Part 2 Of: "Several Reasons Why President Obama's Early Decisions In Office Have Been Generally Good Ones"

NOTE: WITH THIS POSTING, I CONTINUE TO HIGHLIGHT DECISIONS THAT PRESIDENT OBAMA HAS MADE IN WHAT MIGHT BE CALLED HIS "FIRST SEVERAL DAYS IN OFFICE" THAT MIGHT BODE WELL FOR HIS PRESIDENCY OVER THE LONG-TERM. THESE DECISIONS WILL BE NUMBERED, BUT ONLY TO HELP READERS DIFFERENTIATE THEM FROM ONE ANOTHER. THEY WILL NOT NECESSARILY APPEAR IN ORDER OF "IMPORTANCE" (WHICH IS SOMETHING ONLY TIME CAN SORT OUT, ANYWAY).

DECISION #2

Policy Area: Foreign Policy/Middle East Policy

Decision/Announcement: Vice President Biden engages early and often with a number of Middle East scenarios. Also, President Obama gives an exclusive interview to al-Arabiya television.

In his previous capacity as a sitting U.S. senator and the vice president-elect, Joe Biden traveled to Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Kuwait in order to sit down with various political leaders of those countries and other influential people in the region (Americans and non-Americans) with the intent to set a transitional tone and begin to create an accompanying template from which the Obama Administration would operate in and around the region. (It astounds me that his trip was somewhat ignored by the major U.S. media outlets, at least in comparison to the levels of attention it should have received.)

According to the few media reports that saw the public light of day, many of the political leaders he met were left with a dual sense of continued U.S. resolve to root out radical Islamic terrorist cells and a renewed spirit of cooperation (to a far greater extent than present in the Bush Administration's policies) with the principle regional players.

This was an important step toward sending the following messages: 1.) the U.S. will not back down from necessary fights; 2.) the U.S. is not looking for any more unnecessary fights that would serve to distract from the necessary ones; 3.) the U.S. will stay very actively involved in the region; 4.) that involvement will be both military and non-military in nature, and the nature of both types of involvement will likely shift over the next several months, in some cases in minor manners only, and in other cases in major manners; 5.) the U.S. will continue to push its agenda aggressively, but it is increasingly part of the U.S. agenda to listen to the concerns of its partners and integrate some of them into many of its strategies; 6.) the Obama Administration will be savvier regarding the Middle East and the Indian Subcontinent than the previous administration, and it is willing to consider more options as being potentially "viable" ones; 7.) hence, the Obama Administration will have done its collective homework and will not likely be hoodwinked by pie-in-the-sky thinking, but rather it will be ready to engage in complex thinking in order to calibrate better how American might (cultural, military, economic, etc.) is brought to bear in the region.

Following this trip and after the inauguration, Vice President Biden told the major U.S. media outlets that American casualties will surely rise in Afghanistan, due to the fact that the U.S. needs to reinforce its personnel there in its (and NATO's) flagging fight against al-Qaeda-inspired Taliban forces and the like.

The above Biden-related decisions represent careful, strategic thinking on the part of the Obama Administration, because they send two accompanying messages to people in the U.S. and throughout the world: 1.) that the U.S. is ready to alter some of its policies in the Middle East in order to better handle the various complications in that region, which will appeal to foreign policy progressives and pragmatists; and 2.) that the U.S. needs to prepare itself to fight necessary fights, such as the post-9/11 Afghanistan fight, even as it seeks methods of curtailing its military (if not political) activities in fights-of-choice, such as the Iraq scenario. The first message is likely to appeal to left-leaning folks (and those on the right who stress the root word "conserve" in their definition of the political term "conservative"), and the second message is likely to appeal to moderates from all political backgrounds whose takes on the struggles in Afghanistan and Iraq differentiate greatly from one another.

Ultimately, the Obama Administration, through the mouthpiece of Joe Biden, is suggesting that Americans are now not only ready but also willing to paint the Middle East with less of a broad brush than U.S. policy might have suggested was the case until now. This, then, suggests that, broadly speaking, Americans are now willing to back a multiplicity of different strategies to deal with the complexities of the region.

IN A RELATED UPDATE: today President Obama took part in a major "sit-down" interview with al-Arabiya television. In the context of the ongoing worldwide fight against extremist Islamic elements, the president said the following: "The language we use matters. And what we need to understand is, is that there are extremist organizations – whether Muslim or any other faith in the past – that will use faith as a justification for violence. We cannot paint with a broad brush a faith as a consequence of the violence that is done in that faith's name."

(Note: I became aware of the President Obama's "broad brush" statement after writing my "broad brush" statement above.)

The president is doing a few things here, and they all relate to the following: he is working to recover the idea of American moral authority by speaking in an articulate manner about tolerance with a Muslim news organization. He is putting his presence forward as representing what the Obama Administration would like the Muslim world to see as being the "real" American majority viewpoint on these matters. This is another move to put the pressure and focus back on the extreme ideology of radical Islamist terror groups, and take it off of what has been perceived throughout much of the world as the rather myopic, tone-deaf nature of the Bush Administration's policy on these matters. One ultimate reason for doing this is to place blame for international terrorism back squarely on the shoulders of international terrorists themselves by making the U.S. look intellectually and humanely reasonable to those in the buffer zones of world opinion who were vascillating between where to place to blame.

It surely makes sense, too, that President Obama went on al-Arabiya television in order to do this, as al-Arabiya is often seen as a more moderate upstart challenging the Middle East media might of al-Jazeera. If al-Arabiya gets a prolonged ratings boost out of this, that might be a smart marketing move insofar as U.S. public relations in the region are concerned.