by DAVID BROMWICH
The anti-government insurgency in Syria was given an intoxicating vision of triumph by the words President Obama spoke in August 2011 that were translated, correctly, into the headline ‘Assad must go.’ He had earlier conveyed similar messages: ‘Mubarak must go’ and ‘Gaddafi must go.’ Obama may have entertained the idea that he was playing a benign role in the Arab Spring – showing himself ‘on the right side of history’, as he likes to say. ‘Assad must go’ also sounded as if he was channelling the spirit of George W. Bush; but that impression may have been misleading. Obama has a fondness for debonair or solemnly spoken asides that come back to worry him. In February 2010, at the height of the pressure for government action against the ‘banksters’ who drove the financial collapse of 2008, he answered a question about the CEOs Lloyd Blankfein (of Goldman Sachs) and Jamie Dimon (of J.P. Morgan Chase): ‘I know both those guys: they are very savvy businessmen.’ Obama was trying to prove himself a comfortable insider, close enough to Wall Street to impress the big movers but sufficiently detached to deserve the public trust. It did not work. The comment lost him a degree of public confidence and relieved the culprits of a salutary fear. This summer, after an unsatisfactory encounter with Vladimir Putin, Obama said: ‘I know the press likes to focus on body language, and he’s got that kind of slouch, looking like the bored kid in the back of the classroom.’ That was a remark to file away for your memoirs – if you think it truly witty and worth saving – but improper coming from a statesman in a description of another world leader.
London Review of Books for more