It Doesn't All Change in a Day Posted by Ilan Goldenberg

Jackson Diehl has a silly column pointing out that Barack Obama's policies haven't miraculously repaired all that is wrong with the world in just three months.  He then points to a number of incredibly difficult problems to essentially make the point that Obama's policies aren't working.  Here is the thing.  Obama and most of his more sober supporters never claimed that his policies would somehow solve all of our problems in 100 days.  He never claimed that diplomatic negotiations would be some kind of panacea - just that there is little harm in engagement and that it's stupid to cut off potential opportunities for negotiation.  Moreover, it's also worth noting that in many cases Diehl is using highly selective data.  Let's break down the argument.

Diehl starts with a highly simplistic and disingenuous description of the criticism that Democrats leveled against George Bush in regards to North Korea:

The first wake-up call has come from North Korea -- a state that, according to established Democratic wisdom, would have given up its nuclear weapons years ago if it had not been labeled "evil" by Bush, denied bilateral talks with Washington and punished with sanctions.

That actually wasn't the argument.  The argument was that there was an agreement in place that had generally kept the North Koreans from continuing to move forward on their nuclear program.  But that in 2001 the Bush administration turned it's back on that agreement.  North Korea went on and built a few nuclear weapon.  After the North Koreans set off a test , the Bush administration came back to the negotiating table.  So, if you were going to go back to that policy option anyway and all other options had failed why spend six years refusing to talk while they built up a greater weapons capability? 

I also haven't seen anyone in the Obama administration somehow claiming that engagement with North Korea will make a dramatic impact.  Diehl would have us believe that Obama's team is obsessed with engagement and that they are naive enough to think that it could work in all cases.  But there may be a reason they haven't really touted it with North Korea and that while there has been a big outreach effort to Iran the same cannot be said of North Korea.  Perhaps it's because Obama and his team recognize that there are limits to diplomatic engagement.  And that this supposed "wake-up call" wasn't much of a wake up call at all.

Diehl then argues:

A second cold shower rained down last week on George Mitchell, Obama's special envoy to the Middle East... during last week's tour of the region he encountered a divided Palestinian movement seemingly incapable of agreeing on a stance toward Israel and a new Israeli government that doesn't accept the goal of Palestinian statehood

And how exactly did that situation come to be?  To be fair to Bush when he came into office the second intifada was well underway.  But there is little question that Bush's misguided policies made the situation worse.  Bush ignored the problem and refused to engage, pushed for democratic elections in the West Bank and Gaza and then refused to recognize the results, did nothing to encourage a swift resolution to either the Gaza War or the war with Hezbollah in 2006.   And again, Obama hasn't said that this would be easy or could be done instantaneously.  He and his team have been cautious and realistic about how quickly things can be achieved.  So again, I don't see the "cold shower" that is supposedly "raining down."

Diehl then argues that despite a "reset" in the relationship with Russia tensions with Georgia seem to be going up and it has deployed additional forces to South Ossetia and Abkhazia.  But he ignores the fact that Medvedev and Obama have also agreed to negotiate a new treaty that would dramatically reduce nuclear stockpiles - an issue that in my mind ranks much higher than the two breakaway Georgian republics and has much more important direct implications for national security.

Diehl also uses Obama's Iraq policy to argue that his new diplomacy isn't working, writing

Obama told Iraqis that he would, as long promised, use troop withdrawals to pressure the government to take over responsibility for the country. Since he made that announcement, violence in Iraq has steadily increased.

As far as I'm concerned the argument for leaving Iraq was never about the fact that they would like us more and would do our bidding if we left.  Obama always argued that we needed to be "as careful getting out as we were careless getting in."  Getting out is about U.S. national interests and the fact that we couldn't continue to sacrifice all our interests all over the world to continue fighting a war that wasn't really making us safer.

So in the end what we have here is a situation where Diehl attributes to Obama a naive and simplistic foreign policy outlook, which the President never expressed.  Diehl then cherry-pricks the most intractable problems we face - problems that the Obama administration never claimed could be easily or magically solved through quick negotiations.  And finally he ignores any positive developments that have come out in the last 100 days such as the agreement to negotiate a new nuclear deal with Russia and some positive signals from Iran.  Based on all that he concludes that less than 100 days into the Obama presidency, we can already see that the policy isn't working. 

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Was the use of "cherry-pricks" intentional? I think it deserves to be the next internet meme... ;-)

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