An Emperor Without Clothes: Wikileaks and the Limits of American Power

Two months into the public disclosure of US diplomatic cables by Wikileaks, what has been their impact? Although at this point only about 10% of over 250,000 leaked cables are available to the public, the widespread reporting on their content in the media, in particular by those outlets with access to the cables in advance, allows spending some thoughts on this question. Specifically, we should like to ask how much remains from the initial claim that these leaks would cause damage to the US.

My (at this stage admittedly cautious) answer is ‘not much’; at least not in the sense suggested by headlines in the days following the release of the documents. Their dominant claim was that the publication of the cables would expose what the US government ‘really’ thinks and how it ‘really’ goes about its business. In the words of the Wikileaks website (migrating through cyberspace) the cables would “show the contradictions between the US’s public persona and what it says behind closed doors”. It was suggested that they would enable us to access that parallel, secret world of great power politics and show the extent of US influence on events and political dynamics across the globe. The cables would give us the emperor without clothes and reveal its not-so benign face. Such expectations were fostered by the desire of media outlets to sell revelations (with Wikileaks setting the tone by providing the label ‘Cablegate’, suggesting an affinity to ‘Watergate’); yet they also fit the recent debate among academics over the nature and reality of an American empire.

There is no doubt that the cables confirm an impressive US presence in the world. Yet the overall picture that emerges offers little food for one-dimensional conspiracy theories. Instead, the picture we get is more complex and more interesting, with rather counterintuitive consequences.

Of course, unless we actually sift through these cables ourselves, most of what we read is filtered by media analysts and editors. And their reporting occurs from a particular place within a particular political context, which affects the selection and evaluation of cables as well as how stories are constructed out of them. Even so, up until now, the leaked documents have not generated many, if any, surprises, at least not to serious observers of US foreign policy and/or the countries the cables deal with. The majority of the documents are unclassified (accessible by millions working in US government institutions) and contain what one might call common knowledge. That is, they contain information and evaluations gained in private conversations, perhaps, but not going beyond what local journalists or taxi drivers know or suspect (after all, locals tend to be the source of information). This makes for interesting reading of how US officials assess individuals, situations, and dynamics within a particular society, which improves our understanding of how they see ‘the world’ or, rather, a fragment thereof. What the documents do not tell us, however, is a tale of US omnipotence.

Because many of the cables are reports back to Washington and deal with the politics of the respective host country, their content it potentially more embarrassing and consequential for the host government than the White House. Again, this is not so much because the cables contain surprising revelations. Yet they can become an authoritative source substantiating suspicions and explicating known yet unspoken facts, in particular in countries which lack transparency and investigative journalism. In such cases, political elites would have reason to be concerned because the leaks reveal activities they would rather hide from their constituency. And rather than unmasking an hitherto invisible American web of control the cables often show the opposite. Whether it concerns the 2008 Georgia-Russia war or the dynamics in Iraq or Afghanistan following Western military intervention, the cables indicate a lack of American control and, instead, highlight agency and, thus, responsibility of local actors. In other words, it makes apparent that others are not merely objects but subjects of history. From the US perspective this is damaging only to the extent that it pokes holes in the notion of an American empire, fostered by Hollywood images and overly self-confident attitudes of American officials, often happily exploited by actors elsewhere looking for a convenient scapegoat. Thus, ‘Cablegate’ may not only render it more difficult for the US to take credit or blame for the order of things, it may also fuel resistance against local rulers by an unhappy people, as appears to have been the case in Tunisia.

Still, it has been noted that Wikileaks would cause damage to the relations America holds with others because it suggests that the US bureaucracy has difficulty with keeping secrets, prompting contacts to be more hesitant about sharing information with US officials. This is a valid concern, as many informants rely on anonymity for fear of retribution, even if many of the documents hardly contain secrets in a meaningful sense. However, the measures now put in place within US government bureaucracies to prevent such leaks in the future will probably alleviate such concerns. And even if we ignore the rather crude remarks by prominent (Republican) politicians of hunting down and executing those responsible for leaking the documents, it is safe to assume that US agencies are involved in the aggressive campaign trying to take Wikileaks offline.

Yet it is precisely here, in the American reaction to Wikileaks, where we see the potential for great damage to the US. In all fairness, the attempt of the Obama administration to stop the publication of internal documents and prevent further leaks is understandable. Any government in the world facing a similar situation would feel compelled to do the same; indeed most people would object to having strangers read private conversations. The irony is that this attempt to stop the flow of information comes from what is arguably still the most open society on this planet. Despite the secrecies and deceptive manoeuvrings of the Bush administration, as any researcher knows the amount of information about US government business formally available to the public (and not just the American public) is unparalleled. What is more, the Obama administration promised to re-establish transparency and civil liberties curbed by its predecessor, symbolised in the move of declaring the White House ‘the people’s house’. This promise, part of the broader agenda of improving America’s global image, sits uneasily with internet censorship. Thus, the Obama administration faces an interesting dilemma: if it succeeds in shutting down Wikileaks it will damage America’s identity as the ‘land of the free’, and if it fails to stop the leaks it might provide us with further evidence of the limits of American power.

Felix Berenskoetter is a Lecturer in International Relations at SOAS and an Associate of the LSE IDEAS Transatlantic Relations Programme.

Liberal Interventionism R.I.P.

While conducting fieldwork in Washington DC this summer, I was struck by the many complaints about President Obama’s lack of interest in pursuing liberal values abroad. “Those working in the ‘democracy sector’, haven’t seen many resources coming their way from this administration”, one critic told me in private. Others quibbled about Obama’s deafening silence on international human rights issues. Let alone the tsunami of TV commentators debating whether the President was keener on allegedly importing European-style big-government socialism rather than promoting, at home and abroad, America’s entrepreneurial spirit and free-market ethos.

Wondering whether these narrow policy complains reflected broader shifts in American strategic thinking, I turned to Obama’s newly released (May 2010) National Security Strategy (NSS) in search for clues. And I found them. Indeed, what I found was that America’s liberal interventionist grand strategic approach, which had come to define much of its foreign policy thinking and practice since the end of the Cold War, had all but faded. Roughly speaking, liberal interventionism is the belief that the active promotion of liberal values worldwide - such as free markets, human rights and democracy - are instrumental to maintaining international peace and stability and a vital U.S. security interest. Its advocates have generally proposed that the U.S. use its power to pursue and protect these values through direct intervention - even military if necessary - in the domestic affairs of foreign countries.

Take human rights and democracy promotion for example. At a close look of Obama’s NSS, riddled it is with the language of engagement, building cooperation and investing at home to renew American leadership, while impulses of intervening on humanitarian grounds or to spread liberty internationally seem to have gone. Compare Obama’s NSS, for example, with Bush’s 2002 NSS and Clinton’s 1998 NSS. One has to go to page 36, to have a hint of what Obama’s strategy to uphold “universal values” would be:

“The United States supports those who seek to exercise universal rights around the world. We promote our values above all by living them at home...America will not impose any system of government on another country…More than any other action that we have taken, the power of America’s example has helped spread freedom and democracy abroad.” (p.36)

Contrast this ‘exemplarist’ stance with Bush’s highly interventionist freedom agenda, which took center stage in his NSS. Indeed the document opened with the following lines:

“The United States possesses unprecedented - and unequaled - strength and influence in the world. Sustained by faith in the principles of liberty, and the value of a free society, this position comes with unparalleled responsibilities, obligations, and opportunity. The great strength of this nation must be used to promote a balance of power that favors freedom.” (p.1)

The 2002 NSS’ first key strategic objective was to “champion aspirations for human dignity” (i.e. democratic institutions and human rights). This logic then became a central ideological component in pursuing strategies of democracy promotion in the Middle East, build support in the run up to the war in Iraq as well as driving state-building activities in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

So too there are few echoes in Obama’s strategy of anything like the Clinton era concept of “democratic enlargement”. Nor are there many openings for possible humanitarian interventions, which instead peppered the 1990s decade.  Clinton’s 1998 NSS also articulated a more explicit activist approach to “promoting democracy and human rights”, than Obama’s current one, explicitly indicating it as the third core objective of its national security strategy.

“We must sustain our efforts to press for political liberalization and respect for basic human rights worldwide, including in countries that continue to defy democratic advances.” (p.34)

On the economic front, as well, the self-confidence in the necessity of advancing a liberal economic order internationally has evaporated from the 2010 document. Out of the post-Cold War era administrations, Clinton’s was the one which most vigorously articulated a foreign policy vision around the universal expansion of markets. Indeed he appeared at times to elevate economic interests at the same level of more traditional national security concerns. Globalization was the word of the day, while key American priorities were to extend open markets and free trade worldwide alongside building and beefing-up international liberal economic arrangements such as NAFTA, APEC and the WTO. During the 1990s, The Bretton Woods organizations were also given a freer hand in their lending and in advocating for a markedly neoliberal approach to poverty reduction and economic growth.

Similarly bullish was Bush’s NSS about the need to intervene internationally to advance neoliberal economic policies. A stated objective in the 2002 NSS was to “ignite a new era of global economic growth through free markets and free trade”. The 2002 NSS also tied economic liberty to the President’s freedom agenda:

“A strong world economy enhances our national security by advancing prosperity and freedom in the rest of the world. Economic growth supported by free trade and free markets… reinforces the habits of liberty. We will promote economic growth and economic freedom beyond America’s shores.” (p.17)

Then contrast this cavalier attitude of previous decades towards liberal economic prescriptions with Obama’s call for more state-led fiscal stimulus during the latest G20 meeting in Canada. In parallel the 2010 NSS has few words to spare for the universal application of liberal economic principles. It instead concentrates primarily on the notion of rebuilding the domestic foundations for American ‘prosperity’, by:

“Strengthening education and human capital, enhancing science, technology and innovation, achieving a balanced and sustainable growth” (p.2).

I’ll leave it to more rigorous academic analysis than this simple blog post to try and explain why such a shift away from liberal interventionism has happened. One can simply speculate that both international structural and domestic forces are at play here. The slow end of unipolarity with the rise of regional powers along with the soft balancing of an international public opinion which has repercussions on how far national governments can support a highly interventionist American foreign policy, may be at work here. Also domestic forces within the US, such as the high economic, military and human costs of repeated and protracted foreign adventures, could have dampened passions for more of the same.  Furthermore, particular policies have been delegitimized given their partial or complete failures. For example, the realization that protecting human rights abroad through military means is hopeless when there is no functioning state, as in the case of Haiti and Somalia. Similarly, the realization has taken hold democracy isn’t built in a day, as neoconservatives hoped for in Iraq and Afghanistan, and requires a more sustained commitment than interventionists might have previously assumed. Likewise, the 2007-2008 financial cataclysm appears to have deflated enthusiasms for neoliberal economic recipes. Given this scenario, liberal interventionism, which has defined much of American foreign policy strategy for the past two decades, has now been put to rest. 

Gregorio Bettiza is a PhD candidate in International Relations and IDEAS Centre Stonex Scholar at the London School of Economics and Political Science.  He serves as Programme Assistant on the LSE IDEAS Transatlantic Programme.

“The Connection Was Reset”: Google goes to War for the West

Internet users in China last night discovered that the domain Google.cn redirected to Google.com.hk, as the world’s largest search engine shut down its Chinese servers and redirected traffic to Hong Kong, where – crucially – the search engine results would be uncensored by Google themselves.  Of course, users with IP addresses in mainland China attempting to search for material deemed ‘sensitive’ by the Chinese authorities would still be prevented from accessing information by the ‘Great Firewall’, with its tell-tale error message: ‘the connection was reset’.

Yet Google’s decision is of limited significance to Chinese surfers.  Experienced activists in China have ways and means of getting round the authorities’ controls, for example by using IP blocking, VPNs and proxy severs.  Indeed, within China Google accounts for only around 20% of searches, with the home-grown search engine Baidu holding the kind of dominance Google is used to enjoying, with 75% of all searches.  Having said that, China’s technology for blocking and filtering web results is less sophisticated and effective than the rules Google voluntarily applied to its Chinese ‘spiders’ four years ago, so the move does represent a very small, but nonetheless welcome, boost fro freedom of information in China.

Nor is Google’s decision of particular significance for the finances of the company itself in the short term, even if the decision has been taken – as was the case in 2006 when Google decided to filter its results in China – very much from a business perspective.  China accounts for less than 1% of Google’s total income: whilst companies like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo have been eager to gain access to a rapidly-growing market with up to a billion new customers, the fact is that currently revenues from China are insignificant.  Indeed the business decision that Google appears to have taken is that their stance on China has begun to erode their position in other markets.  Google’s idealistic founders may have based the company around the slogan ‘don’t be evil’, but that clever piece of marketing disguised the essential truth behind the search engine’s success: yes Google was fast; yes it returned different, and ultimately better, results; but the key to Google’s dominance was that their users had trust in it.  And user trust is all the more important as firms compete to control user data as more and more computing takes place ‘in the cloud’.  So whilst Google’s decision is based on a long-term business argument that has brought it great success to date, it risks little in the short term in the Chinese market.  Google also clearly believes that Chinese censorship is unsustainable, and that once controls are removed it will be able to return to that market victorious, able to generate user trust quickly on the basis that it – unlike Microsoft or Yahoo – has a genuine commitment to open information, that it had not been evil.

And here is the rub: by revealing the Chinese government’s widespread hacking regime – a fairly open secret in the IT world – and by withdrawing from China, Google has raised the stakes in the ideological conflict surrounding the rights of people versus the rights of governments; it has essentially gone to war for liberalism.  Whilst China may have embraced the economic tenets of liberal capitalism fairly convincingly over the last two decades, its attitudes to political liberalism lag far behind.  Ultimately – as Google rightly believes – sociologically the two cannot be separated: free consumption requires political freedom and vice-versa, and the progress of Chinese economic growth, particularly as it seeks to develop its economy past the core manufacturing stage to focus on R&D and information services, cannot hope to proceed smoothly without political liberalisation.  Google’s actions, however, are a spur to that process, which will both embolden activists, weak though they remain in the face of the Chinese state, and more importantly detract from China’s ability to continue to progress its economy into more advanced sectors.

It is, as well, inconceivable that Google would have taken this move without consultation with the United States government.  Whilst the administration is truly a ‘team of rivals’ with regards to policy on China, with Hilary Clinton significantly more hawkish than the President and Vice-President, the government’s enlisting of Twitter as a policy adjunct during the Green protests in Iran demonstrates that the administration understands the power of open information in driving social and political change conducive to US interests.  So while China is able to defy the diplomatic demands of the US on the level of the Yuan, on sanctions for Iran, or on human rights, in Google it may encounter an irresistible force for the spread of political liberalism.

Dr Nicholas Kitchen  is a Fellow of LSE IDEAS and Programme Coordinator of the LSE IDEAS Transatlantic Relations Programme.

Obama and Medvedev - Improving US-Russian Relations

Moscow, Russia

After Dmitry Medvedev delivered his message to the Federation Council here last week, news outlets in the U.S. and Britain jumped on the Russian president’s seemingly hostile rhetoric regarding the planned missile defense system to be placed in Poland and the Czech Republic. Russia, Medvedev said, would respond by planting a system in Kaliningrad, on the Baltic Sea. The New York Times, which accompanied its coverage with a photo of troops on parade in Red Square, focused on his harsh words as well as the fact that that he did not congratulate Barack Obama on his election victory.

Yet these reports miss a number of essential points. Indeed, people I’ve spoken to here, some of them experienced watchers of Kremlin politics as well as US-Russian relations, thought the speech could prove to be an important marker in terms of a change in direction of domestic and foreign policy and the emergence of a distinct “Medvedev” policy that has not been evident since his inauguration in May.

Undeniably, the most notable elements of Medvedev’s speech had to do with domestic, not foreign, policy. He spoke about the importance of individual rights, battling with corruption, and economic freedom. His predecessors paid lip service to these principles, but what was striking was Medvedev’s tone and the fact that his words seemed to be directed at his own mentor and many of his supporters. (You can read the text for yourself here – try to ignore the slightly awkward translation).

What about Medvedev’s foreign policy?

Medvedev began the speech with a number of references to the summer’s events in Georgia and its two breakaway regions, Southern Ossetia and Abkhazia. He did not shy away from blaming Georgia for the conflict and insisting that NATO had overstepped its bounds. Most of the speech, however, avoided foreign policy. The message was “our priority is getting our own house in order.” And while critical of US policy in Georgia and on the missile-defense issue, it clearly left the door open for an improvement in relations: “I would stress that we have no issue with the American people, we do not have inherent anti-Americanism. And we hope that our partners, the new administration of the United States of America, will make a choice in favor of full-fledged relations with Russia.”

What would it take for the new administration to create a long standing, stable relationship with Russia?

First and foremost, it means being willing to accept limits. This includes limits on NATO expansion, and it may include abandoning the missile shield the Bush administration has worked to place in the Czech Republic and Poland. Why? Because Russia may come to terms with not being a global superpower, but it certainly will not abandon its status as a regional power. It demands respect and will lash out when its sphere of interest is violated. Contrary to the thinking of the outgoing administration and its intellectual supporters at AEI and the Project for a New American Century, not every region is equally important to the U.S. (Not surprisingly, Russia's Deputy Foreign Minister called Obama's staff last Friday and said that Russia would not go ahead with the Kaliningrad deployment if the U.S. refrains from its plans in Poland. Apparently Mr. Obama has already signalled the door is open for discussion on this question, which I view as a positive development and John Bolton does not.)

Second, the Obama administration should do what both Clinton and George W. Bush failed to do – treat Russia as a partner not only in words but deeds. The word partner is now only seen between quotation marks in Russia, because it is associated with a campaign, almost two decades old, to weaken Russia at the expense of its formal rivals. Making someone accept a reality they are powerless to change, which was the case with expansion of NATO in the 1990s, is not the same as partnership. Similarly, it was disappointing that US officials did not even seriously consider the Russian counterproposal to the missile shield. The Obama administration needs to involve Moscow in a real dialog on all such security issues, and be willing to cede ground at least some of the time.

Third, the administration needs to have a frank conversation with its counterparts about what each others’ limits are. It may not like everything it hears, but Moscow is much more likely to cooperate on issues important to the US – including Iran, Afghanistan, and Iraq, if it sees the US as willing to respect its influence in other areas, like Ukraine or Georgia. This may sound naïve, but it is these sort of conversations that have made cooperation between great powers (including the US and USSR) possible historically.

Finally, the new administration could take a number of steps to ease the mutual climate of suspicion, including permanently removing Russia from the Jackson-Vanik Ammendment and easing travel restrictions for Russians traveling to the US. Both the amendment, which links trade with Russia to freedom of emigration, and the costly and difficult visa process are seen as demeaning by many people here. Citizen’s from America’s other partners, like the EU states, don’t need a visa at all. Russia’s economic migrants are much more likely to head for Moscow or St. Petersburg rather than for the distant US; while a full visa-waiver program may be premature, the current regulations need to be relaxed. (US citizens who travel to Russia will also appreciate the reciprocal easing of the process that would follow on Moscow’s part.)

Would any or all of these measures create the kind of stable, peaceful relationship the US and Russia need? It is impossible to say for certain – Medvedev is still weaker internally than Putin, and the global economic crisis has left many things up in the air. Nevertheless, if Mr. Obama is serious about changing the way the US is seen in the world, Russia would be a perfect place to start.

The Obama Revolution: From Hustings to Reality

The Obama campaign turned American politics upside down. His approach to campaign financing revolutionised the rules of the game, and his use of the Internet and mobile web stirred unprecedented interest, brought people to the polls for the first time and produced a larger, more sceptical and informed electorate. Barack Obama portrayed himself as transcending politics, as a national reconciler, and as the harbinger of change in a disaffected country. No doubt President Obama has transformed American politics, but will he revolutionise American foreign policy as well?

Considering the nature of American politics, we may not be able to predict the tenets of President Obama’s foreign policy until after his official inauguration and after he has appointed the key decision-makers in his administration. What we do know is that campaign rhetoric rarely turns into presidential policy and that Obama’s policy will depend, of course, on how events unfold in the coming months.

Few President-elects have stirred so much emotion in America and risen to prominence with such high international approval ratings. Obama is a great symbol of change and progress in America, and his message is especially powerful considering the American and global public’s dissatisfaction with the George W. Bush administration. As such, President Obama is likely to respond to these expectations early in his presidency with a series of highly symbolic foreign policy decisions. He will shift the rhetoric away from Bush’s first term unilateralism and excessive reliance on military might. Obama’s first decisions will aim to repair America’s foreign relations and its reputation in the world. He will decide to close down Guantánamo Bay detention camp, end America’s policy of torture, reconsider extraordinary rendition and re-engage America as a leader in multilateral negotiations for a global climate regime.

Such decisions will be easy for Obama to promise and they will earn him much applause around the world. When the applause dies down however, challenges will abound. Closing Guantánamo will require him to jump through a complex set of legal and political hurdles, while concluding negotiations on climate change will require unprecedented co-operation between the big emitters as well as leadership and vision. Obama’s campaign provided few signposts for a new direction in foreign policy. Generally speaking, he will define the war on terror more narrowly and he will broaden the foreign policy agenda to include human security concerns, climate change, public health and organized crime. In a symbolic shift, the war on terror will no longer dictate the means and ends of American foreign policy. In a sense, his approach recalls the Clinton years – which focused on globalisation and humanitarian concerns – and the post-Vietnam era, when Republicans clung to Cold War thinking and Democrats acknowledged the Sino-Soviet split and the environmental agenda.

To read the rest of this piece, please visit the RUSI website here:

Lisa Aronsson is Head of the Transatlantic Programme at RUSI and a Fellow of the LSE IDEAS Transatlantic Project

Well Done America: Now it’s Europe’s Turn to do its bit.

Barack Obama’s landslide election brings with it impossible expectations of, according to the front page of the Times, “The New World”. In his speech last night Obama promised a new dawn of American leadership based on the enduring power of American ideals. Yet one man’s beneficent leadership is another man’s ignoble imperialism, and talk of universal values and American leadership could well have come from the mouth of George W. Bush. If Obama is to realise the hopes contained within notions of American leadership and avoid the traps of leading without followers he will need to work with Europe, but Europe must also be prepared to fulfil its side of that particular bargain.

Nicholas Sarkozy has pledged that Europe “will find a new energy to work with America”. It needs to. Multilateralism is not just about shared decision making but about sharing the responsibilities entailed by those decisions. And good leadership is not just about bringing others along with you, it is about delegating roles and responsibilities. In the post-Cold War world to date Europe has not given the United States the opportunity to be a good leader because Europe has been a negligent multilateralist – demanding American activism but unwilling to back those demands with significant contributions of its own. The Clinton administration derived very little political capital at home from leading where Europe asked – in Bosnia and Kosovo – and an Obama administration would be wise to demand more from its European allies in return for activism.

So Europe must expand its capabilities, be prepared to contribute, and above all refrain from the kind of petty, electorally expedient ad hoc anti-Americanism that characterised much of the Bush era. In Robert Kagan’s phraseology, if Europe wants American foreign policy to be sprinkled with a touch of Paradise, then Europe will have to bring some Power to the table.

The opportunity is there. Obama won this election, not by moving his party to the centre-right, the modus operandi of Bill Clinton, the great triangulator, but by asking the American people to move themselves out of their political comfort zone. The American public feel that George Bush squandered the goodwill of the world that followed September 11th, and wants America’s prestige restored and its alliances rebuilt. Rebuilding the global financial system is the first major task, an area in which Europe is already possessed of both power and ideological authority.

But Europe should be warned: fail to fully engage, fail to back fine words with the means to help achieve them, and the United States will have little option to continue upon the unilateral pursuit of its interests rather than embrace a shared approach to our shared transatlantic goals. The Bush Doctrine was not so much of an aberration as many in Europe believe, and we would be wrong to assume that with Bush gone enlightened liberal multilateralism will simply fall into being. For that to happen Europe must be prepared to step up to the plate.

Nick Kitchen is a Fellow of the LSE IDEAS Transatlantic Project

A Long Goodbye

What Gorbachev’s effort to get out of Afghanistan can tell us about how a President Obama might face the challenge of withdrawing from Iraq.

Barack Obama’s progressive supporters have been upset by his recent statements on Iraq. Yet his recent “move to the center” on the war should not be particularly surprising. After all, no matter how opposed he may have been to the war in 2003, in 2008 he would be taking over as commander in chief of the world’s most powerful nation and military with commitments all over the world. His advisors have pointed out, no doubt, that how he handles the situation will determine how he is seen by his detractors at home and how the US is seen abroad for years to come.

A useful historical parallel is the Soviet experience in trying to get out of Afghanistan. Mikhail Gorbachev, a reform minded leader who came to power in March 1985, faced a similar dilemma to the one Obama will face if elected. He was opposed to the war but was afraid of the consequences a withdrawal of Soviet troops might have on Moscow’s relationships with its numerous allies and clients. On the day he became General Secretary he jotted down a note saying that the Soviet Union needed to find a way out of Afghanistan, but do it in stages.

A US withdrawal from Iraq would most likely lead to an increase in violence, at least in the short term. It could mean increased influence for Iran. It could mean that US allies in the region and beyond, no matter their views on the war, begin to doubt Washington’s commitment and look elsewhere for support. All of the above could become ammunition for conservatives at home, much like the collapse of South Vietnam became a rallying point for conservatives in the late 1970s.

All of this could happen even if the US stays in Iraq for 10 years. The long term consequences for the US, as well as the region, might be more severe. But politics is a short term business. President Obama would have to think about the 2012 election, when the consequences of a withdrawal could be used against him.

That is why I was not surprised to hear that Obama was “modifying” his stance on troop withdrawal. After an uproar from his progressive supporters, he explained himself at a speech in Georgia on July 8: “We have to be as careful getting out as we were careless getting in…You’ve got to be sure our troops are safe, you have to be sure the country doesn’t collapse.”

Gorbachev made similar statements on numerous occasions between 1985 and 1989, when the withdrawal, in closed, official meetings. Here he is at Politburo meeting in February 1987:

We could leave [Afghanistan] quickly…and blame everything on the previous leadership, which planned everything. But we can’t do that. They’re worried in India, they’re worried in Africa. They think that this will be a blow to the authority of the Soviet Union in the national-liberation movement. Imperialism, they say, if it wins in Afghanistan, will go on the offensive.

Indeed, Moscow’s numerous allies were worried about the implications of a withdrawal and the collapse of a fellow communist state and made their concerns known to Soviet officials. Gorbachev felt Moscow could not take these concerns lightly.

Gorbachev spent several years trying to find ways to make possible a Soviet withdrawal that did not bring about the collapse of the communist regime in Kabul and the attendant blow to Soviet prestige. This included economic aid as well as a policy of national reconciliation to bring opposition elements into the Kabul government. Most of these, however, resembled efforts undertaken between 1980 and 1985. Only when it had become clear that these efforts were failing that Moscow really started to move towards a withdrawal, which finally began in May 1988. In the meantime, the Soviet 40^th army continued to lose over 1000 dead per year and many more wounded.

Contrary to the expectations of US intelligence officials and many in Moscow, the Kabul regime survived without Soviet troops as long as Moscow kept sending economic aid and materiel. Soviet prestige did not collapse as a result of the withdrawal – on the contrary, it allowed Moscow to improve relations not only with the United States but also with China and some nations in the Middle East.

Which brings us back to Obama. A delay in the withdrawal may be justified, but only if he has a serious plan of what will happen during that period. His desire to talk to Iran is a good start- that country is a regional power and will no doubt carry weight in Iraq long after foreign troops are gone. Yet if he has a concrete plan to make sure the Iraqi army is more reliable than it is now or that the government is more stable he has not shown it.

My fear is that President Obama may, like Gorbachev, spend precious time reinventing the wheel or waiting for already failing programs to work. The delay may placate some of his conservative critics, but it will also be costly in terms of live lost and treasure spent. And it may erode his political capital as well, making his task of improving Washington’s relationship with the rest of the world much more difficult.

Of course, the United States is not the Soviet Union, Obama is not Gorbachev, Iraq is not Afghansitan. Yet the concerns that leaders of powerful empires face in trying to extricate their armies from such wars are similar. Obama’s supporters who would like to see him bring the troops home will most likely be disappointed, just as those who hoped Gorbachev would bring the troops home right after coming to power were to see the war drag on for almost four more years.

The Power of Pictures

By now everyone has seen it, right? The Obamas in the Oval Office, Barack in a djellabah and turban and his wife Michelle as a gun-toting Black-Panther. An approving Osama Bin Laden looks down on the couple’s fist bump as an American flag burns in the fireplace. The New Yorker’s cartoon has provoked outrage on the left and the right, with both presidential candidates condemning the depiction.

Of course, it is just a cartoon. But there is an argument to say that the New Yorker, in opting for such an close-to-the-bone lampooning of the misgivings many Americans have about Barack Obama’s candidacy, has actually done him something of a favour.

Last week a Newsweek Poll revealed the following false beliefs Americans hold about Obama. Twelve percent of voters think he was sworn in as senator on the Qur'an. 26 percent believe the he was raised as a Muslim and 39 percent believe he attended an Islamic school as a child growing up in Indonesia. Prior to Newsweek’s poll, the Pew Center found at the end of June that 12% of voters believe Obama to be a Muslim.

The Republicans would have been expected to encourage these false beliefs, engendering mistrust of the opposition candidate. Yet the New Yorker’s cover renders such tactics far more difficult. By putting the issue of Obama’s religion into such contrast, and drawing condemnation from the McCain camp, it now becomes almost impossible for the Republicans to question Obama’s suitability for office on the basis of his religious outlook. The merest hint that Obama’s background renders him unsuitable for high office forces its advocate into a defense of that New Yorker cover, and in no way can that benefit McCain. Thus the effect of the extremity of the New Yorker’s take may be to render the entire issue of Obama’s religion off limits, even when the campaign – inevitably – descends into personal slurs and dirty tricks.