Even though we all ought to concede that it is a blatant fluff piece, Michael Lewis’s long article in Vanity Fair succeeds on a couple of levels. First, it is constructed artfully, which is a sign of a mature and gifted writer. It must have been a pleasure to edit and it’s a very enjoyable read, despite its length. Second, it does a very nice job of giving you a sense for what it is really like to be president. Not just the settings or the aggravations, but the strangeness of it. Being president is a weird thing to be…absurd in many respects, and Lewis brings that out quite effectively.
I’m too tired and hungry to really delve in the bit on Libya, but I just want to make one brief observation. When the president sat down with his Principals to debate what to do about Libya, he was presented with a binary choice: do nothing or support a no-fly zone that they all conceded would not work.
Sec. Clinton supported a no-fly zone, as did Ambassador Susan Rice, but the consensus was for doing nothing. I also approached the decision as a mainly binary choice, although my belief was that after the no-fly zone failed we would be sucked into a bigger conflict. What the president came up with was more imaginative than what I opposed, and it worked better than I predicted.
I still think the talk about Gaddafi killing a hundred thousand people was hype, but he was going to do some serious killing. No doubt, the president saved a lot of lives and he didn’t need to do it. At first, his own leaders, including the Pentagon, didn’t even give an option that would have worked. He had to push them to find a solution.
I still think our decision to intervene in Libya failed any reasonable risk-reward standard, but despite our recent tragedy there, the president pulled it off despite the bad odds. And that’s why he’s president and I am not.
If you want to delve deeper into it there’s an interesting back and forth between David Atkins and digby at Hullabaloo. For the record, I disagree with both of them.
Can you write about it tomorrow when you’re not tired and hungry?
It can be well written and also an embarassing fluff piece. And while I won’t call Lewis a liar, he does seriously stretch things.
I was not going to raise this issue but the writing of it completely set me off, though I found some of the details interesting if not unexpected. Here’s when I knew we were sunk:
This is at the level of NPR “journalists making literary references to 10th grade canonical US lit so their audience can feel well-read. Such self-conscious crap–stringing the sentence together with semicolons while mentioning the President’s use of said punctuation, I mean–is one of the few things that really makes me wish I were a violent man.
Interesting in the article were bits like the President’s approaching political questions from the perspective of odds, which explains why he prefers to fold a losing hand rather than play it through.
I didn’t get far, but my take-away was, “So the president plays basketball with guys who treat him like an ordinary person, unless they accidentally elbow him, in which case they’re never invited back?”
That was such a strange anecdote that it stopped me.
I’m normally happy to just lurk on the Tribune but created an account to comment on this.
Libya was actually a fairly shrewd intervention, in my opinion. It was approached in such a way to present minimal risk to Western personnel. Because we were joining a war in progress, most of the fighting on the ground was being done by the locals. The US and allies simply put their thumb on the scale.
More importantly, Libya is a lightly populated country with a lot of wealth and educated people relative to its size/population. I was told (correctly) that post-war Libya was more likely to produce a somewhat secular, non-hostile, non-Islamic government than most of the Middle East would.
Admittedly, none of the above was really the reason why I was in favor of ousting Gaddafi. He was simply let off the hook too easily by Bush, who desperately wanted some success in his War on Terror to point to. For decades, Gaddafi was the real deal. An enthusiastic supporter of international terrorism with the blood of civilians (westerners) on his hands. He was not worth deposing at any price (like Saddam in that sense), but bringing him down under those circumstances was reasonable.
I’m glad the Obama had the sand to pounce on that opportunity and the historical awareness to understand why it was a valid opportunity to pursue.
The White House’s actions with the revolution and reaction in Egypt and Syria have been less encouraging though. The nature of the countries and the people in them matter a great deal. The factors that were true in Libya are/were not in these other countries.
Decades of dictatorial rule in Egypt have destroyed all organized opposition parties save the Muslim Brotherhood. In post-rebellion Egypt, the MB has wasted no time seizing as much power as they can get their hands on, ignoring the provisional constitution that was agreed upon previously in the process. Now Mohammed Mursi has more power than Mubarak had and he has busied himself burnishing his credibility with his supporters by making a belligerent display against the US. This is a fast reversal that actually does much to support people who cautioning against embracing an idealistic course of action wrt Egypt.
In Syria, the situation is worse. It is becoming clear that much of the rebel faction is Islamic in nature and financed by Gulf States (principally Saudi Arabia and Qatar). The rebel’s statement(s) that they are trying to overthrow the infidel government can be taken at face value. Most of the ruling class in Syria are Alawite, a religious faction that is not regarded as genuine Islam by most Sunni, though the Alawites themselves co-opt the languages and trappings of the larger faith. The struggle in Syria is not in fact a glorious struggle for freedom of representation but is actually a religious/sectarian struggle. The regime’s forces are willing to stick it out with Alawi and savage things to the rebels in part because they know what will happen to them if they lose.
So, to recap, should the government in Syria fall, odious as they are, there is a good chance of two Islamic governments replacing dictatorships in the Middle East. By comparison, Libya was the smart intervention.
Welcome to the Frog Pond. That’s a very astute set of observations. Make sure to stick around and make more comments!
Thoughtful comments, thank you.
But I’d like to underscore the quickly receding fact that our “intervention” in Egypt or Syria was likely to have made as much of a difference as it did in Tunisia.
As bloody and uncertain as the outcome may be in Syria, I hope Assad’s fall will shut down the already amazingly ahistorical claims that we could have preserved Mubarak’s power in Egypt. We had as much of a chance preserving Muburak in power as we did Bautista or the Shah of Iran.
Our media really needs to catch up with the American people and start speaking realistically about our “superpower” powers.
BTW the article was great. I especially liked the very apt analogy paralleling the traitorous Republicans to Putin’s Russia (if the American president is for it, Putin is against it) – with the Thugs more anti-American than Putin!
I don’t think the US can or should do much about Syria, as much as the carnage appalls me.
Egypt was another story. The US probably should not have encouraged the formation of representative government. They did (do) have considerable influence with the generals in Egypt. Money, rhetorical support, and assurances not to impose sanctions or cut them loose if they try to preserve their rule. Dirty business, considering what a bunch of corrupt, nest-feathering bastards the generals are, but corrupt or not they were not wrong about the nature of the Muslim Brootherhood.
With the advantage of hindsight, encouraging the generals to open up Egyptian society while promising to support them through any reaction would have been the best course. Mubarak, of course, could be cut loose. Essentially, endorse something similar to the Turkish (Kemalist) model.
I actually thought it was rather boring. Vanity Fair doesn’t seem to have gotten its money’s worth.
They sent Lewis to the White House for six months and that was all he came up with? Are there more installments coming? Is he writing a book about it too?
He spectacularly misreports the Libya decision making process, completely writing out the UN Ambassador, the State department, and the entire deputies level of the national security council. Like, he lists flat out the various people like Rice, McDonough, Powers, etc. who were the activist force, but then he pretends they didn’t matter and the President was on an island. The Libya intervention is a generational conflict story, where the deputy and junior level players (often non-white or non-male) wanted intervention and the senior level guys (exclusively white and male) didn’t and the President had to side with one side or the other. Which raises the more interesting question of why guys like Gates, Biden, Daley, etc. were ever the “most trusted” advisers in the first place, since they’ve proven themselves completely useless on stuff like Libya or the Bin Laden raid.
But whatever, my point is that Lewis could have written that same piece with half the time and access.
When asked in interview what he thought of Obama, Lewis replied “He’s an interesting cat”.
“Cat”? That putznik of a writer needs to go back to hipster finishing school.
You know, popular magazines in this country used to publish the likes of James Baldwin and Truman Capote. We are completely screwed.
I still think our decision to intervene in Libya failed any reasonable risk-reward standard
Others, who turned out to be right, thought it did. The question should be, what did they do that you didn’t, and what did you do that they didn’t?
I didn’t think we’d be sucked into a wider war, because the broad international support for the mission, including support from the Arab League and UN (and even the pro-rebel, anti-regime rhetoric of al Qaeda) meant that nobody was going to be coming to Gadhaffi’s rescue (unlike the Soviets backing the North Vietnamese/VC, or al Qaeda and the Iranians backing insurgents in Iraq).