by Mark Bowden
So Obama’s speech was very carefully thought out. It was an early effort at speechmaking and shows it. The speech was overly dramatic and derivative, echoing the famous “I Have a Dream” speech of Martin Luther King Jr. It showed careful political calculation but, given what we would see years later, it also expressed conviction. It also showed how far his thinking on the subject had evolved since his comments to the Hyde Park Herald the year before. His first words were: “Let me begin by saying that although this has been billed as an antiwar rally, I stand before you as someone who is not opposed to war in all circumstances.”
Obama took note of the Civil War, “one of the bloodiest in history,” which had driven “the scourge of slavery” from America. “I don’t oppose all wars,” he said. He noted his grandfather’s service in World War II. “He fought in the name of a larger freedom, part of that arsenal of democracy that triumphed over evil, and he did not fight in vain,” he said, and then repeated, “I don’t oppose all wars.”
He would continue to repeat that line as a refrain, imitating King’s famous and stirring repetition of the line “I have a dream.” It took cheek to borrow the most famous rhetorical device ever employed by King, the great practitioner of nonviolence, to proclaim his belief in the necessity of war.
“After September 11, after witnessing the carnage and destruction, the dust and the tears, I supported this administration’s pledge to hunt down and root out those who would slaughter innocents in the name of intolerance, and I would willingly take up arms myself to prevent such a tragedy from happening again. I don’t oppose all wars.”
He went on to denounce the pending invasion of Iraq as a “dumb war,” and a “rash war,” but what those listening that day most remembered was his affirmation of war as just and necessary. His belief that some wars were worth fighting. The one against al Qaeda was one of them. It was a doubly bold speech for someone contemplating a run for the U.S. Senate, because it not only ran counter to the blanket antiwar sensibilities of his immediate audience but also bucked the decidedly pro–Iraq War sentiment of Illinois voters, most of whom were far to the right of the small group of protesters in downtown Chicago. Where the Iraq invasion was concerned, Obama was once more out of step with the nation, but where al Qaeda was concerned, he was no longer calling for some sort of global-welfare campaign. He was ready to “take up arms” himself in that war. In a more direct manner than he could have imagined, he would get his chance.
Three years later, after his victory in the 2004 Senate race and rapid ascent to national prominence, Obama was running for president. In August of 2007, he was still struggling. There had been excitement for him when he announced his candidacy in February, but things had quickly leveled off. He was running well behind Hillary Clinton, considered by many to be a shoo-in for the Democratic nomination, and also behind John Edwards, who was thought to be next in line in the unlikely event that Clinton stumbled.
At the time, the strongest thing Obama had going for him seemed to be that 2002 speech. Here was an attractive, smart, antiwar candidate at a time when America’s patience for its adventure in Iraq was at an all-time low. Every Democrat in the race was opposed to continuing the war. They vied now only over who was more emphatically opposed to it. Obama had not been in the Senate when votes were cast to authorize the war so, unlike Clinton and Edwards, he could claim ideological purity on the issue. And the Chicago speech put him on record as having spoken out against it from the start. He was the premier antiwar candidate, and that’s how he presented himself. The simple thrust of his attack on Clinton, in particular, was that she had gone along with Bush on the war, while he had taken the unpopular, principled stand and had been proved right. Over the course of the campaign Obama would be forced to spell out his thinking in more detail, and the picture would become more complex.
His rise was so meteoric that many felt it had come too fast. His opponents were both baffled and annoyed by the messianic luster that he and his campaign encouraged. The best way to push back was to convince voters that he was in too big a hurry. At age forty-five, with only half of his Senate term behind him . . . well, even if he was destined to be America’s first black president, he wasn’t ready for the job yet. He was one of the youngest men to ever seek the presidency.
So experience was the hammer, and Clinton lowered it whenever Obama gave her a chance. He gave her one after a CNN/YouTube debate on July 23, when he was asked if he would consider meeting with America’s enemies without preconditions. The questioner, whose face was projected on a big screen, approvingly cited Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat’s courageous (and ultimately fatal) decision, in 1977, to initiate peace negotiations with Israel, and asked if any of the candidates would be willing, in the first year of their tenure, to meet without preconditions the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea in an effort to “bridge the gap that divides our countries.”
It was an easy question to dodge: Negotiation is terribly important . . . I wouldn’t rule it out . . . we have a history with these countries that didn’t begin yesterday . . . But Obama didn’t dodge it. Up on the glitzy stage before glowing red, white, and blue screens, behind a spare, modernist podium of steel and plastic, he was the first of the eight candidates asked to respond.
“I would,” he said.
A gasp rose from the studio audience, no doubt partly because of the directness of his answer. They were used to more maneuvering.
“My reason is this,” he explained. “The notion that, somehow, not talking to countries is punishment to them, which has been the guiding diplomatic principle of this [George W. Bush] administration, is ridiculous . . . We may not trust them, they may pose an extraordinary danger to our country, but we have the obligation to find the areas where we may potentially move forward, and I think that it is a disgrace that we have not spoken to them.”
Clinton, who answered next, promptly said that she would not. She explained that a lot of groundwork went into negotiations with unfriendly nations; that one did not rush into them. But, perhaps startled like everyone else, she didn’t hit Obama too hard onstage. On reflection, however, and no doubt after her campaign strategists weighed in, she returned more harshly to the point the next day in interviews, labeling Obama’s answer “irresponsible and frankly naive.”
This was strictly politics. The United States had a long bipartisan tradition of negotiating with even its worst enemies, from John Kennedy—“Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate”—to Richard Nixon’s opening with China, to Ronald Reagan’s famous “walk in the woods” with Mikhail Gorbachev. Obama’s position was firmly in line with longstanding diplomatic practice. George W. Bush’s post–9/11 policy—“You are either for us or against us”—was the exception, and a bad one. It removed subtlety from international affairs. It made no sense whatsoever for a savvy internationalist like Clinton to ignore the opportunity every newly elected president has to reset relations with hostile nations. Still, conventional wisdom held that you didn’t admit such things. It made you sound soft. And naive was a word that worked against Obama.
It worked because many believed he lacked substance. He had yet to really define himself in detail on foreign policy or anything else. He had given a foreign policy address in April in line with his antiwar image, primarily calling for renewed internationalism, a greater willingness to seek consensus, and cooperation from other countries in pursuit of our national security goals. His remark about negotiating with enemies without preconditions made it easy for his critics to paint him as a complete pushover. It also suggested that Obama was a man who did not think things through carefully.
The “naive” label was troublesome. Soon enough the word had attached itself to him. TV pundits seemed unable to mention him without repeating it. Over the next few weeks his standing in the polls continued to fall as Clinton’s rose.
Obama’s staff fretted. Some wanted him to back off from his position, but he refused. “The
thing is that I am right about this,” he insisted in a meeting with his advisers Denis McDonough and Robert Gibbs. “Why would we not want to get into any negotiation that we could?” He asked them to schedule a national TV interview to reiterate his position, to underline it. It was, he felt, precisely the kind of message he wanted to send. He was offering to break with the past, to look at these foreign policy issues in a new way.
And he was just getting started. Obama was not about to let others substitute their analysis for his own. His approach to a problem was to look for a new solution, an original one. He believed much of the way America thought about defense issues was cast in archaic molds—the old divisions of left vs. right, conservatives vs. liberals, hawks vs. doves that had been set by the debate over Vietnam. He had been thirteen years old when that war ended. Much of the voting-age population of the country had not even been born. Nothing had shaken up that old dynamic as much as 9/11. Young people in particular were hard to classify in this regard. They tended to be far more liberal than their parents on most social issues—hence more likely to support Obama—but were also strongly supportive of robust military and intelligence efforts. As the candidate saw it, he was as hawkish as any American about defeating al Qaeda, but some of the tools traditionally associated with doves—tools such as negotiation and international cooperation—weren’t just means of appeasing an enemy. They were essential to defeating this one.
A few weeks earlier, according to John Heilemann and Mark Halperin in Game Change, Obama had brought one of his close friends and old law professors, Chris Edley, to Chicago to lambaste his inner campaign circle for failing to let him do things his way. They were not giving Obama time and space in his frenetic campaign schedule to lay out his ideas in more detail.
“This is a guy who likes to think, he likes to write, he likes to talk with experts,” said Edley, whose work on past Democratic campaigns and in White House service lent authority to his words. “You folks have got to recognize what he’s in this for. He’s in this because he wants to make contributions in terms of public policy ideas, and you’ve got to make time for him to do that . . . With all due respect to all you here, you should just get over yourselves and do what the candidate wants.”
So in the days after the fallout from his negotiate without preconditions promise, it was decided that Obama would give another major national security speech. He did so at the Woodrow Wilson International Center, in Washington, D.C., on August 1, outlining his thinking on national security in some detail and in the process correcting the impression that he was “naive” or, worse, “soft” on national defense.
A National Intelligence Estimate that spring suggested al Qaeda had actually grown stronger in the previous six years. It noted that Pakistan had become the new safe haven for the terror group after the fall of the Taliban. All Democratic candidates had pledged change, but beyond promising to pull the plug on Iraq and end some of the more controversial intelligence-gathering methods (most of which had ended already), none had clearly articulated an approach to national security that differed significantly from Bush’s.
Former Congressman Lee Hamilton introduced Obama at the Wilson Center gathering before an audience of a few hundred, many of them journalists. The speech had engaged all of Obama’s foreign policy advisers, and every word in it had been weighed carefully. Tapped with the task of drafting it was Ben Rhodes, the former NYU graduate student who had watched from the Brooklyn waterfront as the World Trade Center towers collapsed. He was now a top-level campaign worker with prematurely thinning black hair and a perpetual five o’clock shadow. Instead of setting to work on a first novel, he had joined Hamilton’s staff just as the congressman was named cochair of the 9/11 Commission. Rhodes had helped draft policy proposals for the Commission Report and helped write the chapter entitled “What to Do?” One of the subheads in that chapter had been “Attack Terrorists and Their Organizations,” and its first proscription was “No Sanctuaries.” Of all the most likely places in the world to play host to terrorist groups, first on the list was Pakistan. Rhodes eventually helped Hamilton and his cochair, former New Jersey Governor Tom Kean, write a book about the commission’s work. After serving Hamilton on the Iraq Study Group, which the congressman also cochaired, Rhodes joined Obama’s Senate staff as a foreign policy adviser and speechwriter. He had helped draft some of Obama’s talks about Iraq in the Senate, and had then signed on as a speechwriter in Obama’s Chicago office. This was the first campaign speech he had been asked to draft, and it was a big one. It also returned him to a familiar theme.
In a telephone conference with Rhodes, McDonough, Samantha Power, and various other national security aides, Obama outlined seven points he wanted to make in the speech. These were distilled to five by Rhodes and Power. One of them concerned efforts to destroy al Qaeda. As for the issue of safe havens, Rhodes would remember Obama telling him, “Let’s come up with the most forward-leaning formulation to make it clear that we are going to go after these guys, because that’s the whole argument.”
Before the crowd at the Wilson Center, Obama began by relating his own experiences on 9/11—hearing the first report on his drive into Chicago, standing on the sidewalk in the Loop eyeing the Sears Tower, watching the towers fall on TV. In the six years since then, the stirring sense of national unity and purpose engendered by the attacks had been squandered, he said. The Bush administration had started well, toppling the Taliban and chasing al Qaeda, the real enemy, from its bases in Afghanistan. But then it had dropped the ball. Instead of going after the architects of 9/11, who were on the ropes and on the run, the Bush administration had decided to invade Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein, a move that had quickly absorbed the nation’s primary military and intelligence resources. The move had been “rubber-stamped” by Congress, he said, sideswiping his Democratic primary opponents. It was, he said, “A misguided invasion of a Muslim country that sparks new insurgencies, ties down our military, busts our budgets, increases the pool of terrorist recruits, alienates America, gives democracy a bad name, and prompts the American people to question our engagement in the world.” Obama pointed to the new Intelligence Estimate as proof that al Qaeda had only changed its home address.
Once again, he pledged to end the Iraq War, not out of any pacifist conviction, but in order to refocus on the real enemy. His focus, he promised, would be on crushing al Qaeda. This was the mission 9/11 had compelled, a national priority that trumped peaceable relations with Pakistan or any other country. The enemy had been too broadly defined by the Bush administration, he said, a failing that not only had diminished the impact of our response but had fed into al Qaeda propaganda that America was at war with the entire Muslim world. The necessary war called for a much smaller focus: to find, target, and destroy the terror organization. To underscore his determination, Obama said he would respect no sanctuary and zeroed in specifically on Pakistan.
“Al Qaeda terrorists train, travel, and maintain global communications in this safe haven,” he said. “The Taliban pursues a hit-and-run strategy, striking in Afghanistan, then skulking across the border to safety. This is the wild frontier of our globalized world. There are wind-swept deserts and cave-dotted mountains. There are tribes that see borders as nothing more than lines on a map, and governments as forces that come and go. There are blood ties deeper than alliances of convenience, and pockets of extremism that follow religion to violence. It’s a tough place. But that is no excuse. There must be no safe haven for terrorists who threaten America. We cannot fail to act because action is hard. As president, I would make the hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. military aid to Pakistan conditional, and I would make our conditions clear: Pakistan must make substantial progress in closing down the training camps, evicting foreign fighters, and preventing the Taliban from using Pakistan as a staging area for attacks in Afghanistan. I understand that President Musharraf has his own challenges. But let me make this clear, there are terrorists holed up in those mountains who murder
ed three thousand Americans. They are plotting to strike again. It was a terrible mistake to fail to act when we had a chance to take out an al Qaeda leadership meeting in 2005. If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won’t act, we will.”
That final line was the very last one inserted in the speech. Much deliberation preceded it. Rhodes had originally written, “If we have targets [in Pakistan] and President Musharraf won’t act, we will.” It was in keeping with the candidate’s instruction to be as “forward leaning” as possible. But the issue of Pakistan was delicate. That unstable nation was critical to the war effort in Afghanistan. It was a nuclear power in one of the world’s most volatile regions, and yet elements of its government, particularly its powerful intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), were known to be in bed with all manner of Islamist radicals. Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf had been walking a narrow line with the Bush administration, providing enough cooperation to avoid being branded an enemy but falling well short of routing extremists holed up in Pakistan’s lawless northwest. Threatening to go after “targets” without Pakistan’s cooperation made Obama’s national security team nervous.
