JAMES TARANTO: PRESIDENTIAL STORIES
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303701304579551923680521650?mg=reno64-wsj
More than 20 years after its release, the critics are still raving for “Schindler’s List.” President Obama gave Steven Spielberg’s Holocaust film a thumbs-up Wednesday at a dinner for the Spielberg-founded USC Shoah Foundation, on whose behalf Spielberg presented Obama with the Ambassadors for Humanity Award.
Thanks to “Steven’s remarkable film,” the president observed, “the world eventually came to see and understand the Holocaust like never before. . . . That’s what stories do. We’re story-telling animals. That’s what Steven does.”
It’s what Barack does too:
I have this remarkable title right now–President of the United States–and yet every day when I wake up, and I think about young girls in Nigeria or children caught up in the conflict in Syria–when there are times in which I want to reach out and save those kids–and having to think through what levers, what power do we have at any given moment, I think, “drop by drop by drop,” that we can erode and wear down these forces that are so destructive; that we can tell a different story.
Obama’s “remarkable title” is itself an example of the power of story telling. It is a commonplace that he rose to prominence almost entirely on the strength of his biography (which Bill Clinton once disparaged as a “fairy tale”). In 2011, when he was at one of his political low points, critics on the left insisted his failure was one not of leadership or of policy but of story telling.
Now here he is telling a story–a story about telling stories. The moral of this story is that leadership is a matter of telling stories. That is partly true–we do not mean to gainsay the hortatory and informative elements of political leadership–but Obama seems to be citing the power of stories as an excuse for inaction.
Consider the story of Syria. “We have been very clear . . . that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized,” the story teller in chief said in August 2012. “That would change my calculus. That would change my equation.” It did. A year later, when a whole bunch of chemical weapons were indeed utilized, he said he was prepared to order a military strike. But when he encountered political resistance at home, he changed his story: “I didn’t set a red line,” he said. “The world set a red line.”
What would Aesop make of that?
In the case of Nigeria, Obama was referring to the kidnapping of hundreds of schoolgirls by a terrorist group calling itself Boko Haram. As Ayaan Hirsi Ali notes in today’s Wall Street Journal, that name is usually translated “as ‘Western Education Is Forbidden,’ though ‘Non-Muslim Teaching Is Forbidden’ might be more accurate.” Ali continues:
Little attention has been paid to the group’s formal Arabic name: Jam’at Ahl as-Sunnah lid-da’wa wal-Jihad. That roughly translates as “The Fellowship of the People of the Tradition for Preaching and Holy War.” That’s a lot less catchy than Boko Haram but significantly more revealing about the group and its mission. Far from being an aberration among Islamist terror groups, as some observers suggest, Boko Haram in its goals and methods is in fact all too representative.
The kidnapping of the schoolgirls throws into bold relief a central part of what the jihadists are about: the oppression of women. Boko Haram sincerely believes that girls are better off enslaved than educated. The terrorists’ mission is no different from that of the Taliban assassin who shot and nearly killed 15-year-old Pakistani Malala Yousafzai–as she rode a school bus home in 2012–because she advocated girls’ education. As I know from experience, nothing is more anathema to the jihadists than equal and educated women.
How to explain this phenomenon to baffled Westerners, who these days seem more eager to smear the critics of jihadism as “Islamophobes” than to stand up for women’s most basic rights?
Now let’s consider the Obama administration’s story. Here’s Secretary of State John Kerry, speaking Wednesday in Washington:
We see, with what is happening in Nigeria with Boko Haram, the extents to which this can disrupt the world. It’s a challenge to all of us. And what I saw in Africa convinced me, as I talked to leader after leader and asked them how they balance this tension of these challenges that they face–they all talked about poverty and the need to alleviate poverty, and that much of this challenge comes out of this poverty where young people are grabbed at an early stage, proffered a little bit of money. Their minds are bended [sic], and then the money doesn’t matter anymore; they’ve got the minds, and they begin to direct them into these very extreme endeavors.
And here’s Kerry during that Africa trip–in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Saturday:
Let me be clear. The kidnapping of hundreds of children by Boko Haram is an unconscionable crime, and we will do everything possible to support the Nigerian government to return these young women to their homes and to hold the perpetrators to justice. I will tell you, my friends, I have seen this scourge of terror across the planet, and so have you. They don’t offer anything except violence. They don’t offer a health care plan, they don’t offer schools. They don’t tell you how to build a nation, they don’t talk about how they will provide jobs. They just tell people, “You have to behave the way we tell you to,” and they will punish you if you don’t.
(Credit to CNSNews.com for reporting both the Saturday and the Wednesday comments.)
In Kerry’s tale, then, Boko Haram is a group of generic bullies whose motive is simply a desire to boss people around, and whose villainy consists in substantial part of a failure to support social programs (BokoCare?).
Yet in at least one respect Kerry compares favorably with his predecessor, Hillary Clinton. The Daily Beast’s Josh Rogin reports that last November Kerry added Boko Haram to the State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations–a decision that was long overdue.
On Wednesday, Rogin notes, Mrs. Clinton “said that as Secretary of State she had numerous meetings with Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan and had urged the Nigerian government to do more on counterterrorism”:
What Clinton didn’t mention was that her own State Department refused to place Boko Haram on the list of foreign terrorist organizations in 2011, after the group bombed the U.N. headquarters in Abuja. The refusal came despite the urging of the Justice Department, the FBI, the CIA, and over a dozen senators and congressmen. . . .
In May 2012, then-Justice Department official Lisa Monaco (now at the White House) wrote to the State Department to urge Clinton to designate Boko Haram as a terrorist organization. The following month, Gen. Carter Ham, the chief of U.S. Africa Command, said that Boko Haram “are likely sharing funds, training, and explosive materials” with al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. And yet, Hillary Clinton’s State Department still declined to place Boko Haram on its official terrorist roster.
Rep. Patrick Meehan of Pennsylvania, chairman of the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Counterterrorism and Intelligence, tells Rogin: “At the time, the sentiment that was expressed by the administration was this was a local grievance and therefore not a threat to the United States or its interests. . . . They were saying al Qaeda was on the run and our argument was contrary to that.”
The claim that “al Qeada was on the run” was part of the story Obama and his supporters were telling to justify re-election. As Vice President Biden put it on Sept. 6, 2012, at the Democratic National Convention:
Bravery resides in the heart of Barack Obama, and time and time again I witnessed him summon it. This man has courage in his soul, compassion in his heart and a spine of steel. . . . Because of all the actions he took, because of the calls he made, because of the determination of American workers and the unparalleled bravery of our special forces, we can now proudly say what you’ve heard me say the last six months: Osama bin Laden is dead, and General Motors is alive. That’s right. One man.
Folks, . . . we know we have more work to do. We know we’re not there yet. But not a day has gone by in the last four years when I haven’t been grateful as an American that Barack Obama is our president because he always has the courage to make the tough decisions.
Less than a week later, terrorists attacked Americans in Benghazi, Libya, and the administration struck back with a story about an offensive video. “We can tell a different story,” the president said this week. Yes, they can.
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