The Long Game Read Online Free Page A

It reflected the core of his view of politics. He decried the “smallness” of Washington, its obsessions with the fleeting, petty, and trivial, and its penchant for division over consensus.
    Obama had conducted his 2008 presidential campaign in a way that defied prevailing views of how it should be done—eschewing the cable news, political talking-head wisdom, while using innovative methods to attract new voters and compete in places most pundits ignored. The core message of his candidacy—“change”—was to him about more than simply replacing who sat in the White House. Obama wanted to transform the culture of politics, which he believed had become deeply misguided and corrosive. This was especially the case when it came to foreign policy. For Obama, the mentality andincentives of Washington’s professional political and policy class were the main obstacles to pursuing a Long Game strategy.
    Obama believed that conventional thinking had generated a huge strategic mistake, the biggest since Vietnam: the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Instead of laying the blame solely on the Bush administration and a government hijacked by a neo-conservative cabal (as many Democrats wanted to do, so as to absolve themselves of responsibility), Obama saw the Iraq War as a systemic failure in which the entire Washington establishment—Democratic and Republican politicians, foreign policy experts of all stripes, and the press—was responsible. And, importantly, it was an issue he had gotten right from the beginning.
    A LTHOUGH O BAMA WAS more than an antiwar candidate, his early opposition to the invasion of Iraq fueled his political rise. His decision to speak out against the war in 2002 crystalized in one moment everything that he believed was flawed about the foreign policy debate—and how he wanted to change it.
    â€œThe American people weren’t just failed by a president,” he said in an October 2007 speech at DePaul University in Illinois, when few in the foreign policy world were watching. “They were failed by much of Washington. By a media that too often reported spin instead of facts. By a foreign policy elite that largely boarded the bandwagon for war. And most of all by the majority of a Congress… that voted to give the president the open-ended authority to wage war that he uses to this day.” 1
    The DePaul speech, delivered before a crowd of nearly five hundred students on the fifth anniversary of Obama’s famous statement against the Iraq invasion at a Chicago antiwar rally, was a broadside against what he called Washington “groupthink.” To drive this point home, that same day he delivered this speech twice more, in Iowa. Throughout the campaign Obama had sparred with his moreexperienced opponents (including his future vice president and secretary of state) over such issues as how to engage adversaries like Iran and whether to get tough with countries like Pakistan. He turned their criticisms back on them, once saying during a Democratic primary debate that he found it “amusing that those who helped to authorize and engineer the biggest foreign policy disaster in our generation are now criticizing me” for such stands. 2 In the DePaul speech, Obama went further, observing that “you might think that Washington would learn from Iraq. But we’ve seen…just how bent out of shape Washington gets when you challenge its assumptions.”
    Such themes carried through his 2008 campaign, and he would return to them often as president. During his early years in the White House, establishment critiques would gnaw at him. But in the latter part of his presidency he wanted to take on such critics more openly—trying to engender a sense of accountability.
    For example, Obama characterized opponents of the Iran nuclear deal in 2015 in similar terms to those who had criticized his policies in 2007—explicitly drawing a direct line of argument