Obama, Alinsky, and Clausewitz

To Defeat the Islamic State Obama Needs Clausewitz, Not Alinsky

In a recent column assessing President Barack Obama’s judgment (after six
years in office), the Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens asked, “What does
Obama Know?” Stephens brutally concluded that among U.S. presidents, Barack
Obama “stands apart is in his combination of ideological rigidity and
fathomless ignorance. What does the president know? The simple answer, and
maybe the truest, is: not a lot.”

Stephens’ column addressed the “foundation of knowledge” underpinning the
president’s analysis of political problems and hence his policy
prescriptions. Obama is indeed ideologically rigid; Stephens nails that.
Obama is a clinical study in no-give domestic political grandstanding — and
this is where, in my view, Stephens’ conclusion that the president is
abysmally ignorant is akilter.

Barack Obama knows a great deal about aggressive and electorally successful
political activism within the protective confines of the U.S. Constitution.
Ever the expert polemicist, Obama knows how to use the First Amendment’s
guarantee of free speech as a political Swiss Army knife, stabbing Hillary
Clinton with a verbal dagger, and then slicing George W. Bush with a
sound-bite scalpel. He also knows how to leverage fawning U.S. media
outlets, which benefit from perceptually aligning with the self-righteous
polemical sentiments he routinely expresses.

Obama has mastered Saul Alinsky politics: a narrow, confined know-how mixing
cynical pragmatism, polemical populism and elitist ego that in the U.S. can
produce electoral and media success.

Obama, however, does not know zilch about Carl von Clausewitz. The great
German strategic theorist (and combat veteran) understood philosophically
and viscerally the wicked, non-linear complexity of unbridled passions, mass
violence and rational use of capabilities to pursue strategic goals that is
the inescapable condition of international affairs in diplomacy and war.

Alinsky godfathered hard-core late 20th- and early 21st-century American
leftist politics. His “The Rules for Radicals” lists 12 perception
operations for gaining notoriety and then power in a society where the rule
of law protects aggressive dissent.

Examples: “RULE 3: “Whenever possible, go outside the expertise of the
enemy.” Look for ways to increase insecurity, anxiety and uncertainty.” Or,
“RULE 5: “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.” There is no defense. It’s
irrational. It’s infuriating. It also works as a key pressure point to force
the enemy into concessions.  ” Which links to “RULE 12: Pick the target,

freeze it, personalize it and polarize it.” Cut off the support network and
isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions;
people hurt faster than institutions.” The leftist propaganda ditty “Bush
lied, people died” epitomizes these three Alinsky “rules.”

In 2008, Obama rode that Alinskyite ditty into the White House. In 2012, his
“Republican war on women” meme did the dirty trick.
Winning a domestic American election is one thing; waging war against any
organization or nation, much least a beast like the Islamic State, is
something else entirely. Peaceniks may yelp, but war and international
crises shape history’s judgment of a presidency.

Prior to the presidency, Obama had only been responsible for successful
presentation and perception; he never held a job where he was responsible
for definitive policy results. He has attempted to translate his expertise
in tactical (immediate), short term, buy-time polemics into governance. The
result: Tactical, buy-time governance.

Fawning press coverage extended Obama’s “buy-time” proviso.
Media fawning continues, but Islamic State video beheadings and Joint Chiefs
of Staff acknowledgment that defeating the mass murderers may require “boots
on the ground” have all but rendered the emperor nude if not naked.

“War is simply the continuation of political intercourse with the addition
of other means,” Clausewitz wrote. The other means include force and
violence and dead bodies. Clausewitz also called war a contest of wills. To
successfully fight a war — to win a war — requires committed leadership.

The Islamic State’s Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi demonstrates commitment; he cuts
off journalists’ heads and then shoots Iraqi and Syrian prisoners en masse.
His forces have also overrun Eastern Syria and Northern Iraq.

Obama, however, continues to conduct foreign policy and fight his Iraqi war
(which he refuses to call a war) as if he were organizing a community in
Chicago or running for president in the U.S. Alinsky has always worked so
well. Why bother to know anything about Clausewitz?

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