The tick-tocks
explaining how the Obama Administration came to support a robust UNSCR
resolution are revealing, sometimes unintentionally so. For instance, it is clear that the New York Times relied heavily on State Department sources. In the NYT account, Secretary Clinton
masterfully played the system, aided by U,N, Ambassador Susan Rice who
pushed the U.N. into accepting a more robust Security Council resolution than even the allies
were pushing. The Wall Street Journal relied heavily on reporting from allied capitals and in it Secretary Clinton comes off
a bit more in a reactive mode rather than the leader mode the State
sources painted.
The Washington Post reads almost like it relied entirely on Ben Rhodes, the White House communications person for national security. The Post has President Obama in the commanding role, masterfully assembling a coalition behind the scenes. Politico has essentially the same line -- and so presumably the same sources -- but adds this exquisite
detail: Secretary Clinton was too tired from travel to participate in
the crucial Tuesday evening principals meeting where the hawkish turn
was decided. (Perhaps White House payback for the backstabbing Clinton
associates inflicted on Obama during the hectic days when it looked like the President would settle for inaction?)
Other
reporters have told me that this was essentially the frame being pushed
by the White House: all along what outside critics were calling
dithering was actually President Obama's determination to make the
allies something like "responsible stakeholders" so as to avoid the
free-riding on American power that has bedeviled previous multilateral
missions. Those reporters were skeptical, since that was emphatically
not how French and British participants interpreted Obama's efforts.
Regardless,
if you lay the tick-tocks side by side something like a consistent
picture does emerge. And there is a very curious missing figure in that
picture: Vice President Biden. I may have missed it, but I don't think
he figures in any of the accounts and, come to think of it, he does not
feature prominently in the reporting on the issue for the past several
weeks. This is very curious because, of course, the whole reason
President Obama picked Biden as VP was for precisely these sorts of
moments when the entire foreign-policy establishment is strained to the
breaking point by the accelerated crush of world events. But Biden
seems to have been a non-player in all of this.
In fact, the only tick-tock I found that mentions Biden actually reinforces the mystery. FP's own Josh Rogin lays out a "how it happened" with this very intriguing squib at the end:
UPDATE: A previous version of this story stated that Vice President Joseph Biden pushed for the imposition of a no fly zone in Libya. Friday afternoon, a senior White House official told The Cablethat,
in fact, Biden shared the same concerns of Gates, Donilon and McDonough
and that those concerns have been addressed by the policy announced by
the president.
Obviously, early reports had Biden on
one side and then later reports had him on the other side. He
apparently was a bit-player, whichever side he was on.
Perhaps
Biden is seeking plausible deniability on this policy. Or perhaps he
is in the dog house. Or perhaps there is some other explanation I am not
thinking of. But it would be interesting to hear a convincing account.
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