Winter 2009

“A brave and beautiful day”                 ^{Owen T. Davis}

The format and timing of this letter do not allow me to be among the first to congratulate you: indeed, even though I sit down to write these words on the brave and beautiful November day on which the world saw you arrive to be given your first conducted tour of your new Washington home, nobody including you will be able to read them until we are much closer to the day of your inauguration. Congratulations nonetheless, along with, I suppose, an admonition not to be too much overwhelmed by the Niagara of different “hopes” with which you are every day inundated.

I dare say that you at least suspect that the hope-and-optimism surplus generated by your election is in some part and to some extent your own fault. But it is also in the nature of democratic politics to generate a surplus of expectations, as it is somehow part of the essence of America to produce talk about “dreams.” But in dreams, as we also have good cause to know, begin responsibilities. And nightmares are dreams, too. For an instance, both of the similarity and the distinction, let us take an excerpt from your book The Audacity of Hope. You are describing a moment in what you clearly regard as your most important foreign-policy experience: your senatorial work in following up on the Nunn-Lugar initiative on nuclear non-proliferation, or perhaps better to say de-proliferation. And this was indeed important work, helping a near-bankrupt post-Soviet Russia get control of its now-redundant stockpiles while denying access to rogue elements or non-state actors. As you put it, in recording your trip to Russia and Ukraine with Senator Lugar in 2005:

In Perm, at a site where SS-24 and SS-25 tactical missiles were being dismantled, we walked through the center of eight-foot-high empty missile casings and gazed in silence at the massive, sleek, still-active missiles that were now warehoused safely but had once been aimed at the cities of Europe.

How enjoyable and how worthwhile this visit must have seemed—does seem, in your recollection—and how far off 2005 now must appear to you. On the morning of the very day that your electoral victory was being celebrated, Russian President Dimitri Medvedev intruded a loudly discordant note by informing you (and us) that if you continued your predecessor’s policy of installing “missile shield” technology in Eastern Europe, Moscow would begin to target Western European cities with its own ballistic array. Something that we had thought was behind us, in other words, had doubled around the block while our attention was otherwise engaged and was now right before us again.

Well, that was certainly quick and seemed to materialize the much-mocked warning given during the election campaign by your running mate Senator Joseph Biden. Misconstrued as it was by some Republicans, as if our rivals and enemies would only “test” American resolve if there were a Democrat in office, it turned out to be in many ways an underestimate. You were no doubt quite tired and busy and exhilarated that same morning, but the appeal from President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan to stop American over-reliance on aerial bombardment of disputed districts, and the renewed debate in the Iraqi parliament about the date and extent of a “status of forces” agreement in light of your own election, must have illuminated the way in which everything you ever said on the campaign trail had been listened to with extreme care and attention.

There were times during the campaign itself when you allowed yourself to give the impression that your victory would, in and of itself, create a different atmosphere for the confronting and solving of international problems. And you cannot perhaps be blamed for the way in which much international “feedback” appears to confirm the plausibility of this idea. But if the world was already programmed to respond to love and warmth and enthusiasm and mutuality, it would not be necessary to have a foreign or defense policy in the first place. Recently in Indonesia, the world’s most pluralistic and “moderate” Muslim state—and the scene of your well-described early schooling—was convulsed by the government’s decision to execute those who, in Bali six years ago, had murdered Australian and American and Balinese civilians on the orders of al-Qaeda and—a point understood by few—in reprisal for American and Australian support for the independence of East Timor. Just consider the complexity of these interleaved events in a remote but, as you have reminded us, strategically and economically crucial archipelago. Of how much use, really, will your own warm boyhood memories be in arbitrating these matters?



On the assumption that you will be held to what you have already repeatedly stated, and on the further assumption that you fully intended to be taken seriously, there will be four very urgent claims on your time. These will be Iran, Iraq, Pakistan/Afghanistan, and Russia (if we are fortunate enough to hold it to just those four). And there will be two temptations. The first is that of relying on your charm and multicultural appeal, with its somewhat risk-averse rhetoric and its tendency to emulsify basic disagreements in favor of the invocation of “common ground,” while the second is that of staging a Kennedy-esque “rite of passage” moment, in which you seek to show how tough you are, or can be. Both of these have their—not quite equal and not quite opposite, but nonetheless similar—dangers. My own favorite moment during your exchanges with Senator John McCain came when he invoked the tired old “TR” slogan about “speaking softly but carrying a big stick.” As you rightly murmured in rebuke, we see no sign of any especially big stick from the Republicans, but even so a candidate who sings “Bomb Iran” on YouTube can barely be described as having spoken softly.

Let me then return this rebuke to you. Having said, quietly but firmly, that the Iranian theocracy cannot be permitted to crash through every treaty and agreement and undertaking it has ever made or signed and declare itself a nuclear power, you will quite simply have to declare what the logical and probable consequences of this statement actually are. The Bush administration, despite its reputation for bellicosity, never managed to clarify the implications of its own statements on the matter. And it broke its own promise not to bequeath the problem to the next administration. You will have no such room for maneuver: the long-feared coincidence of a messianic regime with an apocalyptic weapon will either occur on your own watch or will be conclusively prevented from occurring. This is not a difference that can easily be split. Nor is it a question that can be subcontracted to Israel, since nobody will believe that if the Jewish state acts in any capacity it is acting independently of ourselves (or failing to make use of Iraqi airspace, which will come to the same thing). If I may make a tiny suggestion before quitting this topic it would be this: have somebody working full time on Sunni Arab responses to a Shiite theocratic nuclear capacity. We may have more allies than we think in this area. And begin work now on a contingency plan for when Iran threatens to occupy Bahrain, using its strategic nuclear ambiguity to discourage any coordinated international response à la Kuwait, and implying that a local Shiite majority confers upon it the right to alter international borders by force.

I suspect, Mr. President, that the international community may not be as naive as some conservatives believe and yet be ready for slightly fewer alarming rhetorical shocks—of the “bring it on” and “mission accomplished” tenor—which tend to confirm existing anti-American stereotypes. Yet these matters are not merely questions of so-called “cowboy” rhetoric, as you will see when we turn to the Afghan/Pakistan border. Without in any way appearing demagogic on the point, you several times said in the course of the campaign that you felt that the United States and NATO were being insufficiently aggressive in respect of cross-border incursions. You even lured your opponent, Senator John McCain, into saying that you were more inclined to rely on force than on diplomacy and negotiation. Several of us appreciated the irony.

But the irony may turn out to be at your expense. When you first pointed out the contrast between developments in Afghanistan and Iraq, it seemed to many consensus-minded commentators that there was a “good war” in the first case and a “war of choice” in the second one. It further appeared as part of conventional wisdom that the first war was going reasonably well while the second was going calamitously badly. Hence your demand for the U.S. armed forces to have withdrawn from Iraq by a date that had already passed before you submitted yourself to the Iowa caucuses. I feel entitled to point this out because it must surely constitute some kind of object lesson in the unpredictability of events.

A great Welsh politician named Aneurin Bevan once asked the British Tory front bench if they had made up their minds whether they wanted “a base in Cyprus, or Cyprus as a base.” Some such question begins to face us very urgently as we review the state of affairs on the Afghan border and in Mesopotamia. It could well be, as we look at the sheer size and unwieldiness and backwardness of Afghanistan, that the main priority is to keep it under close observation and to be able to make continual strikes on any cluster of forces that wishes us ill, without necessarily taking responsibility for the entire welfare and security of a country that has, in effect, no economy. In Iraq the reverse might be the case in that, with new explorations and discoveries of oil (including most importantly the finding of new fields in hitherto “dry” Sunni provinces), we could find that we have laid a solid economic basis for political federalism. Meanwhile, and in order to guarantee access to Gulf oil not just for ourselves but also for others, we might find that there are several discrete political voices, Arab and Kurdish and Muslim, asking us to stay. Iraq is a keystone state in a critical region and is situated at a chokepoint on the world economy and the trade routes of the nations. You have yet to make a speech that recognizes this rather salient fact, or that shows an understanding of the difference between the moral significance of a country and its geopolitical standing.

Everybody understands this difference in practice, which is why we do not confront the People’s Republic of China over Tibet, for example. As you yourself demand to be told in The Audacity of Hope, “why invade Iraq and not North Korea or Burma? Why intervene in Bosnia and not Darfur? Are our goals in Iran regime change, the dismantling of all Iranian nuclear capacity, the prevention of nuclear proliferation, or all three?” It must have struck you that you are now having to answer these momentous questions instead of asking them, and that after the closing years of Bush/Cheney the same questions still stand. I submit that the reappearance of those Russian missiles that you once so happily reviewed, and that we had so recently thought to be decommissioned, might be a point at which to bring your previous expertise to bear on the questions that will now crowd in on you. Let no one say that such experience or expertise was slight. It may have been a better preparation for your high office than you could then have imagined.

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and a Media Fellow at the Hoover Institution.

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