It takes a rare president who can manage to morally and politically situate the United States behind France, the European Union, the Arab League, the Organization of the Islamic Conference and the Gulf Cooperation Council. But then, Barack Obama never wanted to be a conventional president. His campaign promise was one of transcendence and on that, at least, he’s made good. He has transcended what even the hardheaded skeptics of his presidency thought would be a cautious style of governance, neither foolhardy in its commitment to right all the world’s wrongs nor navel-gazing in its isolationism. Moral but not moralizing. He has also transcended what his devoted fans might have expected of him someone whose face told all, as wrote Andrew Sullivan in a much-touted Atlantic profile that doubled as a presidential endorsement. Here was multiculturalism reified, a half-black law prodigy with a Muslim-sounding name who spent a childhood among the muezzins of Jakarta and an adulthood among the rollicking pews of South Side Chicago. Not even the Duke University English Department could invent a more perfect dragoman between the West and the Rest.
Anticlimaxes are supposed to whimper, not bang, which rather makes the volume of this one impressive. Everywhere you look, Obama is now being portrayed as lettind down the Muslim world and lagging behind History.
In 2009, he refused to make common cause with the Green revolutionaries of Iran who were rightly incensed at the fact that an election already stolen by a theocratic prerequisite for approving all presidential candidates had been stolen again by the predetermined result: a grinning, Holocaust-denying peasant would play the besuited emissary to the world for another term. Young Iranians being shot, bludgeoned and arrested on the streets of Tehran, were told that the United States “bore witness” to their plight. But really, this was an internal Iranian affair and not for us to involve ourselves in lest we risk a replay of Mossadegh. One of the most trenchant political slogans in recent memory was what some of the Green revolutionaries chanted in reply this to capitulation, playing on the president’s last name which has resonance in Persian: “Obama, Obama, ya ba oona, ya ba ma”–“Obama, Obama, either with them, or with us.” Neither with them nor against them.
Next came Egypt, which took everyone by surprise because it didn’t involve ultra-Orthodox Jews real estate habits in Palestine was therefore an unexamined subject at Foggy Bottom. Joe Biden denied Mubarak was a dictator; Hillary Clinton said he was family. Obama waited until the Egyptian army went over to the side of the hungry and fed up on Tahrir Square. Then he asked Mubarak to leave as though he were a disruptive student in class. Then he waited politely for Mubarak to do so.
But this last test, Libya, which the president seems adamant on failing, is the more revealing because here is a clear-cut case of humanitarian intervention and aspiring democrats, and increasingly frustrated Democrats, begging for American help. Anne-Marie Slaughter, a former Obama official, took to The New York Times to flay every proffered excuse for inaction. She was preceded here by liberal house columnist Nicholas Kristof whose last call for intervention was for the Hirsi Alis to tell Ayaan they loved her. John Kerry (remember him?) said “cratering” Libyan airfields would be an in-and-out procedure, easily done, and at the least keep the regime’s gunships grounded. As for the Libyan rebels themselves, they’re now screaming for a no-fly zone, armed assistance, jamming of state broadcasts, ground troops, UN blue helmets — something. Why? Because they’re being slaughtered by a hallucinating but sincere psychopath. Oh. But don’t they know about China and Russia and Security Council procedure?
The Times today quotes Hussein Ali, a man whose name is at least as evocative as the president’s in suggesting engagement with the Islamic world. “This is the last step back. That’s it. We can’t take any more steps and we cannot go any further. We have to protect Benghazi.” And if they don’t? Then presumably it will be back to business as usual with Muammar Gaddafi who will surely prove that there’s a third act in American cynicism. Obama’s National Intelligence Agency director thinks he’s bound to win anyway, so why bother? The new definition of a self-fulfilling prophecy is the audacity of hope mugged by realism.
The good news is, we now know how a transcendent presidency matures in office.