The Obama 'Doctrine,' as clear as the Bible

Having scanned the Internet for a consensus of the befuddled, I'd say the Post's Eugene Robinson bundled and bowed it nicely:

The Obama Doctrine calls for humanitarian military intervention when it is both necessary and feasible. This does not include every situation in which civilians are in great peril.

"It is true that America cannot use our military wherever oppression occurs," he said. "But that cannot be an argument for never acting on behalf of what’s right."

What he didn’t do, though, was explain exactly how "what’s right" differs from what isn’t. He didn’t explain how factors such as politics or oil should figure in decisions on whether to intervene. He didn’t explain which conflicts are worthy of ground troops and which are not. The Obama Doctrine’s outlines are clear, but the details are hard to make out.

In short, presidential moralists remain in a tizzy, having not yet determined how many diplomats can dance on the head of a pin. Like humanity's children down through the ages, they look to the heavens and importune, Tell us, please tell us "what's right" -- now and for all times.

The honest splendor of Obama's UnDoctrine is precisely that it does not pretend to know today what might be right tomorrow. Such conjuring is better left to Puritans and Ideologues. Robinson & Co. is looking for some fashion of a Three or Four Commandments, or maybe a mathematical formula for interventionism in which the variables aren't really variables. We should know, for instance, that politics accounts for, say, 40 percent and oil accounts for 60. Or perhaps oil accounts for 55 percent and politics for 45. Fifty-four percent and 46 would undo the math and properly bring the whole thing crashing down.

I suppose at the root of such resistance is an aversion to human ambiguity. We don't want answers so much as we demand predeterminations; we'd like to think that global politics and its occasional corollary of regional conflict resemble a kind of preestablished moral physics. Event A occurs, which sparks B, which then results in C -- each and every time.

This we demand -- or I should say, some demand it -- of commanders in chief. Unfortunately they sometimes deliver it, even though each Event A is distinguishable from other Events A, which either should or should not spark B.

Not to go all Rumsfeldian on you, but how is one to know, until A happens and all its knowable elements are known?

Yet what strikes me as most incongruent is that so many of our yearning, anguished absolutists of doctrinaire diplomacy are undoubtedly also Sunday religionists who somehow find peace and mental comfort in worldly contradictions of literally biblical proportions. Their Judeo-Christian God wasn't -- and still isn't, I assume, since He has sent unto us no exacting editors -- fussy about consistency; He could say one thing one millennium and the confounding opposite the next, yet somehow it all blends together in acceptable text.

In other words, they cut God some slack, but for this U.S. president, they don't.

Comments

[Dorothy Rissman]

"In short, presidential moralists remain in a tizzy, having not yet determined how many diplomats can dance on the head of a pin."

Perfect comment. Any time people are forced to deal with ambiguity, they struggle to find an easy answer. Our president rarely gives them what they seek. A+B=C.