Why, yes. Yes, I did:
Last Saturday afternoon, President Obama got a jarring update from his national security team: With restive crowds of young Egyptians demanding President Hosni Mubarak’s immediate resignation, Frank G. Wisner, Mr. Obama’s envoy to Cairo, had just told a Munich conference that Mr. Mubarak was indispensable to Egypt’s democratic transition.
Mr. Obama was furious, and it did not help that his secretary of state, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Mr. Wisner’s key backer, was publicly warning that any credible transition would take time — even as Mr. Obama was demanding that change in Egypt begin right away.
Seething about coverage that made it look as if the administration were protecting a dictator and ignoring the pleas of the youths of Cairo, the president “made it clear that this was not the message we should be delivering,” said one official who was present. He told Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. to take a hard line with his Egyptian counterpart, and he pushed Senator John Kerry to counter the message from Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Wisner when he appeared on a Sunday talk show the next day.
Hillary Clinton was Frank Wisner Jr.’s main backer? I knew something stunk about sending Wisner because it didn’t seem like something Obama would do based on Wisner Sr.’s record. I thought it was unlikely, but possible, that Wisner Sr.’s role in installing the Shah in Iran had escaped Obama’s memory banks and I was quite shocked to see such a horrible message sent to Cairo and the Islamic world. It turns out that Clinton suggested him and that he didn’t go there to send the president’s message but a message of support from those who made a buck or two off our relationship with Mubarak. “Hang in there, buddy, you’re indispensable.”
So, the president flipped his lid and called up his buddy John Kerry to tell him to contradict that bullshit when he went on Meet the Press.
Meanwhile, he told Mubarak to get the fuck out, even as Clinton, Biden, and Gates tried to get him to side with the PermaGov.
The trouble in sending a clear message was another example of how divided Mr. Obama’s foreign policy team remains. A president who himself is often torn between idealism and pragmatism was navigating the counsel of a traditional foreign policy establishment led by Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Biden and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, against that of a next-generation White House staff who worried that the American preoccupation with stability could put a historic president on the wrong side of history.
In interviews, participants described those tensions, as well as offering the first descriptions of Mr. Obama’s two difficult phone calls imploring Mr. Mubarak to take the protesters’ demands seriously. In those conversations, as Mr. Obama pressed Mr. Mubarak without demanding that he resign, the embattled Egyptian leader pushed back hard, arguing that the protests were the work of the Muslim Brotherhood and agents of Iran, a contention the Americans dismissed.
The officials said the hardest of those conversations came on Tuesday, Feb. 1, barely an hour after Mr. Mubarak announced he would not run for president again. In Mr. Obama’s view, Mr. Mubarak still had not gone far enough. Describing the conversation, one senior official quoted Mr. Obama as telling the Egyptian president, “It is time to present to the people of Egypt its next government.” He added, “The future of your country is at stake.”
Mr. Mubarak replied, “Let’s talk in the next three or four days.” He added, “And when we talk, you will find that I was right.” The two men never talked again.
Biden occasionally breaks the mold, as he did in his opposition to the escalation in Afghanistan, but the president still stands largely alone in his foreign policy team in siding against our sixty-five year history of screwing the underdog in favor of “stability” and “access to markets.” The man has guts, but it’s really nothing but a progressive view of U.S. foreign policy in the post-war era. We all espouse that view, but we never see it carried out in Washington DC. When I see things that never happen, happen, then I have to make a note of it.
Even Jimmy Carter shrugged while the Shah butchered the protesters in 1978 and 1979.
You want to know why I was so passionate that Obama, and not Clinton, be the Democratic nominee? It wasn’t for health care reform. It was for decisions like this.
