Obama and my Grandmother Posted by Shadi Hamid

My father called my grandmother in Cairo yesterday. He told me that she was very excited about Obama's victory, and that she said she was "praying for Obama." (In Arabic, it was even more striking. She used the verb da'a, which is translated as "to pray for," but more accurately means "to make a supplication for." Da'a is usually used in the context of praying for those who are most dear to you, sons, mothers, nephews, close friends).

Keep in mind that my grandmother doesn't speak a word of English, and that she almost never talks about politics, except in the context of telling other people not to talk about it. But she's thrilled about Obama. You've all heard these stories before, but there's still something amazing, to me at least, about an Egyptian cheering for an American president (God, who would have thought!). What a reversal. After 8 years of seeing the U.S. as an enemy, after seeing our country as the source of so many of their problems, (some) Arabs and Muslims are willing to believe again. This is not totally surprising. It always seemed to me that their "hate" for America was always a function of the fact that they held us to a higher standard, and that they felt personally betrayed. When a prominent Muslim Brotherhood activist told my colleague Steven Brooke that he had a giant American flag up on his wall when he was a teenager, I wasn't that surprised. I knew why he had it up.

But the fact that people are willing to give us a chance again, means that we will once again be subject to great, and greater expectations. This can be a good thing. But it also can a bad thing, if we fail to meet them, or, worse, if we fail to try.

Changing the Culture of Military Contracting Posted by Michael Cohen

In my day job at the New America Foundation I look at the influence of non-state actors on American foreign policy and today we are unveiling our first research report examining the issue, Changing the Culture of Pentagon Contracting, which examines the relationship between U.S. government agencies and private security, military, and contingency contractors and offers recommendations for managing this relationship in the future. 

You can read the full report here and check out our key conclusions after the jump, which include a call for the U.S. government to begin moving away from the use of security contractors:

Historic Election Posted by David Shorr

There are a few ways in which we are talking about this as a(n) historic election. This being America, the first is really important (he really gives new meaning to the term African-American doesn't he). But this being a forum for those hugely fascinated with foreign policy, the sense of a time of momentous challenges may be more pertinent. Every American who has been paying any attention has been saying to herself holy **** (or some less profame variant). Financial meltdown, global warming meltdown, energy insecurity, IraqAfghanistan, galloping unemployment, stagnating wages, skyrocketing health costs, foreclosures, Iran, North Korea, Israel-Palestine, Pakistan, etc.

So can we finally put to rest the fallacy of the terror threat as the mother of all foreign policy challenges? Wait, I think I hear the echo of a (barely) earlier time. Did he just say that terrorists aren't really a threat? No, I just said that we lost perspective on the terrorist threat -- which at one and the same time is quite serious but has been dominating and distorting our foreign policy agenda.

Now lest that sound like a faintly partisan point, let me share an excelent bipartisan consensus statement saying exactly that we need to put the terrorist into perspective for the sake of more effective counterterrorism and foreign policy overall. For some real fun, scan the signatures and see if you can spot two or three especially interesting names from the recent campaign. Getting down to bipartisan problem solving on the basis of common sense is within easy reach. The real call of the moment is for a more mature political culture.

Department of Things the Bush Administration Wouldn't Do Before the Election Posted by Ilan Goldenberg

Number one on the Bush administration's list?  Opening a U.S. interests section in the Swiss Embassy in Tehran.  Newsweek reports:

An administration plan to open a "U.S.-interests section" in the Swiss Embassy in Tehran has been endorsed by career State Department officials and has won the backing of some senior policymakers inside the White House, according to administration officials who asked not to be identified talking about sensitive matters. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice favors the move but is reviewing details before making a final recommendation to the president.

This was an idea endorsed months ago by most sane foreign policy observers - including many Republicans.  But the administration would have completely undercut McCain if it had moved ahead.  With that fear gone, this probably happens soon or gets picked up by an Obama administration pretty quickly.

Next up?  My money is on the timeline in the Iraq security agreement conveniently going from 2011 to 2010.  The language might also become even more rock solid than it already is (and it's pretty rock solid).  But we shall see.

Medvedev's Speech: A Warning or a Sign of Weakness? Posted by James Lamond

Did Russian President Medvedev throw down a gauntlet to President-elect Obama yesterday, while the rest of the world (including Medvedev’s fellow-citizens) was celebrating in the streets?  Did he really intend to be less gracious than Iranian President Ahmedinejad by neglecting to congratulate Obama?

Medvedev announced that Russia would place new ballistic missiles in Kaliningrad if the US deploys its planned missile defense shield in Poland and the Czech Republic.  Kaliningrad is Russian territory located on the Baltic between Poland and Lithuania, two NATO and European Union member states.  President Medvedev said that the Iskander missile system will be deployed “to neutralize -- if necessary -- the anti-missile system,” that president Bush controversially pushed for, despite the objections of many NATO allies.

Many reports are declaring this a “warning,” a “threat,” or even a “gauntlet being thrown.”  But Rose Gottemoeller, long-time non-proliferation specialist just back from three years running the Carnegie Endowment’s Moscow Center, says hold on: Medvedev's speech may actually be more telling of internal problems within Russia than a power move to test the new American leader.

Gottemoeller offered Democracy Arsenal several deep-breathing perspectives on Medvedev’s speech:

“Medvedev’s failure to congratulate Obama during the speech was a missed opportunity typical of the shambolic decision-making situation in Moscow at the moment.  There is no need to overreact to it.

“The anti-missile defense measures in Europe are a waste of scarce Russian resources (grown even scarcer thanks to the financial crisis and the fall in oil prices) and have the flavor of ‘preemptive concessions’:  They are measures the Russian Federation could bargain away to gain U.S. concessions on the missile defense deployments.

“This is a dangerous game to be playing, when the first order of Russian business should be to gain the goodwill of the incoming Administration.  However, it is symptomatic once again of the situation in Moscow, where the ‘tandem leaders’ Putin and Medvedev are trying to outdo each other on being tough toward the outside world. 

In sum:  there are enough real and potential gauntlets awaiting our new president – including ones emanating from Moscow -- that we don't have to pre-figure them.

Sarah Palin and the Muslim Brotherhood Posted by Shadi Hamid

So I've been reading with great interest the rather amusing stories of Republican post-election infighting. "Factions" strikes me as an appropriate word here. I was watching FNC's Carl Cameron dishing the juicy gossip, and I kept on thinking to myself: where have I heard this before?

It sounds a lot like the the Muslim Brotherhood after it lost big in the 2007 Jordanian elections (mostly due to pretty blatant vote rigging). The MB won only 6 seats out of 110 - it's worst result in history. The movement was in disarray, with the conservative base ("hawks") calling for the heads of the relatively moderate leadership ("doves"). Conservatives accused moderates of not staying true to the movement's principles and capitulating to the ruling elite. You wanna talk about "going rogue"? Palin's got nothing on Zaki Bani Irsheid, the secretary-general of the Islamic Action Front, the MB's political arm. The group had called a press conference to announce their list of candidates for parliament. Irsheid calls up the Brotherhood head, Salem Falahat, and tells him he's not going to show up, even though he's the leader of the party. He was for boycotting the election, but didn't get his way, so he proceeded to sabotage the party's electoral prospects from within. 

After the election, the factions organized against each other. Eventually, the group's highest policymaking body, the Shura Council, dissolved itself and new internal elections were called. The conservatives won 23-22, and were able to elect, for the first time, a leader of Palestinian origin, who also happened to be a fiery hardliner. The story continues. The two factions have reached a temporary rapprochement, but the underlying disagreements have not been resolved. I suspect that, at some point, they will have to be. This does not mean there will be an internal civil war, but it does mean that one side will have to assert dominance over the other. I only bring this up to point out the difficulties that previously ascendant parties find themselves in after a crushing electoral defeat.

Why I've had trouble blogging about this election (and other post-election thoughts) Posted by Shadi Hamid

Over the last 7 months or so, I didn’t blog much as I would have liked. I certainly didn’t blog much at all about the election (and I guess most of what I felt I needed to say was said here). I would sit down and think of something, but it was difficult to translate my thoughts into the appropriate words. I wanted to write about my fears, but I couldn’t, because if Obama failed to win, I felt that it would be devastating for the country, but devastating also in an intensely personal way. I was banking on too much. When I was in Jordan, I was constantly trying to offer a defense of America. "They" seemed to “hate” America, but the America they spoke of wasn’t the one I knew, or the one I wanted to know. I made the argument that a lot of their anger had to do with the last 8 years, and wasn't necessarily a reflection of the idea of America as I understood it. But what is an idea if it bears little resemblance to reality?

America can change, I would say. “Just wait.” "Give us time." My relatives in Egypt were excited about Obama, but they said it was impossible. America will never elect a black man. I found it slightly disorienting that they would claim to know more about race relations in America than I did. But, every now and then, I would wonder. Indeed, when I tried to visualize an Obama victory, it seemed slightly out of reach. I could understand it happening in theory, but, in practice, it was hard to picture it. Keep in mind that nearly all of my formative political experiences have been ones of defeat (our post-9/11 capitulation on civil liberties, the failure to stop the Iraq war, Kerry's loss, the tragedy of the aborted "Arab spring"), ones of expecting one outcome but being handed another. The notion that Democrats never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity was never from my mind. I was proud to be a liberal, but I had lost faith in my party’s ability to reflect that liberalism in a way that was both true and effective.

So, if Obama had lost, it would have been a vindication to all the people over the last 8 years who attacked the very essence of the American idea, of those who said that we were not what we wished to be. That the American “idea,” to the extent that it still is existed, was just that: an idea. How could I defend America to its naysayers – how could I tell them that America would correct its course – if Americans, with all the requisite information, had opted to make the wrong choice not just once, but twice, and not just twice, but three times. 

But there was another matter: I have put, some would say perhaps, an inordinate amount of faith in “democracy,” in both its power and its promise. It is true: I do believe that democracy is the key to addressing so many of the Middle East’s problems, and, in turn, our own. Part of this is founded upon a belief in democracy’s self-correcting mechanisms, that people can make blatantly wrong decisions only so many times before they try a more promising course – that in a free market of ideas, with competing political parties communicating their respective ideas to the electorate, eventually and ultimately, the best ideas would rise to the top, that people could be trusted with their own agency. A McCain victory would have made me question some of these premises. I would have lost some degree of faith – because if we could not win under these circumstances, when could we ever? But democracy, as an idea, and American democracy, as a practical matter, have been vindicated. The best aspects of who we are, and who we still wish to be, have been vindicated. So many of us didn’t know what to say when we were living abroad. Now, we will know what to say. They, however, will be watching what we do. That, in the end, will be the measure that matters. The struggle did not end yesterday. 

Election Day Music Posted by Shadi Hamid

I was just thinking about what song (or songs) captured how I feel today, on this day. Something that captured the sadness of what we have lost, but the (guarded) optimism of what we might still gain. They call it redemption. And that's what the best music is about. For reasons that are not entirely clear, I can't stop listening to this song. It's called "Us Ones in Between," by Sunset Rubdown, a band you've probably never heard of (and neither did I until last week). The lyrics are ambivalent, but somehow, I feel, appropriate.

Everyone Should Feel This Way (a voting-related thought) Posted by Shadi Hamid

Just taking a quick break from phone-banking and wanted to share a quick thought: I was born and raised here, and have lived here for most of my life, but every time I participate in the political process, I find myself feeling both exhilarated and, well, surprised. Something about democracy and practicing it strikes me as improbable. I have to be careful not to fall into cliche, but this is a beautiful thing. It's beautiful to have seen my parents donate to a a political campaign for the first time in their lives. Seeing my dad excited about Obama, and believing that this country's best days are still ahead of it, fills me with joy.

I doubt my dad ever believed, when he was a young boy in Egypt, living under one of the Middle East's most brutal dictatorships, that he would one day be able to vote for the president of a land he hadn't yet been to, and hadn't yet believed in. But I know that this year, like all other years, his brothers, his sister, and his mother, will not know what it's like. They will long for something, and they probably will not get it, not this year, not the next, perhaps not in their lifetimes. They won't be able to feel what my father has felt. This, to me, is unacceptable. And while we fight for democracy here in the U.S. today, let us remember that it must be fought for elsewhere. In this, we have a role too.

Democracy In Action Posted by Michael Cohen

On this most historic of election days, a few thoughts from my piece on the New York Times.com on what it all means:

After nearly two years of speeches, punditry, polls, robo-calls, debates, attack ads, position papers, bumper stickers and campaign rallies the decision about the race for the White House in 2008 is finally where it should be: in the hands of the voters. Today, millions upon millions of Americans will choose their 44th president.

Of course, some voters will be filled with joy after tonight and others won’t. But whatever the outcome, it’s worth standing back for a second and reminding ourselves of the wonder of American democracy. The emotions that many of us feel today in casting a ballot for our favored candidate are not artificial; they are emblematic of the patriotic fervor and love for this land that defines us as Americans.

In moments like these, as we all wait for the polls to come in and the winner to be declared, it’s worth harking back to the words of Alexis de Tocqueville and his most perceptive account of American democracy. Writing in 1832, de Tocqueville had this to say about the presidential election that year, which saw President Andrew Jackson face off against Henry Clay:

For a long while before the appointed time has come, the election becomes the important and, so to speak, the all-engrossing topic of discussion. Factional ardor is redoubled, and all the artificial passions which the imagination can create in a happy and peaceful land are agitated and brought to light…. As the election draws near, the activity of intrigue and the agitation of the populace increase; the citizens are divided into hostile camps, each of which assumes the names of its favorite candidate; the whole nation glows with feverish excitement; the election is the daily theme of the press, the subject of every private conversation, the end of every thought and every action, the sole interest of the present. It is true that as soon as the choice is determined, this ardor is dispelled, calm returns, and the river, which had nearly broken its banks, sinks to its usual level; but who can refrain from astonishment that such a storm should have arisen.

Keep in mind, the 1832 campaign wasn’t exactly a barn-burner of a race as Jackson won re-election handily (and of course millions of Americans were prevented by law from voting). But the emotions of any national election are genuine, and they reflect a level of passion and intensity unique to democracy. As de Tocqueville reminds us, John McCain and Barack Obama are more than mere candidates for higher office, they are vessels for the hopes, dreams and fears of their supporters. As Americans wait in those long lines today — sometimes for hours at a time — they are doing far more than simply picking an individual to run the government, they are voting for an idea and a vision of what they believe America is, and above all, what it can be.

Whichever candidate wins; simply the opportunity to ensure that our voice is heard and that our vote is counted is today’s greatest and most lasting gift.