Obama vs Gelb=democracy vs covert war

In a piece in the forthcoming New York Review of Books, David Bromwich creatively opposes the post-colonial credo of Obama in his Cairo speech to a book by Leslie Gelb of the Council of Foreign Relations, which mingles the best-and-the-brightest and Machiavelli. Excerpts:

Obama spoke at the end about the general good of democracy: his predecessor's favorite and almost his only theme. Advocates of democracy ought to maintain their support for freedom even when they gain power. As for religious freedom, its sincerity is not measured by a rejection of other people's faith. And women's rights are not to be confused with the approval or discountenancing of an orthodox custom...

It was a long speech, fifty-five minutes, none of it easy to take in at a glance; but there were two decisive moments in Obama's peroration: "It's easier to start wars than to end them." The suggestion seemed to be that even in Afghanistan, he has his eye on the difficult work of ending a war. And the last of his three quotations from the Hebrew Bible, the Koran, and the New Testament was drawn from the Sermon on the Mount: "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God."

In a discussion moderated by Senator Daniel P. Moynihan some twenty-five years ago, Leslie Gelb said with a genial irony that covert wars brought no real impairment of democracy...

Obama in Cairo spoke as the leader of a constitutional democracy. By contrast, Gelb, and many others of the policy establishment, think a president should take Congress into his confidence only for the reason that Machiavelli advised the prince to hold the powerful close by. You keep a sharper eye on them that way; it is better to have them as visible allies than as secret enemies. But the involvement of Congress in policy is presented, in this book of advice to a democratic prince, as a strictly instrumental good. Policy is the property of the strategists. You work out a policy, and you implement it.

Among the tacit assumptions of Gelb's argument is the good that should have come, and that may yet come, from America's bombing, invasion, and occupation of Iraq. He offered the assistance of the Council on Foreign Relations to Condoleezza Rice and Stephen Hadley in the aftermath of the war, and he wishes that they had not declined the help of so many qualified talents.