Sometimes the tabloid route is best: Obama got Osama. President Barack Hussein Obama approved the attack that killed his near namesake Osama bin Laden the very same week that Obama revealed his long-form birth certificate, addressing a silly dispute that was really about something heinous and serious: the suspicion of far too many Americans that the President was not who he said he was, that he was a secret Muslim and maybe not even playing for our team. All such doubts are resolved now, by document and deed, although the various birthers and truthers and mouthers will continue to play their vile games. But the facts are there for posterity and for the voters who will have to make a judgment in 2012: this profoundly American President ran an exquisite operation to find and kill one of the great villains of history. In the process, U.S. presidential politics and the so-called war on terror were transformed dramatically; suddenly, both foreign policy experts and Republican candidates for President had vast new landscapes to consider. And so much for No Drama, by the way.
there is no measure of competence the public takes more seriously than a President’s performance as Commander in Chief. On the most basic level, the bin Laden raid was a vivid demonstration of how this Commander in Chief operates. He is discreet, precise, patient and willing to be lethal. He did not take the easy route, which would have been a stealth-bomber strike on bin Laden’s compound. He ordered the Navy SEAL operation, even though there were myriad ways it could have failed — or turned out to be an embarrassment if bin Laden hadn’t been there, or a disaster if the SEALs had been slaughtered, or if a helicopter had been damaged (as several aircraft were when Jimmy Carter tried to rescue the hostages from Iran). In at least nine National Security Council meetings, Obama insisted on reviewing every crucial detail of the operation. He made sure, after a decade of witless Islam-related goofs by U.S. leaders, that bin Laden’s body would be handled and consigned to the lower depths in a way that would not offend Muslims; that in the early hours, at least, there wouldn’t be gory photos or films or any evidence of barbaric gloating; that the operation would be surgical and stealthy enough that bin Laden’s document hoard would be preserved and dispositive DNA evidence would be gathered. These are the sort of nuances — a word his predecessor mocked — that have marked many of Obama’s foreign policy decisions, made in a deliberative style that his critics, and even some supporters, have seen as evidence of dithering or indecision.
George W. Bush certainly deserves some of the credit for this raid. It would not have been possible without his decision to amp up human-intelligence assets and special-operations forces after decades of neglect. But you have to wonder whether Bush would have had the patience or subtlety to conduct this operation with the same thoroughness Obama did. Bush certainly lacked the strategic focus to understand that the war against al-Qaeda had to be primarily a slow-moving special-forces affair; he was diverted into bold gestures, like the disastrous war in Iraq. He never studied the intelligence rigorously enough; he bought the sources that backed his predispositions. He understood too late the style and substance of Islam, how words like crusade resonated through the region. His was a bumper-sticker foreign policy. His speeches were full of God and Freedom and Evildoers. His troops rushed into Baghdad in three weeks, and he celebrated their victory with another bumper sticker: MISSION ACCOMPLISHED. He was able to use these simplicities to win re-election in 2004, although he lost a lot of lives unnecessarily and damaged America’s esteem in the eyes of the world.
Obama’s national-security practices, if not his actual policies, have been almost the exact opposite, almost to a fault. There have been no three-week victories; there have been three-month deliberations about what to do in Afghanistan. There were precious few victories at all before the bin Laden operation. There was a lot of multilateralism and deference to foreign leaders. Critics said Obama bowed too deeply to the Emperor of Japan. There were few dramatic pronouncements and zero foreign policy bumper stickers; there were more than a few embarrassments. He was dissed by the Chinese. He was dissed by the Iranians. He was defied by corrupt nonentities like Afghanistan’s Hamid Karzai; he was double-dealt by the Pakistanis. And in recent weeks, there was a growing chorus that his handling of the Arab Spring revolutions had been incoherent and his indulgence in a humanitarian intervention in Libya had been muscled through by a coterie of female policy advisers who were tougher than he was.
In the days before the bin Laden raid, Obama’s national-security staff was increasingly frustrated with how his foreign policy was being portrayed. He was not indecisive, they argued, just careful. They made a transcript of a crucial Feb. 1 phone call between Obama and Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak available to me. It was classic Obama. “I have no interest in embarrassing you,” the President said. “I want to help you secure your legacy by ushering in a new era.” He worked this track patiently, twice, three times. “I respect my elders,” Obama said, “but because things worked one way in the past, that doesn’t mean they’re going to work the same way in the future. You need to seize this historic moment and leave a positive legacy.” Mubarak said he’d think about it and would talk again in a week. Obama said he wanted to talk again the next day. Mubarak said maybe over the weekend; Obama said no: “We’ll talk in 24 hours.” No threats, but no give, either.
“You have to see this in the context of history,” a senior Administration official told me. “That’s a pretty tough decision to make, involving a longtime U.S. ally. But he was very firm with Mubarak. If you look at Reagan, he agonized far longer over whether to abandon governments we had supported in Indonesia and the Philippines than the President did about Egypt.” Last Aug. 12, four months before the Tunisian rebellion began, the President issued a national-security directive ordering his staff to develop a new policy that assumed the governments in the Middle East were rickety and might soon topple. A copy of this memo was provided to me as well.
Too much has been made of what some are calling Obama’s taste for humanitarian intervention. Officials at the National Security Council and the State Department insist that the roles of NSC staffer Samantha Power, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice and former State Department director of policy planning Anne-Marie Slaughter have been exaggerated. Power is a well-known human-rights activist, but she attended only one meeting with the President on Middle East policy in the past six months; Slaughter is a prominent academic, but she never met with the President on these issues. Indeed, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was leaning against taking military action in Libya until the last moment, when members of the Arab League convinced her that a massacre would take place in Benghazi if nothing were done. The President opposed a no-fly zone because it wouldn’t effectively stop a Gaddafi massacre. “He expanded the U.N. resolution to include attacks on Libyan equipment and forces about to move into the city,” an Administration official said. “He drove the policy. No one talked him into anything.”
But there was something incoherent, or perhaps insufficiently explained, about Obama’s foreign policy performance. The Libya intervention opened the door to a series of logical questions: Why choose this humanitarian intervention and not others? Why not get involved in Syria, a far more crucial country, where the government was brutally suppressing its citizens and perhaps even conducting massacres? Whom were we actually supporting in Libya? What if the conflict slipped into a tribal stalemate? How were we going to deal with the economic catastrophe looming in Egypt, which Administration officials say is the most pressing problem in the region? Weren’t the President’s priorities all screwed up? “Libya was tough,” the official told me. “The President decided to make a front-end decision to save Benghazi and let our allies carry the burden after that.” This policy became the subject of ridicule after an anonymous Administration official called it “leading from the rear.”
The splendid success of the bin Laden operation should clarify the precise way that this President goes about his work. It also provides an insight into the reasons for Obama’s ill-concealed frustration with his critics: the metabolism of policy runs much more slowly than the metabolism of the media. Policy, especially foreign policy, does not lend itself to spiffy one-size-fits-all doctrines. The same President can decide to take a risky shot at killing Osama bin Laden and choose not to take out Muammar Gaddafi; he can decide to make a discreet humanitarian intervention in Benghazi, at the behest of all the countries in the region, while allowing blood to flow in Syria. Not all of these decisions will prove correct over time — every President makes mistakes — but the overall pattern of judgments can be assessed only with sufficient hindsight. It is difficult for a President and his team to keep things in perspective when the media pulse has reached tuning-fork speed and now includes not just CNN and Fox News but also al-Jazeera, Facebook and Twitter. It is particularly difficult for a President whose every decision is questioned by an opposition whose most prominent spokespeople are willing to toy with despicable rumors about his nationality and religious background.
“My fellow Americans,” the President opened at the White House correspondents’ dinner on the night before bin Laden was killed, and the audience roared with laughter. His decimation of Donald Trump, who sat in the audience, was particularly brutal. He marveled at Trump’s decision to “fire” Gary Busey instead of Meat Loaf on his Celebrity Apprentice show. “These are the kinds of decisions that would keep me up at night. Well handled, sir.” The audience didn’t know it at the time, but two nights earlier Obama had been kept up trying to decide whether to launch the SEAL team against bin Laden or take the stealth-bomber route. A President lives at the intersection of historic decisions like that one and a media environment in which Donald Trump can make outlandish claims about the President’s birthplace — and shoot to the top of Republican presidential polls. The distance between those two worlds is mind-bending.
The Obama presidency has been plagued by complexities: How do you conduct a presidency without bumper stickers? How can you explain counterintuitive policies like the need to spend money to soften the blow of a killer recession, even if it expands the federal deficit? How do you convey the policy tightrope that has to be walked as longtime despotic allies in the Arab world are toppled, or not, by revolutions without leaders? How can you explain the delicate task of managing relations with China, when all the public wants to know is why the U.S. seems to be falling behind economically?
The one slogan Obama has attempted — WINNING THE FUTURE — seems pretty lame and lamer still when he repeats it incessantly. Why isn’t he focused on winning the present? There have been times — his speech after the Tucson, Ariz., shootings, his bin Laden announcement — when the President has tapped directly into the heart of American sensibility and sentiment. More often, he seems a stranger, unable to fix on the momentary needs of the public, unwilling to indulge the instantaneous needs of the media. His strategy is to hope that the accumulated wisdom of his decisionmaking will count for more when 2012 rolls around than the pyrotechnics that pass for political discourse in this jittery, nano-wired age. He will mediate congressional disputes rather than make grand policy proposals that others can shoot down. He will eschew dramatic gestures overseas — unless he has carefully considered every facet, as he did in Abbottabad, Pakistan. He will play the grownup because he is a grownup. It will be interesting to see if that works.