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"Dignity Promotion" Was Certainly Missing In 2006

Spencer Ackerman has written a very positive review of Obama’s foreign policy team in The American Prospect.  In the first section, he describes how the team sees the campaign as breaking out of the “defensive crouch,” as some call it, that defines how Democrats address foreign policy in national debates.  What it doesn’t do is consider or […]

Spencer Ackerman has written a very positive review of Obama’s foreign policy team in The American Prospect.  In the first section, he describes how the team sees the campaign as breaking out of the “defensive crouch,” as some call it, that defines how Democrats address foreign policy in national debates.  What it doesn’t do is consider or “think through” the policy recommendations Obama made last summer, all of which were at the very least questionable and some of which were simply bad ideas.  The fact that the Bush administration has actually been putting one of these recommendations into action does not necessarily prove it to be a bad idea, but it certainly doesn’t help in persuading skeptics that it represents some remarkable break with the status quo.  Usually, at least outside the Bush administration and its supporters, policies that involve violating allied states’ sovereignty and risking their internal destabilisation are considered unwise–not so with Team Obama.

In the second section comes the discussion of “dignity promotion”:

This ability to see the world from different perspectives informs what the Obama team hopes will replace the Iraq War mind-set: something they call dignity promotion. “I don’t think anyone in the foreign-policy community has as much an appreciation of the value of dignity as Obama does,” says Samantha Power, a former key aide and author of the groundbreaking study of U.S. foreign policy and genocide, A Problem From Hell. “Dignity is a way to unite a lot of different strands [of foreign-policy thinking],” she says. “If you start with that, it explains why it’s not enough to spend $3 billion on refugee camps in Darfur, because the way those people are living is not the way they want to live. It’s not a human way to live. It’s graceless — an affront to your sense of dignity.”

Well, it’s pretty “graceless” to full-throatedly support the bombardment of a country, Lebanon, when the campaign kills 1,000 civilians and displaces a million more, putting hundreds of thousands into refugee camps for months and years afterwards, but that is what Obama did during the summer of 2006.  His appreciation for human dignity is truly overwhelming. 

Then there is this gem:

“Look at why the baddies win these elections,” Power says. “It’s because [populations are] living in climates of fear.”

Viewed another way, they win because significant numbers of people in Lebanon, Iraq and Palestine don’t think of these groups as “the baddies,” and not least because these groups have come to represent them and their aspirations to some degree (which is a troubling development all its own), because they offer them a means to vent their resentments against someone else (in the cases of Hizbullah and Hamas, Israel) and because the groups may also provide some meaningful social services (Hizbullah) or local policing (see Sadr’s militias in Iraq), and serve a function beyond demagoguery and thuggery.  One might note again that the empowerment of Hizbullah in the aftermath of the “Cedar Revolution” was then redoubled by the solidarity against Israel on account of the wide-ranging, disproportionate and indiscriminate war against Lebanon, and then one could observe that Obama was right there along with most of the Senate cravenly endorsing the campaign to the hilt.  In other words, Obama has proudly backed policies that have struck at the dignity of hundreds of thousands of Lebanese, and he has proudly backed policies that contribute to the “climate of fear” that helps empower what his then-advisor described as “the baddies.”  (Seriously, “the baddies”?  Who talks like this?)  This is the candidate who offers a change of direction in foreign policy?  Really? 

Those who continually come back to his position on Iraq seem satisfied that Obama reached the right conclusion without concerning themselves very much with how he reaches conclusions and makes decisions.  Taking the longer view, his assumptions about America’s role in the world are more significant than his view on any particular policy.  Basic assumptions are more valuable for understanding what a politician is likely to do in a crisis than how he has responded to any one particular policy or event.

Ackerman adds towards the end:

Conservatives are using Obama’s argument about the inextricability of international prosperity and U.S. national security to portray him as a “post-American globalist.”

For my part, I have never used the phrase “post-American,” but it seems undeniable to me that Obama is in some real sense a globalist (as is most, if not all, of the foreign policy establishment).  And Obama does not argue for “the inextricability of international prosperity and U.S. national security” as such, but argues explicitly that the security of every other country is inextricably bound to American national security: every security crisis, in theory no matter how local or contained, is fundamentally our business because it (supposedly) affects us.  It seems to me that people who agree with this are globalists and would probably not mind being called by this name.  I would conclude by noting that it requires someone with the strange assumptions of a globalist about the vast scope and extent of American security interests to have ever believed that a third-rate dictatorship on the other side of the world posed a meaningful threat to the United States or American interests worthy of preventive war.  The “mindset” behind the Iraq war is the mindset that says the following: state sovereignty is irrelevant when Washington says it is, international law exists to be used as a justification for our policies and a bludgeon against other countries, and civilian populations of states that supposedly or actually harbour or support terrorists are essentially expendable.  In his comments on Pakistan and his vote on the war in Lebanon, Obama has not only failed to repudiate this mindset, but has demonstrated his fidelity to it on occasion. 

I wonder if progressive realists interested in a sane and responsible foreign policy will see these flaws, or if they are so intent on getting out of the “defensive crouch” that they will endorse a bad foreign policy paradigm simply because it is being presented as a break with the past.  Thus far, my impression is that the latter is more the case than the former.

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