Union to do all they could to help the Russians succeed - by cracking down on countries aiding Al Qaeda and the Islamic State and by facilitating serious peace talks between Assad and "moderate" Sunni politicians.
Perhaps the "under-the-table" Obama will move in that direction in the weeks ahead, but the "above-the-table" Obama seems more afraid of committing a social faux pas that will offend Official Washington. He seems to fear that criticism more than he cares about saving lives and bringing peace to Syria.
