United States President
Barack Obama's strategy of maximizing personal
political mileage for his presidential re-election
campaign from the killing of Osama bin Laden has
sharpened the battlelines in the lead-up to the
November elections.
The Washington Post
labeled the president a "campaigner in chief",
apart from commander-in-chief, on the eve of the
first anniversary of the raid in Abbottabad,
Pakistan, in which the al-Qaeda chief was killed
by US special forces.
The repeated
political marketing about Obama as a tough nut on
national security issues and contrasts with
Republican challenger Mitt Romney's alleged
indecisiveness have reversed the tables, as the
Republican camp was traditionally seen as more
assertive in
war and terrorism-related
issues while the Democratic Party had a
namby-pamby image.
That Obama was no pansy
was clear from the very first days after he took
office. But he had a monumental task of shrugging
off the legacy of Democratic presidents who earned
a reputation for bungling on international crises.
Romney recently tried to tap into that vein by
arguing that Obama did nothing special by ordering
the raid of the Navy Seals on Bin Laden's hideout
and that "even Jimmy Carter" would have done the
same as it was an easy opportunity to take out
America's public enemy number one.
President Carter's top-secret attempt to
free US diplomats from the hostage crisis in Iran
in 1980 and president John F Kennedy's disastrous
Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961 have been
peddled as glaring examples of Democratic
presidential failures in the security realm.
These are juxtaposed against Republican
icon, president Ronald Reagan, who was the poster
boy for aggressive foreign policy decision-making
that did not hesitate to use force or secure
American interests by hook or by crook. Reagan's
halo as an iron-fisted leader was inherited by
both president George H W Bush (for teaching
Iraq's Saddam Hussein a lesson in the Gulf War)
and president George W Bush (for relentlessly
pressing on with the "war on terror").
But
Romney's tactic of placing Obama within the
portals of a Democratic presidential legacy of
cowardliness does not hold water because Obama has
been an unusually savvy decision-maker on national
security concerns. Just as his brand of politics
while ascending to power in 2008 was a rejection
of the establishment line of the Democratic Party,
Obama's thinking and acumen on the al-Qaeda threat
and on war in general has been much more farsighted than any Democratic president since Franklin Roosevelt in the 1940s.
Contrary
to Romney's caricature of the Abbottabad raid as a
simple home run, the chances of success in nabbing
or assassinating Bin Laden last May were actually
"50-50" and Obama grasped a historic opportunity
with a degree of optimism and hope. It was
exemplary political leadership, wherein the
president's own military advisers were unsure
whether to go ahead and launch the Navy Seals when
intelligence was not absolutely certain that Bin
Laden was in the hideout. A civilian like Obama
eventually took the decision on his own, based on
gut instinct and an inbuilt self-confidence.
Portraying Obama as a wimp on Iran, Syria,
China or other major preoccupations of American
foreign policy is not cutting much ice.
Rather, the popularity of a new television
advertisement by the Democratic Party's propaganda
machine, which asks whether Romney - had he been
president of the US on May 1, 2011- could have
mustered the courage and the conviction to risk
his career and US relations with Pakistan in order
to find Bin Laden, shows that perceptions of Obama
as a historic change agent are not confined to
domestic US politics.
He avoids war (or in
the case of Afghanistan, tries to de-escalate
inherited wars) where it would be
counter-productive, but does not hesitate to use
surgical military action if there is a reasonable
chance of success. In terms of rationality (ie
cost-benefit analysis), Obama is proving a far
better commander-in-chief than his Republican
predecessor.
Some observers have been
critical of Obama's attempts to crassly cash in on
a collective American achievement such as the
assassination of Bin Laden to boost his political
fortunes when the economy is showing a "thumbs
down".
Is Obama diverting the economically
distressed American electorate with macho fables
of how Bin Laden and al-Qaeda's core organization
were effectively decimated under his command? Is
Obama's hyping of Bin Laden's assassination a
camouflaging of what is basically a strategic
defeat for the US in Afghanistan and Pakistan?
There is indeed a fair bit of political
opportunism in Obama's actions, which cannot be
denied. But then, terrorism itself is a dangerous
form of politically motivated violence. Keeping it
out of electoral politics is impossible and
unrealistic to even ask for.
Take India,
for example. Every time a major terrorist attack
shatters peace, a blame game ensues in the hotly
contested arena of in India's electoral politics.
The opposition slams the ruling party as
inefficient or soft on countering religious
fundamentalists and their foreign sponsors, and
the roles get reversed when the opposition
occupies the treasury benches in parliament.
The independent Indian news media
commentators then cry foul and accuse all the
parties of "politicizing terror" instead of
uniting to tackle the menace. Such calls for
de-politicizing terrorism and making
counter-terrorism a purely technical problem that
has mechanical solutions are misguided and also
bereft of comparative insights about how politics
inevitably enters debates on terrorism around the
world.
Whether for good or bad, French
President Nicolas Sarkozy and his challenger, the
socialist candidate, Francois Hollande, are
politicizing terror by accusing each other of
failure to understand or tackle the Islamist
threat since the Toulouse massacre by the
al-Qaeda-inspired Frenchman of Algerian descent,
Mohamed Merah. In Spain and Germany, elections
have been won or lost on issues of how adeptly an
incumbent regime has managed terrorist attacks or
foreign military crises.
To wish away
politics from the question of counter-terrorism is
purely wishful. What Obama is showing through his
grandstanding on the Bin Laden scalp is that there
is a relationship between citizens and the state
based on the understanding that governments
protect their people.
The questions of
national security, terrorism and war are so
integral to citizen's sense of safety that they
cannot be left to technocrats or military mavens.
Besides the domestic socio-economic welfare issues
which dominate discourse on citizen-state
relations, national security too remains a central
public policy concern in an age where terrorism
and war beckon in every direction.
There
have been instances in Western history where Prime
Ministers and Presidents like Winston Churchill in
Britain, Charles de Gaulle in France and George H
W Bush in the US lost elections or referendums
despite winning wars and heroically leading their
countries in times of peril.
The
arithmetic which they miscalculated was to expect
that under-performance in the domestic welfare
state and governance functions would be
compensated for by superlative antics in the
international arena.
As a community
organizer with a strong grassroots base, Obama is
not committing that error. He is aware of the deep
economic malaise in the US and is trying to
recover lost ground in the unemployment and wealth
inequality domains. Unlike a Sarkozy or a typical
Indian politician, who might be using the
terrorism card to stave off defeat triggered by
domestic corruption or mismanagement, Obama's
brand of politics is conveying that politics is
the art of delivering results both on domestic and
on foreign policy matters.
Obama's
re-election in November is not a foregone
conclusion, but his smart politicization of
counter-terrorism (in spite of the overall fiasco
for the US in the war in Afghanistan) is more or
less ensuring that the revolution he has brought
to the Democratic Party will become rooted with
four more years in the White House.
Sreeram Chaulia is Professor and
Dean of the Jindal School of International Affairs
and the first ever B Raman Fellow for Geopolitical
Analysis at the strategic affairs think-tank, the
Takshashila Institution. His most recent book
is International Organizations and Civilian
Protection: Power, Ideas and Humanitarian Aid in
Conflict Zones (I B Tauris, London).
(Copyright 2012 Asia Times Online
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