Барак Обама - The Audacity of Hope

By the time Bill Clinton came into office, conventional wisdom suggested that America’s post — Cold War foreign policy would be more a matter of trade than tanks, protecting American copyrights rather than American lives. Clinton himself understood that globalization involved not only new economic challenges but also new security challenges. In addition to promoting free trade and bolstering the international financial system, his administration would work to end long-festering conflicts in the Balkans and Northern Ireland and advance democratization in Eastern Europe, Latin America, Africa, and the former Soviet Union. But in the eyes of the public, at least, foreign policy in the nineties lacked any overarching theme or grand imperatives. U.S. military action in particular seemed entirely a matter of choice, not necessity — the product of our desire to slap down rogue states, perhaps; or a function of humanitarian calculations regarding the moral obligations we owed to Somalis, Haitians, Bosnians, or other unlucky souls.

Then came September 11—and Americans felt their world turned upside down.

IN JANUARY 2006, I boarded a C-130 military cargo plane and took off for my first trip into Iraq. Two of my colleagues on the trip — Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana and Congressman Harold Ford, Jr. of Tennessee — had made the trip before, and they warned me that the landings in Baghdad could be a bit uncomfortable: To evade potential hostile fire, military flights in and out of Iraq’s capital city engaged in a series of sometimes stomach-turning maneuvers. As our plane cruised through the hazy morning, though, it was hard to feel concerned. Strapped into canvas seats, most of my fellow passengers had fallen asleep, their heads bobbing against the orange webbing that ran down the center of the fuselage. One of the crew appeared to be playing a video game; another placidly thumbed through our flight plans.

It had been four and a half years since I’d first heard reports of a plane hitting the World Trade Center. I had been in Chicago at the time, driving to a state legislative hearing downtown. The reports on my car radio were sketchy, and I assumed that there must have been an accident, a small prop plane perhaps veering off course. By the time I arrived at my meeting, the second plane had already hit, and we were told to evacuate the State of Illinois Building. Up and down the streets, people gathered, staring at the sky and at the Sears Tower. Later, in my law office, a group of us sat motionless as the nightmare images unfolded across the TV screen — a plane, dark as a shadow, vanishing into glass and steel; men and women clinging to windowsills, then letting go; the shouts and sobs from below and finally the rolling clouds of dust blotting out the sun.

I spent the next several weeks as most Americans did — calling friends in New York and D.C., sending donations, listening to the President’s speech, mourning the dead. And for me, as for most of us, the effect of September 11 felt profoundly personal. It wasn’t just the magnitude of the destruction that affected me, or the memories of the five years I’d spent in New York — memories of streets and sights now reduced to rubble. Rather, it was the intimacy of imagining those ordinary acts that 9/11’s victims must have performed in the hours before they were killed, the daily routines that constitute life in our modern world — the boarding of a plane, the jostling as we exit a commuter train, grabbing coffee and the morning paper at a newsstand, making small talk on the elevator. For most Americans, such routines represented a victory of order over chaos, the concrete expression of our belief that so long as we exercised, wore seat belts, had a job with benefits, and avoided certain neighborhoods, our safety was ensured, our families protected.

Now chaos had come to our doorstep. As a consequence, we would have to act differently, understand the world differently. We would have to answer the call of a nation. Within a week of the attacks, I watched the Senate vote 98–0 and the House vote 420–1 to give the President the authority to “use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations or persons” behind the attacks. Interest in the armed services and applications to join the CIA soared, as young people across America resolved to serve their country. Nor were we alone. In Paris, Le Monde ran the banner headline “Nous sommes tous Américains” (“We are all Americans”). In Cairo, local mosques offered prayers of sympathy. For the first time since its founding in 1949, NATO invoked Article 5 of its charter, agreeing that the armed attack on one of its members “shall be considered an attack against them all.” With justice at our backs and the world by our side, we drove the Taliban government out of Kabul in just over a month; Al Qaeda operatives fled or were captured or killed.

It was a good start by the Administration, I thought — steady, measured, and accomplished with minimal casualties (only later would we discover the degree to which our failure to put sufficient military pressure on Al Qaeda forces at Tora Bora may have led to bin Laden’s escape). And so, along with the rest of the world, I waited with anticipation for what I assumed would follow: the enunciation of a U.S. foreign policy for the twenty-first century, one that would not only adapt our military planning, intelligence operations, and homeland defenses to the threat of terrorist networks but build a new international consensus around the challenges of transnational threats.

This new blueprint never arrived. Instead what we got was an assortment of outdated policies from eras gone by, dusted off, slapped together, and with new labels affixed. Reagan’s “Evil Empire” was now “the Axis of Evil.” Theodore Roosevelt’s version of the Monroe Doctrine — the notion that we could preemptively remove governments not to our liking — was now the Bush Doctrine, only extended beyond the Western Hemisphere to span the globe. Manifest destiny was back in fashion; all that was needed, according to Bush, was American firepower, American resolve, and a “coalition of the willing.”

Perhaps worst of all, the Bush Administration resuscitated a brand of politics not seen since the end of the Cold War. As the ouster of Saddam Hussein became the test case for Bush’s doctrine of preventive war, those who questioned the Administration’s rationale for invasion were accused of being “soft on terrorism” or “un-American.” Instead of an honest accounting of this military campaign’s pros and cons, the Administration initiated a public relations offensive: shading intelligence reports to support its case, grossly understating both the costs and the manpower requirements of military action, raising the specter of mushroom clouds.

The PR strategy worked; by the fall of 2002, a majority of Americans were convinced that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, and at least 66 percent believed (falsely) that the Iraqi leader had been personally involved in the 9/11 attacks. Support for an invasion of Iraq — and Bush’s approval rating — hovered around 60 percent. With an eye on the midterm elections, Republicans stepped up the attacks and pushed for a vote authorizing the use of force against Saddam Hussein. And on October 11, 2002, twenty-eight of the Senate’s fifty Democrats joined all but one Republican in handing to Bush the power he wanted.

I was disappointed in that vote, although sympathetic to the pressures Democrats were under. I had felt some of those same pressures myself. By the fall of 2002, I had already decided to run for the U.S. Senate and knew that possible war with Iraq would loom large in any campaign. When a group of Chicago activists asked if I would speak at a large antiwar rally planned for October, a number of my friends warned me against taking so public a position on such a volatile issue. Not only was the idea of an invasion increasingly popular, but on the merits I didn’t consider the case against war to be cut-and-dried. Like most analysts, I assumed that Saddam had chemical and biological weapons and coveted nuclear arms. I believed that he had repeatedly flouted UN resolutions and weapons inspectors and that such behavior had to have consequences. That Saddam butchered his own people was undisputed; I had no doubt that the world, and the Iraqi people, would be better off without him.