How to Beat Obama

The president is far more vulnerable than he thinks on foreign policy.

BY KARL ROVE AND ED GILLESPIE | MARCH/APRIL 2012

In an American election focused on a lousy economy and high unemployment, conventional wisdom holds that foreign policy is one of Barack Obama's few strong suits. But the president is strikingly vulnerable in this area. The Republican who leads the GOP ticket can attack him on what Obama mistakenly thinks is his major strength by translating the center-right critique of his foreign policy into campaign themes and action. Here's how to beat him.

First, the Republican nominee should adopt a confident, nationalist tone emphasizing American exceptionalism, expressing pride in the United States as a force for good in the world, and advocating for an America that is once again respected (and, in some quarters, feared) as the preeminent global power. Obama acts as if he sees the United States as a flawed giant, a mistake that voters already perceive. After all, this is the president who said, "I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism." Voters also sense he is content to manage America's decline to a status where the United States is just one country among many. As he put it, his is "a U.S. leadership that recognizes our limits."

The Republican nominee should use the president's own words and actions to portray him as naive and weak on foreign affairs. Obama's failed promises, missed opportunities, and erratic shifts suggest he is out of touch and in over his head. For example, before he was elected, he promised to meet with the leaders of Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria, and Venezuela "without precondition." Nothing came of that except a serious blow to the image of the United States as a reliable ally. During the 2008 campaign, he also argued that Iran was a "tiny" country that didn't "pose a serious threat." How foolish that now seems.

At the same time, the Republican candidate should not hesitate to point out where Obama has left his Republican predecessor's policies largely intact. He will be uncomfortable if the nominee congratulates him for applying President George W. Bush's surge strategy to Afghanistan, carrying through on the expanded use of drones, reversing course on the handling of terrorist detainees, and renewing the Patriot Act after previously condemning it as a "shoddy and dangerous law." Such compliments will give the Republican candidate greater ability to be critical of Obama's many fiascoes -- not only his proposed outreach to tyrants in Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela, but also the disastrous "reset" with Russia, mismanagement of the U.S. relationship with Pakistan, politicized timetables for withdrawing troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, and neglect of important traditional allies such as NATO, Canada, and Mexico, as well as key rising powers like India.

Obama recognizes that he's seen as "cold and aloof," and the Republican nominee should hammer this point home. The president has few real friends abroad (excepting, of course, Islamist Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, ashe told Time magazine's Fareed Zakaria). The Republican nominee should criticize Obama for not understanding that the U.S. president's personal engagement is essential for effective global leadership. Obama's lack of regular close contact with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and Afghan President Hamid Karzai, which has destroyed relationships with America's erstwhile allies, is simply the most jarring, inexplicable example of this president's hands-off approach.

Because the fall campaign must be devoted to promoting the Republican message on jobs and the economy, the GOP nominee must share his big foreign-policy vision no later than early summer. Giving voters a sense of where he wants to take the country is important to cementing his image as a leader worthy of the Oval Office. Merely projecting the right image is not enough.

The Republican candidate must address at least four vital areas. The most important is the struggle that will define this century's arc: radical Islamic terrorism. He should make the case that victory must be America's national goal, not merely seeking to "delegitimize the use of terrorism and to isolate those who carry it out," as Obama's May 2010 National Security Strategy put it. As in the Cold War, victory will require sustained U.S. involvement and a willingness to deploy all tools of influence -- from diplomacy to economic ties, from intelligence efforts to military action.

Second, the Republican candidate must condemn the president's precipitous drawdown in Afghanistan and his deep, dangerous defense-budget cuts. Both are viewed skeptically by the military: The former emboldens America's adversaries and discourages its allies; the latter is of deep concern to veterans and other Americans who doubt Obama's commitment to the military.

Third, the Republican candidate should focus on the dangers of rogue states, particularly Iran and North Korea. The upcoming three-year anniversary of the stolen June 2009 Iranian presidential election is a particularly opportune moment for the Republican nominee to meet with Iranian exiles and offer a major speech drawing attention to Obama's weakness and naiveté in dealing with this belligerent power.

In part because of how he has mishandled the Iranian threat, Obama has lost much political and financial support in the American Jewish community. His approach to Israel must be presented as similarly weak and untrustworthy. The Republican candidate must make clear the existential threat to Israel from a nuclear-armed Iran -- not only because it will lead to a better policy, but also because it will reduce the president's support among this key voting bloc in the critical battleground states of Florida, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.

The fourth line of attack must be about America's fragile economy and how to restore it. Many voters think Obama's stewardship of the economy has been inconsistent and even counterproductive. This makes it imperative for the Republican candidate to make the case for promoting trade and greater international economic engagement. Obama's failure to match other countries in aggressively opening markets for exports and jobs should be tied to his responsibility for high domestic unemployment and an anemic recovery.

Undoubtedly, Obama will attempt to preempt criticism of his foreign policy by repeating endlessly that Osama bin Laden was killed on his watch. By campaign's end, some voters will wonder whether the president personally delivered the kill shot. The best response is to praise the president. In doing so, however, Obama's opponent should be sure to praise all the drama's actors, especially the Navy SEALs whose courageous assault killed the terrorist leader and the tireless CIA analysts whose hunches convinced then-Director Michael Hayden in 2007 to unleash a massive effort that eventually led to the compound in Abbottabad. In the end, voters know that Obama did not kill bin Laden -- SEALs did.

Absent a major international crisis, this election will be largely about jobs, spending, health care, and energy. Voters do, however, want a president who leads on the world stage and a commander in chief who projects strength, not weakness.

A November 2011 survey conducted by Resurgent Republic showed that 50 percent of voters (as well as 54 percent of self-identified independents) think America's standing in the world is worse under Obama, while only 21 percent believe it is better. This represents a sharp drop from April 2010, when 50 percent of voters (and 49 percent of independents) believed Obama had improved America's standing.

That's because Obama has failed to become a strong international leader, and the Republican nominee must reinforce this message -- one most Americans already believe. Foreign policy is a weakness for this president, not a strength.

The Least Bad Option

Let's face it, there are no good solutions to the mess in Syria.

BY JAMES TRAUB | MARCH 30, 2012

Are you okay with where you're at on Syria? I know that I'm not. A senior State Department official told me that the Obama administration isn't either. Almost everyone I've spoken to about Syria in the last few days has thrown up their hands and said, "There's no good solution." It may be that the only people who are comfortable with their position are the cynics in Russia and China who are prepared to let Syrian President Bashar al-Assad grind the opposition to powder, and Senator John McCain, who wants NATO to take out Damascus.

It's so much easier to say what won't work in Syria than what will. The Libya intervention-style air campaign that McCain advocates is a bad idea for reasons which a great many people, myself included, haveenumerated. In any case, it's not going to happen, because no one who could do it -- the United States, Europe, even Turkey or the Gulf states -- has any appetite for a second Libya. If you haven't heard a syllable recently out of Samantha Power, the chief advocate in the White House for humanitarian intervention, it's probably because such an intervention is simply not in the cards.

But what is in the cards? Diplomacy? Many of us who favored intervention in Libya, but not Syria, have hoped that diplomatic pressure might tip the scales inside Syria and force Assad to step down. The Obama administration backed a U.N. Security Council resolution which would have compelled Assad to step down, transferring power to an interim regime and initiating a political dialogue with all elements of Syrian society. Russia and China vetoed the resolution, though Damascus would almost certainly have shrugged off the demand in any case. Now the U.N. has backed a new diplomatic effort by former Secretary General Kofi Annan, and Assad has formally accepted the terms, which require him to impose a cease-fire and embrace an "inclusive, Syrian-led political process" to address the demands of the opposition. But Syrian security forces have continued firing on civilians in direct contradiction of the Annan plan's terms; it's clear by now that Assad will leave office only if he feels sure that the alternative is a bullet in his head. The real danger is that he will comply with the peace plan just enough to further divide the international community.

So there won't be an intervention or, in all likelihood, a diplomatic deus ex machina. What's in between those two extremes? Last week, the Obama administration announced that, along with Turkey, it would ship communications equipment and other "nonlethal" gear to armed rebels inside Syria. (Saudi Arabia and Qatar have already begun to supply the rebels with weapons.) This is an important shift in policy, since the equipment would permit rebels militias to securely communicate with one another. Such gear may be nonlethal, but it's still military. How far is the White House prepared to go in helping the Free Syrian Army, as the military opposition calls itself? For the moment, it seems, not much further. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have both said that the Free Syrian Army and the civilian opposition, gathered under the umbrella of the Syrian National Council (SNC), must demonstrate far more unity and coherence in order to become a legitimate alternative to the Assad regime, and thus conduits for more substantial aid. At a recent meeting in Istanbul, the political opposition did unite behind the SNC -- except for the Kurds, who walked out.

The administration is right to insist that the militias inside Syria at least acknowledge the legitimacy of the political leadership, and that the SNC get its act together. In Libya, after all, NATO was able to intervene on behalf of the Transitional National Council, which functioned  as an inclusive, nonsectarian, secular government-in-exile. What's more, journalists and others had access to the Libyan rebels, and so could answer the question of just who they were -- which is not the case in Syria. Even so, the militias which fought the war in Libya began to behave like miniature sovereigns soon after Muammar al-Qaddafi was killed. A post-Assad Syria with no recognized political authority might prove even more violent and chaotic than Libya has, leaving the country carved up into sectarian fiefs.

But how much coherence is fair to require as a precondition for further help? A recent report by the Institute for the Study of War points out that "insurgencies are inherently decentralized" and argues that Syria's armed opposition "has shown a propensity for organization at the local level." The report concludes that "delaying policy decisions before the opposition has coalesced around a viable alternative government is tantamount to insisting that the revolution succeed fully before it receives practical or military assistance."

The Friends of Syria, an organization of over 60 nations seeking to resolve the conflict there, is meeting this weekend in Istanbul, and should work actively both to help the civilian opposition hang together and to bind the militias inside Syria to the SNC -- rather than waiting for these forces to gel. (Giving the rebels satellite phones is, of course, one way to do just that.) And then what? White House officials have not wanted to say what they would do once the opposition begins to present a united front -- perhaps in part because they don't know. But reportsthat the rebels are literally running out of bullets argue that if outsiders don't act fast, there will be no insurgency to support -- at which point, Assad will be able to crush his opponents with impunity.

One person I spoke to who does have a plan is a former government official with extensive experience in Syria. The opposition, he argues, needs not just weapons but "a comprehensive military and civilian battle plan" to defeat Assad. He envisions a multilateral effort in which the United States would provide not just communications technology but real-time military intelligence to help the rebels respond to government troop movements. Gulf states would provide the bulk of the weapons and funds; the Jordanians might provide special forces to work closely with the militia; Turkey would provide the staging ground itself as well as other forms of aid; and diplomats would give strategic guidance to the SNC.

Such an effort would look less like the bombing campaign in Libya and more like, well, the  CIA-sponsored campaign to arm and train the mujahideen who fought the Soviets in Afghanistan. This is, of course, not a terribly encouraging analogy, since yesterday's anti-Soviet warriors became today's anti-American Taliban. We need no better reminder of the unintended consequences of supporting foreign insurgencies. But he did not shy away from the comparison. "We need to do what we did under Reagan," he said, "which is to actively support these insurgencies." But, he adds, we need to know who we are working with, to set out clear standards of behavior and to condition our help on maintaining those standards -- as we did not do in Afghanistan. And we need to be careful that the international effort doesn't exacerbate the problem: The Saudis, for example, are likely to bring an overtly sectarian agenda to Syria. The effort would be better off with a bigger role for the Turks, and a smaller one for the Saudis.

The neo-mujahideen strategy has plenty of problems -- beyond the possibility of a Frankenstein insurgency. It will take months to organize, and Assad will keep targeting civilians in the meanwhile. Assad's security forces may respond to a more robust military opposition by further ramping up the killing machine. And providing a safe haven along the northern border with Turkey offers very little comfort to either civilians or rebels in western cities like Hama or Homs, which border on Lebanon, or southern ones like Deraa, which is close to Jordan. And neither of those countries is prepared to host the insurgency.

But there are no good solutions; only less bad ones. And Assad's evident willingness to kill his opponents, and his opponents' willingness to keep fighting, or even protesting, despite the likelihood of being killed, compels outsiders to urgently devise and implement a least-bad solution rather than wait for the opposition to demonstrate that it deserves support. I'm open to a better suggestion. Does anyone have one?

The Next Net

By Douglas Rushkoff

01.03.11, 10:36am Comments (156)

 

The moment the "net neutrality" debate began was the moment the net neutrality debate was lost. For once the fate of a network -  its fairness, its rule set, its capacity for social or economic reformation - is in the hands of policymakers and the corporations funding them - that network loses its power to effect change. The mere fact that lawmakers and lobbyists now control the future of the net should be enough to turn us 

Douglas Rushkoff just released a new and updated version of his critically acclaimed book, Life, Inc., about the corporatization of everday life and how to reverse it.
The new version includes a resource guide – 70 pages of people, organizations, and businesses that have moved beyond corporatism and are thriving by using new peer-to-peer models for value creation and exchange. Learn more about and buy the book here.
Also check out Rushkoff's most recent book, Program or Be Programmed, which explores self-determination in media and technology.

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elsewhere.

Of course the Internet was never truly free, bottom-up, decentralized, or chaotic. Yes, it may have been designed with many nodes and redundancies for it to withstand a nuclear attack, but it has always been absolutely controlled by central authorities. From its Domain Name Servers to its IP addresses, the Internet depends on highly centralized mechanisms to send our packets from one place to another.

The ease with which a Senator can make a phone call to have a website such as Wikileaks yanked from the net mirrors the ease with which an entire top-level domain, like say .ir, can be excised. And no, even if some smart people jot down the numeric ip addresses of the websites they want to see before the names are yanked, offending addresses can still be blocked by any number of cooperating government and corporate trunks, relays, and ISPs. That's why ministers in China finally concluded (in cables released by Wikileaks, no less) that the Internet was "no threat."

I'm not trying to be a downer here, or knock the possibilities for networking. I just want to smash the fiction that the Internet is some sort of uncontrollable, decentralized free-for-all, so that we can get on with the business of creating something else that is.

That's right. I propose we abandon the Internet, or at least accept the fact that it has been surrendered to corporate control like pretty much everything else in Western society. It was bound to happen, and its flawed, centralized architecture made it ripe for conquest.

Just as the fledgling peer-to-peer economy of the Late Middle Ages was quashed by a repressive monarchy that still had the power to print money and write laws, the fledgling Internet of the 21st century is being quashed by a similarly corporatist government that has its hands on the switches through which we mean to transact and communicate. It will never truly level the playing fields of commerce, politics, and culture. And if it looks like that does stand a chance of happening, the Internet will be adjusted to prevent it.

The fiberoptic cables running through the streets of San Francisco and New York are not a commons, they are corporate-owned. The ISPs through which we connect are no longer public universities but private media companies who not only sell us access but sell us content, block the ports through which we share, and limit the applications through which we create. They are not turning the free, public net into a shopping mall. It already *is* a shopping mall. Your revolutionary YouTube video has a Google advertisement running across the bottom. Yes, that's the price of "free" when you're operating on someone else's network.

But unlike our medieval forebears, we don't have to defend our digital commons from corporate encroachment. Fighting and losing that un-winnable battle will only reinforce our sense of helplessness, anyway. Instead of pretending that the Internet was ever destined to be our social and intellectual commons, we can much more easily conspire together to build a real networked commons, intentionally. And with this priority embedded into its very architecture and functioning.

It is not rocket science. And I know there's more than a few dozen people reading this right now who could make it happen.

Back in 1984, long before the Internet even existed, many of us who wanted to network with our computers used something called FidoNet. It was a super simple way of having a network - albeit an asynchronous one.

One kid (I assume they were all kids like me, but I'm sure there were real adults doing this, too) would let his computer be used as a "server." This just meant his parents let him have his own phone line for the modem. The rest of us would call in from our computers (one at a time, of course) upload the stuff we wanted to share and download any email that had arrived for us. Once or twice a night, the server would call some other servers in the network and see if any email had arrived for anyone with an account on his machine. Super simple.

Now FidoNet employed a genuinely distributed architecture. (And if you smart hackers can say why that's wrong, and how FidoNet could have been more distributed, please continue that line of thought! You are already on your way to developing the next network.) 25 years of networking later, lessons learned, and battles fought; can you imagine how much better we could do?

So let's get on it. Shall we use telephony, ham radio, or some other part of the spectrum? Do we organize overlapping meshes of WiMax? Do we ask George Soros for some money? MacArthur Foundation? Do we even need or want them or money at all? How might the funding of our network by a central bank issued currency, or a private foundation, or a public university, bias the very architecture we are trying to build? Who gets the ability to govern or limit what may spread over our network, if anyone? Should there be ways for us to transact?

To make the sorts of choices that might actually yield our next and truly decentralized network, we must take a good look at the highly centralized real world in which we live - as well as how it got that way. Only by understanding its principles, reckoning with the forces at play, and accepting the battles we have already lost, might we begin to forge ahead to create new forms that exist beyond any authority's ability to grant them protection.

Teaser image by Glenn Zucman.
##
UPDATE: response to this article has been so great that Douglas Rushkoff is convening Contact, an open space event to catalyze projects that support decentralized peer-based communication, commerce, and culture. Read more about Contact in his follow up post, "The Evolution Will Be Socialized" and follow related Twitter conversation with the #nextnet hashtag.
Related Posts:

• ...And Satellite Internet for All, which is about a nonprofit's plan to buy satellite TerreStar-1 to provide net access to developing countries

• Shareable Futures, our Sci-Fi series featuring original short stories by Bruce Sterling, Cory Doctorow, Benjamin Rosenbaum, and more

• Notes from the International Commons Conference, report from a historic first meeting of physical (land, water, etc.) and digital commoners

• No Public Domain Day for the United States, tightening copyright laws means nothing entered the public domain in the US on public domain day

Motherboard TV: Free the Network

Posted by Brian_Anderson on Wednesday, Mar 28, 2012

Click here to watch the trailer for ‘Free the Network’.

You’re on the Internet. What does that mean?

Most likely, it means one of a handful of telecommunications providers is middle manning your information from Point A to Point B. Fire off an email or a tweet, broadcast a live stream or upload video to YouTube, and you’re relying on vast networks of fiber optic cables deep underground and undersea, working with satellites high above, to move your data around the world, and to bring the world to your fingertips.

It’s an infrastructure largely out of sight and mind. AT&T, Level 3, Hurricane Electric, Tata Indicom – to most these are simply invisible magicians performing the act of getting one online and kicking. To many open-source advocates, however, these are a few of the big, dirty names responsible for what they see as the Web’s rapid consolidation. The prospect of an irreparably centralized Internet, a physical Internet in the hands of a shrinking core of so-called Tier 1 transit networks, keeps Isaac Wilder up at night.

Wilder is the 21-year-old co-founder of the Free Network Foundation. Motherboard first caught up with Wilder at Zuccotti Park during the fledgling days of Occupy Wall Street. The Kansas City native seemed to be running on little sleep. He’d gone hoarse from chanting relentlessly over the first three days of a populist movement that would soon sweep the country and the world. But there was an undeniable urgency and excitement when Wilder told us about the efforts of the FNF, a non-profit, peer-to-peer communications initiative striving to liberate the global Internet from corporate and governmental interference.

It all sounded lofty and arcane and way, way over our heads. But Wilder seemed committed enough to his drop in the bucket of global revolution, which comes in the form of nine-foot-tall Freedom Towers that beam out free, secure Wi-Fi to occupied sites and underserviced communities, that we wanted to hear more.

If the argument for mesh networking, a sort of pirate radio Internet scheme that allows people to talk to one another online through no middle man, is that a centralized ‘Net lends itself to the sort of surveillance and censorship that, however futile, strokes the Internet kill switch of science fiction, is there a way to circumvent that system altogether? Is there a way to build a new network from the bottom up? To occupy a fresh Internet outside the existing confines of the Web? Or is that all just the stuff of ideological fantasy?

To check the pulse of the Internet – and to get a feel for what life’s like in the digital nerve center of what’s arguably the first fully Web-fueled social movement in America – Motherboard has been following Wilder and Tyrone Greenfield, communications director for the Free Network Foundation, for the past half year. Through the thick of Occupy marches, in squats and test-lab offices, on rooftops and all places in between, we saw Wilder, Greenfield and the FNF building and perfecting their Towers and their humble, cooperatively owned, physical Internet.

We even broke a story that popped off on the Internet in the immediate wake of the New York Police Department’s Nov. 17 raid on Zuccotti Park. We traveled with Wilder to a Department of Sanitation garage shortly after he was released from a 36-hour stint in jail. He was looking for things lost in the early morning sweep of Occupy’s epicenter: cash, his backpack and laptop, Zuccotti’s Freedom Tower.

What he found next to a wet heap of clothing and tents were a number of laptops splayed in rows. They appeared mangled and snarled. One was even stripped of its back casing. Whether Occupy’s laptops were purposefully destroyed, or merely crunched under the hydraulic mash of a Sanitation garbage truck, remains unclear.

To be sure, after the incident we contacted the NYPD, who forwarded us to Sanitation. Sanitation was tasked with hauling away all the abandoned property from Zuccotti to an off-site garage, where demonstrators were later allowed to rummage for their belongings. A Sanitation representative told Motherboard there had been no directive to destroy property, but that he wasn’t surprised to hear that some items, including laptops, had maybe been mishandled or misplaced.

In the end, what we came up with is a short documentary called Free the Network. It’s a story about big dreams and cloudy missions, about complex affiliations and what happens when aDIY hack-tech movement confronts the force of the state.

But beyond that, it’s a story about the incredibly high stakes of living networked in today’s world. We all have skin in this game. Remember: You’re on the Internet.

CONNECTIONS:

Going the Other Way: Vlad Teichberg Talks SOPA
Dear Congress: Techno-Ignorace Isn’t ‘Cute’ Anymore
When Occupy Wall Street Got Real
The Kill Occupy Wall Street Memo
The Beginning is Here: a Report from Rushkoff’s Contact Summit

Erin Lee Carr contributed reporting. Contact Brian at brian@motherboard.tv, and Erin aterin@vice.com. @TheBanderson @ERINLEECARR

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