Obama's Exceptionalism

By Roger Cohen
This commentary was published in The New York Times on 31/03/2011

LONDON — Near Carthage, in Tunisia, there’s an American cemetery where 2,841 military dead rest, victims of the North African campaign in World War II. Among them is a young man from Stillwater, Minnesota, named Robert Lund. He was 25 when he was killed on March 29, 1943. A long time ago, I would sit on a porch in the pretty town of Stillwater and wonder at the gale that could lift a young man from the middle of a placid continent to death on a faraway shore.

America is a restless nation. It was built by taking in the people of the world and so it cannot turn its back on the world. Decades after he was killed, Lund’s death still haunted the family of my first wife. With the return of the resonant datelines of the “Desert War” against Hitler — Tobruk, Benghazi, Tripoli — and the return of U.S. forces to Libya, I’ve been thinking about Lund and American power.

The limits of that power confronted President Barack Obama. He was always a realist onto whom idealism was thrust. He adheres, by instinct and experience, to the middle ground. Taking office in a nation drained by war, he found arguments aplenty to bolster his inclination for ending conflicts.

American exceptionalism — the notion of the United States as a transformative moral beacon to the world — made him uneasy. Atlanticism, the fruit of the war that took Lund’s life, had little emotional hold on a man not yet 30 when the Cold War ended. The disappearing jobs of the home front were his domain.

And yet, and yet, this cautious president, who has been subtly talking down American power — with reason — has involved the nation in a new conflict in Libya, one in which his own defense secretary holds that the United States has no “vital interest.” He has joined a long line of U.S. leaders in discovering the moral imperative indivisible from the American idea.

There were many good reasons for staying out of Libya. A chief strength of the Arab Spring is that it was homegrown. The Levant’s suspicion of the West is bottomless. Obama needs no tutoring in colonialism. Its lessons were bred into him. But could he, the nation’s first African-American president, have sat passive as the forces of Muammar el-Qaddafi delivered a massacre in Benghazi on the North African shore?

Maybe there wouldn’t have been a massacre, just another modest Qaddafi bloodbath. Qaddafi is not Hitler, not even Saddam. But his nature is murderous. And so I say Obama was right to draw a line in the Libyan sand.

I was against a Libyan no-fly zone, having seen its uselessness in Bosnia. My condition for going in was ruthlessness. The one unforgivable thing would have been to involve America in looking virtuous from the sky. I think Obama has met, with bombs, that initial standard; and done so with a strong United Nations mandate reflecting his diplomacy of repair these past years. (The U.N., as its former Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld noted, “Was not created to take mankind to heaven, but to save humanity from hell.”)

But now what? There was an Allied offensive during the North African campaign called “Operation Brevity.” It had mixed results, but I’d borrow the name. Speed in ousting Qaddafi, the objective from which Western leaders cannot retreat, is essential. We all know what happens if this Mad Max war festers: The coalition fractures, jihadists seep into a failed state of porous borders, mission creep begins.

Qaddafi can go three ways: through military defeat, the least likely given the chaotic rebel traffic-jam on the coastal highway; through a negotiated departure, a long shot despite Turkey’s efforts; or though his inner circle deserting him, the most promising avenue.

Moussa Koussa, the foreign minister, has just fled to London. He’s the biggest prize yet from an intense U.S. and British effort to turn top aides. “We’re doing a ton in that regard, golden parachutes etc.,” one person involved told me.

The tone of the Qaddafi entourage keeps changing: first panicked, then ebullient tirades, now plaintiff. That’s encouraging. Do whatever it takes. This regime reeks of ricketiness. Talks with Libya in recent years mean top Western officials have relations with the core people who must, like Koussa, be turned. Abdullah Al-Sanousi is one prime target.

Obama, having embraced in extremis the radical idea that “the United States of America is different,” having taken a shot at nations that “may be able to turn a blind eye to atrocities in other countries” (the rising powers — Brazil, Russia, India, China — all abstained on the Libya vote) must now deliver on his honed interpretation of American exceptionalism.

As it happens, his deputy national security adviser, Denis McDonough, is also from Stillwater. That’s a coincidence, but a link exists: The United States is strongest when it aligns its values and interests and is not itself when it turns its back on the meaning of Lund’s sacrifice. Americans understand that. Which is why the moral imperative is not only indivisible from the American idea, it’s indivisible from re-election.