Obama’s Sunday on Capitol Hill

A Call for Making ‘History’ | 5:13 p.m. President Obama exhorted Senate Democrats on Sunday to put aside their fierce policy differences and to make history by passing landmark health care legislation, according to The Times article now posted on our Web site.

Original Post | 2:35 p.m. President Obama arrived on Capitol Hill shortly after 2 p.m. Sunday for his meeting with Senate Democrats.

Mr. Obama offered a “Hey, guys, good to see you” greeting to the Capitol press corps but otherwise did not say anything as he walked briskly into the Mansfield Room, where Democrats hold their weekly party luncheon.

The Sunday session is unusual. Democrats remain divided over some important issues in the health care bill, and Mr. Obama was expected to urge them to band together to finish the legislation.

Climate change protesters take to London streets

Thousands of people marched through central London on Saturday calling for a deal on climate change at next week's conference in Copenhagen.

Organizers of the Stop Climate Chaos Coalition had originally estimated that more than 10,000 people would participate in the event that began at Grosvenor Square and made its way to the Houses of Parliament on the River Thames.

But London's Metropolitan Police said there were about 20,000 people at the march.

"We wanted to make a positive statement," retired teacher Pip Cartwright, 72, from Witney, Oxfordshire said. "It's for the future. It's not my generation that's going to have the problem to solve."

The coalition — which includes groups such as Oxfam, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and the World Wildlife Federation — called the protest "The Wave," and organizers asked marchers to dress in blue.

The first stop for many in the march was the headquarters of BP, the large British-based oil company, because of its relationship with Alberta's tarsands project.


"We have to leave the tarsands oil in the ground," said one of the speakers.

The march was to climax with a mass "wave" around Parliament. Other "Wave" events were being held in Glasgow, Belfast, and Dublin. Similar demonstrations took place in Brussels and Berlin.

"The U.K. government must fight for a comprehensive, fair and binding deal at Copenhagen. That is our demand today and we expect it to be fulfilled," Oxfam GB chief executive Barbara Stocking said in a statement.

"They must return home with a strong, effective climate deal both for our own sakes in the U.K. and for the millions of poor people already suffering from the effects of climate change around the world," she said.
Data from 1,000 weather stations to be released

Also on Saturday, Britain's Met Office said it would publish some of the data it uses to analyze climate change, after thousands of pieces of correspondence between some of the world's leading climate scientists were stolen from the University of East Anglia and leaked to the internet.

Skeptics of man-made global warming have said the mails prove that scientists have been conspiring to hide evidence about climate change.

On Friday, the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Rajendra Pachauri, said the issue raised by the emails was serious and would be looked at in detail.

Met Office spokesman Barry Gromett said data from 1,000 weather stations around the world, covering 150 years, will be released early next week. The office has written to 188 countries to ask for permission to release more data from a further 4,000 stations.

Ahead of the march through central London, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams offered prayers for negotiators in Copenhagen and urged people not to listen to those who say there's a choice between "looking after human beings and looking after the Earth."

"If we make ourselves a bit less comfortable, if we draw back from a little bit of our space and liberty so that others may have the space and comfort they need for life, thank God," Williams said.

A second group of climate campaigners was planning an action for later Saturday.

Richard Bernard, a spokesman for Camp for Climate Action, said protesters planned to pitch tents somewhere in central London to spotlight the talks in Copenhagen.

He said his group intended to march with the main protest, and then head off to their so-far secret site in London.

The Post-Imperial Presidency

Even as Obama increases troop levels, he is scaling back American foreign policy.
If you take just one sentence out, Barack Obama's speech on Afghanistan last week was all about focusing and limiting the scope of America's mission in that country. His goal, he said, was "narrowly defined." The objectives he detailed were exclusively military—to deny Al Qaeda a safe haven, reverse the Taliban's momentum, and strengthen the Kabul government's security forces. He said almost nothing about broader goals like spreading democracy, protecting human rights, or assisting in women's education. The nation that he was interested in building, he explained, was America.
And then there was that one line: "I have determined that it is in our vital national interest to send 30,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan." Here lies the tension in Barack Obama's policy. He wants a clearer, more discriminating foreign policy, one that pares down the vast commitments and open-ended interventions of the Bush era, perhaps one that is more disciplined even than Bill Clinton's approach to the world. (On the campaign trail, Obama repeatedly invoked George H.W. Bush as the president whose foreign policy he admired most.) But America is in the midst of a war that is not going well, and scaling back now would look like cutting and running. Obama is searching for a post-imperial policy in the midst of an imperial crisis. The qualified surge—send in troops to regain the momentum but then draw down—is his answer to this dilemma. This is an understandable compromise, and it could well work, but it pushes off a final decision about Afghanistan until the troop surge can improve the situation on the ground. Eighteen months from now, Obama will have to answer the core question: is a stable and well-functioning Afghanistan worth a large and continuing American ground presence, or can American interests be secured at much lower cost?

This first year of his presidency has been a window into Barack Obama's world view. Most presidents, once they get hold of the bully pulpit, cannot resist the temptation to become Winston Churchill. They gravitate to grand rhetoric about freedom and tyranny, and embrace the moral drama of their role as leaders of the free world. Even the elder Bush, a pragmatist if there ever was one, lapsed into dreamy language about "a new world order" once he stood in front of the United Nations. Not Obama. He has been cool and calculating, whether dealing with Russia, Iran, Iraq, or Afghanistan. A great orator, he has, in this arena, kept his eloquence in check. Obama is a realist, by temperament, learning, and instinct. More than any president since Richard Nixon, he has focused on defining American interests carefully, providing the resources to achieve them, and keeping his eyes on the prize.

In 1943 the columnist Walter Lippmann defined foreign policy as "bringing into balance, with a comfortable surplus of power in reserve, the nation's commitments and the nation's power." Only then could the United States achieve strategic stability abroad and domestic support at home. Consciously or not, President Obama was channeling Lippmann when he said, "As president I refuse to set goals that go beyond our responsibility, our means, or our interests." In his speech he quoted only one person, a president of the opposite party, Dwight Eisenhower, who said of national-security challenges, "Each proposal must be weighed in the light of a broader consideration: the need to maintain balance in and among national programs." Obama added that "over the past several years, we have lost that balance." He is hoping to restore some equilibrium to American foreign policy.

"In the end," said the president last week, "our security and leadership does not come solely from the strength of our arms." He explained that America's economic and technological vigor underpinned its ability to play a world role. At a small lunch with a group of columnists (myself included) last week, he made clear that he did not want to run two wars. He seemed to be implying that these struggles—Iraq and Afghanistan—were not the crucial path to America's long-term security. He explained that challenges at home—economic growth, technological innovation, education reform—were at the heart of maintaining America's status as a superpower.

It is now clear that Obama is attempting something quite ambitious—to reorient American foreign policy to-ward something less extravagant and adversarial. That begins with narrowing the war on terror; scaling back the conflict with the Islamic world to those groups and countries that pose serious, direct threats to America; and reaching out to the rest. He has also tried to develop a better working relationship between America and other major powers like Russia and China, setting aside smaller issues in hopes of cooperating on bigger ones. This means departing from a bipartisan approach in which Washington's role was to direct the rest of the world, pushing regimes large and small to accept American ideas, and publicly chastising them when they refused. Obama is trying to break the dynamic that says that when an American president negotiates with the Chinese or Russians, he must return with rewards or concessions—or else he is guilty of appeasement.

And then there is that line. It might seem hard to reconcile a more targeted and focused foreign policy with the expansion of a war and the introduction of 30,000 troops. But it is not unprecedented. When Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger entered the White House in 1969, they inherited a war in Vietnam that they might have believed in at some theoretical level, but that they recognized was bleeding the country. Over their years in office, they focused on shoring up America's power position through diplomacy with the Soviet Union, China, Egypt, and Israel. But they also recognized that they had to deal with the crisis in Vietnam and said explicitly that they were going to try to scale back America's involvement there. In this they succeeded. By April 1969, soon after Nixon took office, there were 543,000 American troops in Vietnam. At the end of his first term, there were fewer than 20,000 left. But in between, in order to keep the enemy on the defensive, to gain momentum, and to create space for American troops to leave, Nixon and Kissinger ordered a series of offensive military maneuvers that were designed to hit the North Vietnamese hard. Surge and then draw down, you might say.

Although the Viet Cong were beaten back temporarily, ultimately the North took over the South in 1975. But it is instructive to think about why. First, our local ally lacked legitimacy and competence. The government of South Vietnam was simply unable to gain the confidence of its people, and the Viet Cong and its Northern allies were able to persuade or intimidate tens of thousands of Vietnamese to shift to their side. Second, the enemy had safe havens outside South Vietnam—mainly in North Vietnam and Cambodia—which provided them escape routes and supply chains. More significant, the insurgents had the active support of the other superpower, the Soviet Union, as well as some aid from China. Finally, the United States cut off all assistance to South Vietnam, abandoning a country it had lost 59,000 troops defending.