For mixed Haitian American families, getting home can be an odyssey

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By Theola Labbé-DeBose
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, January 19, 2010; A10

PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI -- Carline Georges, an American citizen living in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., came to Haiti on Jan. 1 to see friends and family and to celebrate the national independence holiday. She brought her son Schneider, 4, and they planned to return to the United States in a few weeks.

Then the earthquake hit. Georges and thousands of other Haitian Americans visiting relatives and friends in Haiti had no way to get back to the United States. Clutching crying children and wearing just the clothes on their backs after going hungry and thirsty for days, distraught Haitian Americans lined up outside the U.S. Embassy or waited hours in the Caribbean sun outside of the Toussaint L'Ouverture Airport to be evacuated.

Georges, who stood outside the U.S. Embassy for more than two hours, said her normally boisterous son has been extremely quiet these past few days. With supermarkets closed or destroyed, and no running water or electricity, "where should I go to buy stuff for him?" she asked, standing near a lush palm tree while international security guards carrying M-16s milled around to keep the line orderly.

"He hasn't eaten anything, just drank milk, that's it," she said.

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The U.S. State Department had evacuated 2,200 Americans as of Sunday, said Jerome Oetgen, a spokesman. He estimated that the number would be close to 3,000 by the end of the day on Monday, and that it would continue to climb. The agency is running ads on Haitian radio saying that anyone with a valid U.S. passport can go to Toussaint L'Ouverture Airport for immediate departure to Homestead Air Force Reserve Base near Miami.

Americans who are sick or injured would receive treatment first at the embassy's military hospital, then flown to Guantanamo Bay Naval Base for further observation before being taken to the Florida base, Oetgen said.

"We don't want to make any more misery through bureaucracy; our goal is to help any American who wants to leave," Oetgen said. "We will continue this effort until we are done."

The physical distance between Haiti and the United States belies a fluid and close-knit familial relationship between Haitians living in their home country and those in the United States. Mixed citizenship is common among Haitian families -- a fact that many Haitians said they never gave a moment's thought until now.

Dominic Beatrice, 39, a dentist who has lived in Port-au-Prince since birth, has a daughter, Leyna, 13, who was born in Haiti, and a son Xavier, 9. Beatrice said that she was kidnapped while pregnant with her son, and that after her family paid a ransom, she was released and went to the United States to recover, staying with relatives in Florida. All along she planned to have her child in Haiti, she said, as her father-in-law is a gynecologist and her husband is an orthopedic surgeon. But while she was recovering from the emotional trauma, she went into labor, and her son became a U.S. citizen.

On Monday, she stood with hundreds of other Haitians in a long line that snaked in front of the airport -- a bustling scene of airport workers and everyday Haitians, some of them there to see their family members. When Beatrice got to the head of the line, she met a State Department employee. Flanked by several Haitians to assist with interpreting, J. Brett Fernandez asked to review the family passports.

"This child can travel," Fernandez said, pointing to Xavier. Then she pointed to Leyna: "But this child cannot. You have a decision to make, ma'am. Please let me know what you decide."

Beatrice paused for a moment, looking shocked and unsure. Fernandez told her that if she decided not to travel then, she would have to wait in line again if she changed her mind. Beatrice grabbed her black suitcase and two children and left, fighting back tears.

Faced with the same decision, Bertho Lenesca, 44, with one daughter born in Haiti and another in the United States, said she couldn't make the trip. "I can't separate my two daughters," said Lenesca, who lost her house in the earthquake and has been sleeping on the street. "I don't know what we're going to do."

About 15 minutes passed and Beatrice reentered the line, managing to return to the front, this time without her daughter. She went to her husband in the airport parking lot and they decided that their daughter would stay in Haiti with her father; the two hopefully would end up in the United States via the Dominican Republic. Beatrice would leave immediately with their son.

"I've never thought of one of my children being Haitian and one of them being American," Beatrice said. "But now I know that it is important. I've just made one of the hardest decisions of my life."

Sunni Iraqis fear disenfranchisement after hundreds of candidates banned

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By Leila Fadel and Ernesto Londoño
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, January 19, 2010; A07

BAGHDAD -- By barring hundreds of candidates from an upcoming parliamentary election, a controversial commission whose members have close ties to Iran is threatening to disenfranchise members of Iraq's Sunni minority and weaken its fledgling democracy.

The commission, led by Ahmed Chalabi, an Iraqi politician who supplied faulty intelligence to the United States in the run-up to the war, and Ali Faisal al-Lami, a former U.S. detainee, was established to help cleanse the Iraqi government of officials who adhered to the ideals of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party.

But the panel sent shockwaves through Iraq's political establishment when it recently announced the disbarment of 511 candidates for their alleged allegiance to the party. The move has led to recriminations that Iran, through proxies, is trying to rig the vote to ensure that Iraq is solidly in the hands of politicians loyal to Tehran.

U.S. officials, who were caught off guard by the decision, now fear that it could reignite sectarian violence and dash their hopes of political reconciliation in Iraq -- the end goal of the U.S. military strategy known as the "surge."

"If there is no balance, there will be violence," said Mustafa Kamal Shibeeb, a Sunni who was among those banned.

Outside a cemetery in the Sunni Baghdad district of Adhamiyah, Ibrahim Hamid, 22, glanced over a railing at about 6,500 graves of Sunnis buried during Iraq's sectarian war.

"This is Iraq," he said. "Always the men with dignity are banned. I'm sure there is going to be a lot of violence."

Many Sunnis boycotted a national election in 2005 to protest the U.S. occupation. Their disenfranchisement contributed to the rise of an insurgency and a civil war fought along sectarian lines. This time, there is little talk of boycotting, but there is widespread fear that Sunnis will once again believe they got a raw deal.

On Friday, at a Sunni mosque in Adhamiyah, the Iraqi army stopped a demonstration over the disbarments, residents said. Sunnis in Baghdad complain that in recent months the Iraqi army has sharply restricted movement in their districts, stifling commerce and imposing de facto martial law.

"People will keep their mouths shut," said Zaki Alaa Zaki, 38, a member of the local Sunni paramilitary force established by the U.S. military and now controlled by the Iraqi government. "We are the living dead now."

The committee that announced the disbarments is known as the Supreme National Commission for Accountability and Justice. Its chairman, Chalabi, is an erstwhile Pentagon and CIA ally who played a crucial role in the run-up to the invasion. He's fallen out of favor, and most U.S. officials now call him an Iranian agent. Chalabi's deputy on the commission, Lami, spent nearly a year in U.S. custody after being implicated in the bombing of a Sadr City government building that killed two American soldiers and two U.S. Embassy employees. He has denied involvement in the attack and claims that U.S. interrogators tortured him.

An aide to Chalabi said he was unavailable for comment. In an interview, however, Lami said he wasn't to blame that candidates failed to qualify for elections. He also disputed allegations, from U.S. officials and others, that he and Chalabi were acting at the behest of Tehran or in the interest of their own coalition vying for seats in the next parliament.

The list of barred candidates, which was endorsed by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, provides vague justification for the banishments. It includes Sunni and Shiite politicians, but it seems to disproportionately target prominent Sunnis and secular leaders. There were 6,592 candidates who were screened for Baathist ties.

Being labeled a Baathist in today's Iraq, which is led by exiles driven out by Hussein, is tantamount to being called a communist during the McCarthy era. The disbarment would be likely to benefit Maliki's coalition and the predominantly Shiite bloc that includes Chalabi and Lami.

Barred candidates have three days to appeal to a newly empaneled body of three judges. Sunni politicians and U.S. officials worry that the appeals process could inflame tensions and potentially derail the election, scheduled for March 7.

U.S. Ambassador Christopher R. Hill said he worries that the process could overwhelm the democratic system.

"It's a tough issue. It involves deep emotions," Hill said in an interview. "Frankly, the weight of these emotions sometimes exceeds the capacity of the institutional framework to handle them."

Vice President Biden called the Iraqi speaker of parliament Sunday to push back the disbarment of politicians until after the vote, according to the speaker's spokesman. But the call and other, similar efforts by the U.N. envoy to Iraq and Western diplomats appear to have gone unheeded.

Some Sunni leaders and analysts said more aggressive American intervention is the only way to avert a bigger crisis.

"We need to hear from you Americans. Please don't just watch this from the outside," said Mithal al-Alusi, a former member of the now-disbanded commission on de-Baathification. "The White House needs to move and move quickly."

Special correspondent Aziz Alwan contributed to this report.

Congested border crossing may affect U.S. buildup in Afghanistan

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By Joshua Partlow
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, January 19, 2010; A06

SPIN BOLDAK, AFGHANISTAN -- The pace of President Obama's troop buildup in Afghanistan hinges in part on a narrow, pothole-riddled dirt track that is controlled by a 33-year-old suspected drug lord and by the whims of the Pakistani military.

It is down this road each month that thousands of cargo trucks bearing U.S. and NATO military supplies pass through the only major border crossing in southern Afghanistan -- the area where most American troop reinforcements are scheduled to deploy.

Here at the border crossing, where traffic switches from the left side of the road in Pakistan to the right in Afghanistan, supply trucks must pass along with the flood of pedestrians, donkey carts, drug shipments and materials to make roadside bombs. Only about 2 to 3 percent of the vehicles are regularly searched, and payoffs to border guards are rampant, U.S. military officials say.

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The chaos and congestion of this border crossing have become a matter of urgent concern as military logisticians scramble to fulfill Obama's plan for bringing 30,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan this year. Compounding the problem is that Pakistan has been slow to respond to U.S. proposals to create a separate lane for coalition military vehicles and nighttime crossing rights, U.S. officials say.

Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, flew to Quetta, Pakistan, on Monday to meet with Pakistani military commanders, then toured the border crossing with officials from both countries.

"It's absolutely key to have this gate functioning better," said Maj. Gen. Hubert De Vos, a Belgian army officer who is the deputy chief of staff for resources with the coalition military command. "It's a direct link to the south, and the south is absolutely critical."

Hastening overland supplies of fuel, food and military equipment to Afghanistan is just one issue in a frenzy of logistical work that is required to feed, house and protect soldiers coming to fight. The military is rushing to construct and expand military bases, dig wells and build power plants, dining halls, aircraft landing strips and temporary housing. At the end of each week, coalition officials responsible for southern Afghanistan convene for hours to monitor the progress -- meetings that have earned the nickname "Friday night fights."

Maj. Gen. Don T. Riley, the chief engineer for U.S. forces in Afghanistan, said the pace of traffic through Spin Boldak needs to increase to 150 NATO supply trucks a day, up from the current average of just under 100. These additional trucks are needed, among other reasons, to slake the military's demand for fuel, which is expected to increase by 30 to 40 percent.

The U.S. military has longer-term plans to build a bypass road around the crossing. In the short term, it is pushing for overnight access through the border.

But for the past month, Pakistan has given little ground. Part of the problem is apparently bureaucracy, with at least five Pakistani agencies involved in providing security for NATO convoys between the port city of Karachi and the border. In the past, Pakistani officials also have criticized U.S. plans to increase troop levels, arguing that an intensified war will spread back into their country.

There is trouble on the Afghan side as well. The urgency to increase the flow of military supplies has forced the U.S. military to rely heavily on Abdul Razziq, the illiterate local commander of the Afghan border police.

According to U.S. military officials, Razziq wields near total control over Spin Boldak and the border crossing. Razziq, a former anti-Taliban fighter, owns a trucking company, commands 3,500 police, effectively controls the local government, and reportedly takes in millions from extorting passing vehicles and trafficking drugs. He is a colonel, but his soldiers call him "general." On Monday, Razziq popped pistachios while smiling and chatting with U.S. generals.

Razziq can shut down the border crossing at will. He also provides intelligence to Americans about potential attacks and keeps the insurgency in check in his area. He says he is amenable to U.S. plans to fast-track NATO supplies but has tried to keep U.S. soldiers at arm's length at the crossing point.

Razziq said in a telephone interview that the allegations against him are "totally baseless," and that in the past three months his police has confiscated 11 tons of drugs and arrested at least 15 traffickers. "If they have any kind of evidence, then they should present that evidence," he said.

Razziq's power also seems to anger Pakistan, which already has a fraught relationship with Afghanistan over the disputed border. One Western official who works with the Pakistani Army said Pakistan wants the border crossing to be more efficient to avoid backups on its side.

But, he said, Pakistani officials find Razziq "unpalatable," think that he is slowing traffic and are upset that "he's getting all the money." Fittingly, the Friendship Gate, which marks the border with dual archways, is locked.

Riley, the chief engineer, said Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, regional envoy Richard C. Holbrooke and U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl W. Eikenberry are "all working feverishly to get the two governments to work a little more closely together" to speed supplies.

After his meetings in Quetta and Spin Boldak on Monday, McChrystal sounded optimistic.

"We want to make sure that it's as efficient as it can be," he said of the border crossing. "And instead of it being something where the two nations don't work closely together, we'd really like it to be something that's a little closer to a handshake. And I think we can do that."

Special correspondent Javed Hamdard in Kabul contributed to this report.

In Leogane, Haiti, rebuilding starts with scavenging

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By Scott Wilson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, January 19, 2010; A01

LEOGANE, HAITI -- Townspeople say as many as 500 nuns, priests and students were crushed to death when the cream-colored walls of the Sainte Rose de Lima School collapsed in last Tuesday's earthquake, a disaster that destroyed the emotional and physical centerpiece of this city.

Six days later, mourning has given way to scavenging, as scores of men and women on Monday swarmed the pile of tin, timber, tiny desks and metal chairs to pry loose anything useful. The debris of Leogane's best school is now building the refugee camps rising in nearby parks and cane fields.

A trickle of outside help began to arrive Monday in this once-graceful city about 20 miles west of Port-au-Prince, the capital. No one here is expecting much more, even though by some official assessments the damage to towns across Haiti's southern provinces may exceed that of the ruined capital.

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"There's been none so far," said Jacques Marcelius, a fisherman who was using a door latch as a crowbar to pry apart boards. "And we're not able to wait any more."

A town in which everyone lost someone in the quake, Leogane has come alive with the energy and enterprise that comes with knowing you're on your own. This provincial hub immediately west of the quake's epicenter, and dozens of other towns along Haiti's southern finger, has been reduced to chunks and masonry, lumber and dust, leaving thousands dead.

Small international medical teams are just now arriving, and they have been quickly overwhelmed by the number of severely injured. Given the extent of the damage to the capital, Haiti's provinces, historically forgotten by the central government, fear they have been overlooked again at this moment of dire need.

"It's beginning to move in here slowly," said Pete Buth of Doctors Without Borders, the medical organization. "But I'm not going to tell you it's still any good."

Buth's team arrived Sunday evening, five days after the quake. Surgical teams from Japan and Argentina pulled in Monday, setting up an operating suite inside the hospital compound where hundreds of families now live in makeshift shelters.

Scores lined up to enter the mobile clinic, surrounded by a fence topped with razor wire. Two men ran toward the surgery area carrying a wooden rocking chair. In it sat a boy, 8, his lifeless legs dangling in front of him.

Buth said his team found that most of the injured had been untreated for days. The team cared for more than 70 people with severe infections and crushed limbs within five hours, then mysteriously ran out of patients.

"We took a walk through the tents and found dozens of injured who couldn't make it even the 50 yards to get inside the hospital for care," he said. "That's indicative of what's out there in this city. Many people just can't get here."

Heading west from Port-au-Prince, traffic slows along a two-lane highway, where large cracks have opened since the quake. In several places, hillsides have tumbled into the road, complicating the delivery of water, food and U.N. peacekeepers deployed to protect the aid workers and medical teams.

On the edge of Leogane, where 134,000 people once lived, U.N. peacekeepers closed a road so a small plane could land with supplies. A human corpse burned on the dusty shoulder.

After a few hours in the city, it is hard to see how any but a tiny fraction of its homes and buildings will remain standing. The United Nations estimates that up to 90 percent of the city's structures suffered heavy damage or were destroyed.

Already, most survivors have moved into the streets, with tent cities filling everything from soccer fields to median strips.

Buth said one shipment of water had arrived, although no one in town appeared to be aware of it. Supplies of essentials are dwindling fast. Men with plastic jugs waited impatiently for a chance at what little fuel remains at the Canaan gas station. A $5 bag of rice sells for $10, and survivors are spending much of their time finding the ways and means to feed families.

"Any money we have we spend on staying alive," said Guifaud Frederic, 35, whose brother was killed when his house collapsed.

Frederic's pharmacy fell, too, and he has built a shelter in a park where he lives with his wife and 1-year-old daughter.

"Most everything coming into this country right now stays in Port-au-Prince," he said. "I don't think we'll see any of it."

Along Grande Rue, the main commercial strip, the collapsed grocery stores have been stripped bare. A church trimmed in pale blue crumpled into the street, and a web of electrical wires loops dangerously overhead, low enough that men on motorcycles duck to avoid them. There is no electricity or running water.

Getro Surin, 26, worked in the hot morning sun on a pile of wood and tin sheeting of what had been a gingerbread-style home, using a hammer to pound apart boards. No one has seen the town's mayor since the quake, he said, and only his deputy has appeared to urge survivors to be patient for aid to arrive.

Surin said he couldn't be patient anymore. He works for a local nonprofit agency, and he and three colleagues went to work Monday collecting from the ruins any useful materials needed for shelters.

"Even in good times, they don't care about the provinces," he said. "They're not going to care now."

Thousands of people died here in the quake, and the bodies of Girard Dessources and son Patrico, 7, are still entombed in the rubble of their home on the corner of Grande Rue and Rue d'Enfer.

The sharp pungency of decomposition filled the air around the home, as it did near the remains of several schools nearby. People wear surgical masks or sport a toothpaste mustache, a technique Haitians use to dampen the smell of death. A mass grave has been dug inside the cemetery walls.

"We were just living our lives, and then this," said Nella Jean-Louise, 44, who lived next to the Dessources family. She lives in the street now under a blue tarp and on a plywood floor, begging for food.

Some here have begun taking for themselves. The shelves of two grocery stores, their facades collapsed, have been stripped bare. The scavenging has accelerated as hope fades that supplies from the outside are on the way.

Along one hardscrabble street, a bicyclist teetered, with a length of lumber over one shoulder and a bedsheet tied around his neck. He was coming from the Sainte Rose de Lima School, which once stood among banana and palm trees in the city's lush center.

Only two classrooms remain standing, and a man worked to dismantle wooden student benches with a hammer, stooping beneath a small black cross painted on the wall above him.

A Haitian history book, a woman's sensible shoe and the laminated report card of Sophonie Saint Short, a sixth-grader, appeared in the pile of detritus being worked over for anything useful.

Sophonie scored a perfect 10 in Creole, catechism, hygienic sciences and vocabulary. A photograph on the back of her report card showed four rows of smiling girls -- her class -- dressed in uniforms of sky-blue jumpers.

No one on the pile knew whether she had survived, saying only that not many did.

One year later: How Obama has learned to become a wartime commander in chief

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By Scott Wilson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, January 19, 2010; A01

Through a haze of grief, Dona Griffin watched President Obama turn toward her, opening his arms to offer a hug.

A midnight knock on her door the previous evening had brought her from her home in Terre Haute, Ind., to the morgue at Dover Air Force Base and into a presidential embrace. The body of her son, Army Sgt. Dale R. Griffin, and those of 17 other Americans killed in Afghanistan waited in the frigid hold of a military cargo plane standing on the runway.

Obama had flown in by helicopter from Washington. Nearing a decision about whether to send thousands more troops to the battlefield, he wanted to witness the homecoming of dead soldiers.

The visit was part of an eclectic self-education program Obama has undertaken to become a wartime commander in chief. He has emerged as a president uncomfortable with the swagger and rhetoric traditionally used to rally troops, favoring an image of public solemnity as he wrestles with the moral consequences of war. Republicans have criticized him for being reticent in the face of crisis and for taking too long to set strategy.

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But even as Obama has sought to convey an image of a deliberate leader preoccupied with the battle's human toll, he has used military power at least as aggressively as his Republican predecessor did during the waning years of his administration. In his first year in office, Obama has set in motion plans to triple the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan; expanded operations against U.S. enemies in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen; and, in one early instance of his willingness to use deadly force, authorized Special Forces snipers to kill three Somali pirates holding an American hostage.

The politician who brashly opposed the Iraq invasion has had more than 443 U.S. service members die while serving under his command. On a chilly October evening, in a stark waiting room at Dover, he leaned toward Dona Griffin less than 24 hours after she learned that her 29-year-old son had been killed by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan.

"I found myself with my hand in his, and he was asking if there's anything he could do," she recalled. "I put my left hand behind his left elbow, and leaned forward, and whispered in his ear, 'Mr. President, please don't leave our troops hanging.' "

Hoops with troops

In the fall of 2002, as the Bush administration rallied the country for an invasion of Iraq, Obama, then an Illinois state senator, appeared at an antiwar demonstration in Chicago's Federal Plaza.

"I'm not opposed to all wars," he told a crowd made up of many who were. "I'm opposed to dumb wars."

Obama never served in the military, and early in the speech he cited his maternal grandfather as a kind of surrogate. A World War II veteran who "fought in Patton's Army," Stanley Dunham embodied for him the necessity to fight those who will not yield to anything but force.

"I think he came to office with a sophisticated understanding of the use of power and when it is necessary," said David Axelrod, a senior adviser who began working with Obama the year he delivered the "dumb war" speech. "What no one can understand before coming to the office, though, is the gravity that surrounds those decisions."

Obama prepared early. As a candidate, he made several unannounced visits to retired Gen. Colin L. Powell at his Alexandria office, seeking advice about leadership and command from perhaps the most famous soldier of his generation. Powell had worked at the highest levels of government, in uniform and as a civilian, and Obama trusted him to offer counsel free of partisan prejudice.

"He understood that this was something he'd never done before and that he'd have to learn it on the job," said Powell, who said Obama has "done well as commander in chief." "He was also confident in his ability to surround himself with people who could help him learn it."

On the campaign trail, Obama was perceived as vulnerable on national security, which his Republican opponent, Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), sought to make his own. The son and grandson of Navy admirals, McCain was a war hero whom most Americans could envision as commander in chief.

Obama, a first-term U.S. senator of cool temperament, was harder to imagine in the role. In July 2008, he stepped off a plane at a U.S. staging base in Kuwait for his first encounter with troops in a theater of war as a possible next president. It was an opportunity to put some doubts to rest.

Obama was tired from the long flight, and a hip injury limited a basketball game to an informal shoot-around session. But the Senate staff members accompanying him were stunned when, on arriving at the gym, they discovered that more than 1,000 service members had packed the stands to watch. Some of Obama's aides worried that a poor showing would yield images of Commander Air Ball.

"Just make a shot or two, and that'll be all right," Antony J. Blinken, then the director of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff and now Vice President Biden's national security adviser, told Obama.

"Oh, I'll make the shot," he answered.

He squared up behind the three-point arc for a jump shot that zipped through the net. The troops erupted, and a potentially awkward encounter ended in a moment of schoolyard glory, with future commander and troops appearing largely as equals. As president, months later, he would take a more paternal view of his relationship with his forces.

A change of mind

Upon taking office, Obama moved quickly to imprint his view of war on the vast national security apparatus, drawing criticism from conservatives in doing so. Within days, he banned the use of torture in interrogation and ordered the closing of the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, by Jan. 22, 2010 -- a deadline that will be missed.

The executive orders were part of a review of the Bush-era protocols that framed the "global war on terror," a term Obama immediately discouraged his advisers from using because he said it overstated al-Qaeda's strength. To the former constitutional law lecturer, the refinements in language and policy strengthened the moral argument for war.

Obama, in his new role, disregarded the advice of his military commanders and heeded the demands of civil libertarians after a campaign in which he promised a more transparent government.

Over the initial objection of Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, the president allowed the release in April of the Bush-era memos that served as the legal justification for what were called "enhanced interrogation methods." That same month, the administration announced that it would comply with a court order demanding the release of as many as 2,000 photographs depicting prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib in Iraq and other U.S.-run detention sites.

Gen. Ray Odierno, his commander in Iraq, opposed the decision, and Obama viewed a sampling of the photos. He changed his mind, saying that making the pictures public would "further inflame anti-American opinion and put our troops in danger."

"There are more than 200,000 Americans who are serving in harm's way, and I have a solemn responsibility for their safety as commander in chief," Obama said in a speech at the National Archives explaining his decision.

Civil libertarians, with whom Obama had once sided, felt betrayed. Republicans saw the decisions as an unworkable compromise. Speaking at the American Enterprise Institute within minutes of Obama's address, former vice president Richard B. Cheney said, "The administration seems to pride itself on searching for some kind of middle ground in policies addressing terrorism."

He added: "But in the fight against terrorism, there is no middle ground, and half-measures keep you half exposed."

Military relationships

In May, Obama fired his commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David D. McKiernan, becoming the first president since Harry S. Truman to relieve a commanding general in a theater of war. He acted largely on advice from Gates, and a senior adviser described the firing as "a significant moment" in making the battle his own.

Obama replaced him with Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, who outlined a plan calling for vastly more resources at a time of rising deficits and public opposition to the war at home.

The general also began selling his plan publicly before Obama had carried out what would become a three-month strategy review. During an appearance in London, McChrystal said a change in his strategy that would require fewer troops and a more narrowly defined mission would be "shortsighted."

A day later, Obama, who was in Denmark pitching Chicago's Olympic bid, summoned the general for a meeting there. The two had met in person only once previously, and Obama's aides said he did not use the brief meeting to criticize McChrystal for his public remarks, even in the privacy of Air Force One.

A senior administration official said the president was "frustrated" by the military's public appeal, but Obama, unwilling to jeopardize relations with his Afghanistan commander, kept those feelings private.

Obama intended a more formal, arm's-length relationship with his generals than the one favored by George W. Bush, who spoke frequently with his then-commander in Iraq, Gen. David H. Petraeus, even though several officers were above him at the time.

"This is a president who is going to respect the chain of command," said another senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the president's thinking. "He feels like it is the most efficient way to receive information and maintain control of the process."

Commander to troops

During White House deliberations on national security, Obama has kept his own counsel as he has made decisions, according to his aides and senior officials. But this methodical style, during the fall review of the Afghanistan strategy, provoked criticism -- mainly from Republicans -- that he was dithering.

Obama's Democratic Party worried that a novice commander in chief would succumb to the wishes of his generals at the expense of his wide-ranging domestic reform agenda, which was already threatened by the rising costs of war.

Aides said Obama looked to President John F. Kennedy's relationship with the military, in particular how he managed the Cuban missile crisis when his military leaders urged a quick strike on the island, an act he resisted. One senior adviser said Obama valued Kennedy's "think before you shoot" ethos.

He also drew from the experience of GOP presidents. "What he took from Eisenhower is that everything you do as commander in chief must be seen for how it affects your other goals," a senior administration official said.

Those goals were also threatened by events outside the Situation Room. As reports of a mass shooting at Fort Hood, Tex., arrived on Nov. 5, Obama worried chiefly about morale in the exhausted ranks. The largest Army post in the country had churned with overseas deployments for eight years.

That Maj. Nidal M. Hasan was Muslim and that he allegedly opened fire at a staging area for departing troops, killing 13 people, complicated the message Obama was called on to deliver to an angry community. For months as president, he had described Islam as a religion of peace.

Under a late-fall Texas sun, a breeze lightly flapping the American and unit flags behind him, Obama eulogized each of the dead by name. As he spoke, he had already decided that tens of thousands of additional troops would be needed in Afghanistan, and in the cadences of a slow march, he ended with a tribute meant for the military more broadly.

"We need not look to the past for greatness," he said, "because it is before our very eyes."

The speech, one aide said, was intended to be a message "from the commander in chief directly to his troops."

The next day was Veterans Day, and Obama spent a rain-soaked morning at Arlington National Cemetery, where, following tradition, he laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknowns. He then strayed from script to walk, umbrella-less, among the bleach-white headstones of Section 60, where the dead from Afghanistan and Iraq are buried. He talked with the few family members he found there.

Hundreds of miles away in Terre Haute, the town gathered to bury Dale Griffin, the young sergeant whose remains Obama had helped receive at Dover more than a week earlier.

"He opened himself up to understand," Dona Griffin said. "I respect that. Some lessons are harder than others and we'd rather avoid them. But I was thankful he was there."

'Bookends'

Traveling in Asia over the next nine days, Obama began to consider a pair of seemingly incongruous speeches that he was scheduled to give by the end of the year.

In the first, he planned to announce an escalation of the war in Afghanistan and a date for a withdrawal to begin. In the next, he would accept the Nobel Peace Prize, which he had sheepishly declared earlier that he did not deserve. He began to think of the two, in the words of a senior adviser, as "bookends."

One evening on Air Force One, Obama called to his cabin chief speechwriter Jon Favreau and Ben Rhodes, the deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, who had been helping draft his foreign policy speeches since 2007. He wanted to talk about his Nobel lecture, as the acceptance speech is known.

"He said he didn't want to give the same speech on nonproliferation, climate change and other issues associated with the prize," Rhodes recalled. "He wanted to step back and give a speech that wasn't just of this moment in time but would last in history."

Obama asked them to prepare for him a list of readings that Rhodes described as a "modern-day take on war and peace -- from Churchill to King." He also asked for writings by theologians such as Saint Thomas Aquinas and Reinhold Niebuhr on the morality of war.

On his return to Washington, Obama worked through the final details of his Afghanistan strategy and chose the U.S. Military Academy at West Point as the venue for his announcement. The audience of cadets was the future officers corps in Afghanistan, and his advisers said he wanted to speak to them directly.

"He was very clear to me that we were not going to beat our chests in the speech," Rhodes said. "He told me we were not going to treat war as a glorious endeavor to be celebrated."

With his Dover visit still vivid, Obama told the cadets that "as your commander in chief, I owe you a mission that is clearly defined and worthy of your service."

"I know that this decision asks even more of you -- a military that, along with your families, has already borne the heaviest of all burdens," he said, and afterward, waded into the crowd of gray tunics to shake hands and talk.

In the following days, the president had his staff summon some clergy members for a meeting. He wanted them to hear the reasoning behind his Afghanistan strategy. And he wanted his staff to solicit their opinions on the ethical implications of war as he prepared his "bookend" speech in Oslo, scheduled for the following week.

Peg Chemberlin, president of the National Council of Churches, was among about 25 religious leaders who assembled at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building the first week of December. She described the hours-long session as "more than just a briefing, but a discussion" on the morality of war. White House staff members took notes for the president.

Obama wrote his Nobel address, which he delivered Dec. 10 under the vaulted ceilings of Oslo's City Hall, around the theme of "just war."

"I think this is a president who sees a theological element in his work," Chemberlin said. "Would I have liked to have been more deeply and more often involved in his thinking on this? Yes. But we were happy to be a part of it when we were."

During vacation, a wait

Throughout the year, Obama has tried at home and overseas to define the country's enemy in a way that preserves the viability of his outreach to the Islamic world.

He warned in Oslo that "no holy war can ever be a just war," citing causes from the Crusades through the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to make his case. Just over two weeks later, on Christmas Day, a 23-year-old Muslim man from Nigeria allegedly tried to bomb a Northwest Airlines plane as it approached Detroit.

On vacation in Hawaii at the time, Obama took several days before addressing the nation. By waiting, he had hoped to deprive al-Qaeda of a public relations victory of a presidential overreaction. To his critics, Obama was absent as commander in chief when the country needed reassurance.

Behind the scenes, the United States twice that month -- on Dec. 17 and 24 -- provided intelligence and other assistance to Yemeni forces battling the same branch of al-Qaeda that had sent the Nigerian.

Back in Washington, Obama chastised senior officials for the lapses that could allow someone to come so close to bringing down an airliner. In contrast with his quiet handling of McChrystal, a White House aide emphasized to reporters that Obama had called the oversights "a screw-up." In public, Obama spoke angrily about "systemic failures," and while he criticized his intelligence agencies for faulty analysis, he declared that "ultimately, the buck stops with me."

"We are at war," he said.

Haiti earthquake relief is stifled by chaos in Port-au-Prince

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

By Mary Beth Sheridan and William Booth
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, January 19, 2010; A01

PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI -- Security has emerged as one of the most formidable challenges in this earthquake-shattered capital, officials said Monday, limiting the ability of the United Nations and relief officials from elsewhere to distribute the food and medicine beginning to pile up at the airport.

The U.N. Security Council on Monday unanimously endorsed a proposal from Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to send 3,500 more peacekeepers to Haiti to assist in the humanitarian relief effort, but it was not clear how soon they would arrive. Pentagon officials, meanwhile, said they had about 1,700 troops in Haiti, the vanguard of an estimated 5,000 American soldiers and Marines expected to be in the country by midweek.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

"Security is the key now in order for us to be able to put our feet on the ground," said Vincenzo Pugliese, a U.N. spokesman. He said a lack of security had limited peacekeepers' access "to the operational theater" -- the city beyond the U.N. compound's walls.

The acknowledgement came as the streets here filled with people scrambling to survive six days after a 7.0-magnitude earthquake destroyed the Haitian capital. The European Commission, the executive body of the European Union, estimated that 200,000 people were killed in the earthquake, far more than the 50,000 estimated over the weekend. The new figure is based on information from the Haitian government, but officials cautioned that it was still only an estimate.

Although a few trucks could be spotted in the capital delivering water, residents said they were becoming increasingly hungry.

Many of those in need of food and medicine are children. A representative for UNICEF, which is racing to open a facility to hold children who have lost their families, said thousands of young Haitians could have been separated from their parents in the disaster.

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Late Monday, the Obama administration said it would temporarily allow orphaned Haitian children who are eligible for adoption by U.S. citizens into the United States to receive care. "We are committed to doing everything we can to help reunite families in Haiti during this very difficult time," Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said in a statement.

Exodus from the capital

In Port-au-Prince, scores of desperate residents clambered onto packed buses to flee the chaos. Across the city, buses left for the countryside full and returned to the capital empty. Prices for tickets doubled as the buses jostled in long lines at gas stations.

Station owners refused to open because there was no security to hold back crowds -- and to keep away gunmen who could swoop in and steal a day's sales.

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In the cities of Les Cayes, Jeremie and Cap Haitien, buses were hired by civic organizations, banks and other businesses and sent to the capital to collect anyone who wanted to leave. But the need for transport far outstripped supply.

"The numbers are growing every day for people who want to leave," said Michel Pierre Andre, a bus driver who makes the run to Jeremie. His bus was crammed to the roof with passengers, but the driver had no gas. Drivers and passengers were screaming at the gas station manager to start pumping some fuel, but he refused.

"Nobody wants to come to Port-au-Prince. There is nothing here. No food to buy. No work. No nothing," Pierre Andre said.

Image by United Nations Photo via Flickr

In the city's center, at the sprawling tent cities by the destroyed National Palace, residents said they had not seen a single international aid group distribute food in five days.

"I have been here every day. I heard they gave away some food but there was a riot," said Jean Marie Magarette, who was camping with her mother, sister and four children. "If you tell me they have been giving out food, I will believe you, but we have been on this spot since the day of the earthquake, and we have not seen anyone give away anything but water."

Trying to speed up the effort, President René Préval met with his Dominican counterpart and agreed to create a humanitarian corridor stretching from an airport and ship harbor in the western Dominican Republic into neighboring Haiti.

But relief remained agonizingly slow to get here. Across the capital, painted signs calling for help multiplied: "We need help," said one. "We need food, water, medical," said another.

Caring for the orphans

Officials were only beginning to cope with the challenge of caring for children separated from their parents, who in many cases died in the quake.

Nearly half of Haiti's population is younger than 18 years old. Even in better times, many of this country's youth are in desperate need of aid. In Haiti, where malnutrition is not uncommon, one in four children is reported to have a low birthweight, according to UNICEF.

A spokeswoman for the agency, Tamar Hahn, said UNICEF was seeking to set up a facility for children separated from their parents. Already, clinics around Port-au-Prince are starting to grapple with what to do with children they have treated who arrived unaccompanied by a parent.

As Hahn approached a field hospital near the airport Monday, she was met by Karen Schneider, a pediatric emergency doctor from Johns Hopkins University.

"Did you find us parents for our kids?" Schneider demanded.

Five unaccompanied children had been brought by rescuers to the clinic, run by the University of Miami-based charity Project Medishare. One, an 8-year-old boy named Jonas, curled up in a ball on the ground and cried for his parents for two days, Schneider said.

"We realized he must have seen the bodies," she said.

On another cot was a 2-year-old girl in a diaper, covered with bloody scratches.

"Orphan Baby Girl," read the sign at the end of the cot.

No one knew who had brought in the little girl, who had the bowed arms and legs of a person with cerebral palsy. She whimpered softly.

"We can tell she's never walked. She's completely helpless," Hahn said.

On another cot lay a 9-year-old, Sandi St. Cyr, who said she was on the school bus coming home when the quake occurred. Her bus tipped over, and a man brought her to the hospital for treatment of a sprain in her leg, she said.

"I don't know if my mom is alive," she said. "I haven't seen her."

Staff writers Colum Lynch at the United Nations and Michael E. Ruane and Joby Warrick in Washington contributed to this report.

FBI broke law for years in phone record searches

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By John Solomon and Carrie Johnson
Special to The Washington Post and Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, January 19, 2010; A01

The FBI illegally collected more than 2,000 U.S. telephone call records between 2002 and 2006 by invoking terrorism emergencies that did not exist or simply persuading phone companies to provide records, according to internal bureau memos and interviews. FBI officials issued approvals after the fact to justify their actions.

E-mails obtained by The Washington Post detail how counterterrorism officials inside FBI headquarters did not follow their own procedures that were put in place to protect civil liberties. The stream of urgent requests for phone records also overwhelmed the FBI communications analysis unit with work that ultimately was not connected to imminent threats.

A Justice Department inspector general's report due out this month is expected to conclude that the FBI frequently violated the law with its emergency requests, bureau officials confirmed.

The records seen by The Post do not reveal the identities of the people whose phone call records were gathered, but FBI officials said they thought that nearly all of the requests involved terrorism investigations.

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FBI general counsel Valerie Caproni said in an interview Monday that the FBI technically violated the Electronic Communications Privacy Act when agents invoked nonexistent emergencies to collect records.

"We should have stopped those requests from being made that way," she said. The after-the-fact approvals were a "good-hearted but not well-thought-out" solution to put phone carriers at ease, she said. In true emergencies, Caproni said, agents always had the legal right to get phone records, and lawyers have now concluded there was no need for the after-the-fact approval process. "What this turned out to be was a self-inflicted wound," she said.

Caproni said FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III did not know about the problems until late 2006 or early 2007, after the inspector general's probe began.

Documents show that senior FBI managers up to the assistant director level approved the procedures for emergency requests of phone records and that headquarters officials often made the requests, which persisted for two years after bureau lawyers raised concerns and an FBI official began pressing for changes.

"We have to make sure we are not taking advantage of this system, and that we are following the letter of the law without jeopardizing national security," FBI lawyer Patrice Kopistansky wrote in one of a series of early 2005 e-mails asking superiors to address the problem.

The FBI acknowledged in 2007 that one unit in the agency had improperly gathered some phone records, and a Justice Department audit at the time cited 22 inappropriate requests to phone companies for searches and hundreds of questionable requests. But the latest revelations show that the improper requests were much more numerous under the procedures approved by the top level of the FBI.

FBI officials told The Post that their own review has found that about half of the 4,400 toll records collected in emergency situations or with after-the-fact approvals were done in technical violation of the law. The searches involved only records of calls and not the content of the calls. In some cases, agents broadened their searches to gather numbers two and three degrees of separation from the original request, documents show.

Bureau officials said agents were working quickly under the stress of trying to thwart the next terrorist attack and were not violating the law deliberately.

FBI officials said they are confident that the safeguards enacted in 2007 have ended the problems. Caproni said the bureau will use the inspector general's findings to determine whether discipline is warranted.

The internal memos were obtained from a government employee outside the FBI, who gained access to them during the investigations of the searches. The employee spoke on the condition of anonymity because the release was unauthorized.

After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the need to get information quickly and connect the dots was considered paramount throughout the federal government. The failure to obtain timely and actionable information has been a recurrent theme in the U.S. counterterrorism effort, up to and including the recent shootings at Fort Hood, Tex.

Before 9/11, FBI agents ordinarily gathered records of phone calls through the use of grand jury subpoenas or through an instrument know as a national security letter, issued for terrorism and espionage cases. Such letters, signed by senior headquarters officials, carry the weight of subpoenas with the firms that receive them.

The USA Patriot Act expanded the use of national security letters by letting lower-level officials outside Washington approve them and allowing them in wider circumstances. But the letters still required the FBI to link a request to an open terrorism case before records could be sought.

Shortly after the Patriot Act was passed in October 2001, FBI senior managers devised their own system for gathering records in terrorism emergencies.

A new device called an "exigent circumstances letter" was authorized. It allowed a supervisor to declare an emergency and get the records, then issue a national security letter after the fact.

The procedure was based on a system used in the FBI's New York office in the days immediately after the Sept. 11 suicide hijackings, officials said.

On Jan. 6, 2003, then-FBI Assistant Director for Counterterrorism Larry Mefford issued a bureau-wide communique authorizing the new tactic, saying the bureau's telephone analysis unit was permitted in "exigent circumstances . . . to obtain specialized toll records information for international and domestic numbers which are linked to subjects of pending terrorism investigations."

The e-mail called this new method of gathering phone records "imperative to the continuing efforts by the FBI to protect our nation against future attacks," even as it acknowledged the phone records of many people not connected to a terrorism investigation were likely to be scooped up.

The 2003 memo stated that the new method "has the potential of generating an enormous amount of data in short order, much of which may not actually be related to the terrorism activity under investigation."

Within a few years, hundreds of emergency requests were completed and a few thousand phone records gathered. But many lacked the follow-up: the required national security letters.

Two individuals began raising concerns.

Special Agent Bassem Youssef, the new supervisor of the communications analysis unit that gathered the records, began to receive complaints from phone companies that they had not received documentation to show the searches were legal.

Youssef, a longtime counterterrorism investigator, had earlier fallen out of favor with FBI management as he pursued a whistleblower claim that he had been wrongly retaliated against and denied promotion because of his ethnicity.

He raised questions in spring 2005 with his superiors and the FBI general counsel's office about the failure to get national security letters. E-mails show he pressed FBI managers, trying to "force their hand" to implement a solution.

Youssef's attorney, Stephen Kohn, said Monday that he could not discuss the specifics of the investigation except to confirm that his client cooperated with the inspector general. FBI officials said they could not discuss the conduct of individual employees.

Separately, Kopistansky in the FBI general counsel's office learned in mid-December 2004 that toll records were being requested without national security letters. She handled a request that originated from then-Executive Assistant Director Gary Bald, who had "passed information regarding numbers related to a terrorist organization with ties to the US" and obtained toll records, the memos show.

The communications analysis unit asked Kopistansky to "draw up an NSL" to cover the search, but she was unable to get superiors to tell her which open terrorism case it involved. The request "has to specify why the numbers are relevant to an authorized investigation," she said.

An employee in the communications analysis unit wrote back that most of the emergency requests he received "come from upper mgmt. I don't always receive documentation or know all the facts related to the number, which is a problem for me when I try to get the NSL."

Kopistansky persisted, demanding an open terrorism case file for the legal rationale. "I am sure you know it is true and Gary Bald knows it's true, but it needs to be reflected on a piece of paper," she wrote.

Two months later, Kopistansky was still unable to issue a national security letter to comply with the FBI rules.

She took note of the overall problem. The issuance of a national security letter after exigent searches "rarely happens," Kopistansky warned in a March 11, 2005, e-mail seeking the help of the FBI's top national security lawyer and the deputy counsel.

By March 2005, Kopistansky and Youssef were discussing a worsening "backlog" of other cases where no national security letters had been issued and growing concerned that exigent letters were being abused, e-mails show.

"I also understand that some of these are being done as emergencies when they aren't necessarily emergencies," Kopistansky wrote in an April 26, 2005, e-mail to Youssef.

Kopistansky and the other FBI lawyers discussed a strategy to handle the past emergency searches and to allow the practice to continue.

The e-mails show that they conceived the idea to open half a dozen "generic" or "broad" preliminary investigative (PI) case files to which all unauthorized emergency requests could be charged so a national security letter could be issued after the fact.

The generic files were to cover such broad topics as "threats against transportation facilities," "threats against individuals" and "threats against special events," the e-mails show.

Eventually, FBI officials shifted to a second strategy of crafting a "blanket" national security letter to authorize all past searches that had not been covered by open cases.

A November 2006 e-mail chain indicates that then-FBI Assistant Director for Counterterrorism Joseph Billy signed the blanket national security letter. But when FBI lawyers raised concerns about it, he wrote back that he did not remember signing.

"I have no recollection of signing anything blanket. NSLs are individual as far as I always knew," Billy wrote Caproni on Nov. 7, 2006.

Billy did not immediately respond to a message left at his office on Monday. Kopistansky and Bald, reached by phone Friday, said they could not comment without FBI approval. Mefford did not return calls.

In all, FBI managers signed 11 "blanket" national security letters addressing past searches, officials told The Post.

Although concerns about their legality first arose in December 2004, exigent searches continued for two more years. Youssef's unit began limiting the number of exigent letters it signed between summer 2005 and spring 2006, seeking more assurances the requests could be covered by a national security letter, the memos show.

Phone record searches covered by exigent letters ended in November 2006 as the Justice Department inspector general began investigating.

Among those whose phone records were searched improperly were journalists for The Washington Post and the New York Times, according to interviews with government officials.

The searches became public when Mueller, the FBI director, contacted top editors at the two newspapers in August 2008 and apologized for the breach of reporters' phone records. The reporters were Ellen Nakashima of The Post, who had been based in Jakarta, Indonesia, and Raymond Bonner and Jane Perlez of the Times, who had also been working in Jakarta.

Solomon, a former Post reporter and Washington Times editor, is a freelance journalist. Johnson is a Post staff writer.

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One year in, Obama’s approval ratings have slipped, and they’re likely to get worse. He’ll probably muddle through seven more years of partisan acrimony, small-bore achievements, and bitter disappointment. But this is okay. In fact, it’s the definition of success for a modern president.

by David Greenberg

The Honeymooners

Image credit: Steve Brodner

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The promise and selling point of Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign—breaking with the past, delivering something new—was the oldest promise in American politics. Since European settlers crossed the Atlantic imagining (mistakenly) a “new world” without history, Americans have rewarded talk of new beginnings. The early colonists sought to create a society de novo in ways that Europe—with its religious wars, social stratification, and finitude of land—made impossible. To the Revolutionary generation, the acts of declaring independence and drafting a constitution seemed to ratify this mythology. And in every era since, Americans have fallen, starry-eyed, for leaders who speak of a future unencumbered by history’s weight. Theodore Roosevelt’s New Nationalism, Woodrow Wilson’s New Freedom, FDR’s New Deal, JFK’s New Frontier, even George H. W. Bush’s New World Order—all began with the promise of the new.

Of course, after the flush of a campaign, both voters and presidents have invariably discovered that history imposes constraints. After the Civil War, a cohort of young intellectuals invested hope in Ulysses S. Grant, only to see rampant corruption persist and the dream of reconstructing the South dissolve. After World War I, the crash-and-burn of Wilson’s noble quest for “peace without victory” soured Americans on an energetic executive for a decade. Bill Clinton’s New Covenant, a dead-on-arrival slogan, presaged the letdown that came as his followers realized that liberalism’s revival would require more than a few token compromises.

Obama in 2008 was just the latest aspirant to talk of beginning anew. He bested Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination in part by saddling her with the record of not one but two past presidents: the residual regret over her husband’s supposedly small-bore and blandly centrist Third Way agenda, and the collective buyers’ remorse over the Iraq War. In contrast to the dreaded “incrementalism” of the Clintons, Obama’s candidacy tantalized voters with a chance for what he called “transformational” or “fundamental” change.

One year later, transformation looks like a fleeting dream. No one knows whether Obama can deliver massive change on the scale of Lincoln, Wilson, FDR, or LBJ. But right now, the opportunity that loomed last fall seems to have passed. Conservatives—uncharacteristically mute last winter—have regained their voice, nearly derailing Obama’s health-care plan and keeping the administration on defense in the daily media wars. Meanwhile, liberals and leftists, who largely muffled their doubts when Obama had a presidency to win, are suddenly seething over his moderation and compromises—keeping suspected terrorists jailed indefinitely, countenancing his treasury secretary’s coziness with financial CEOs, letting center-right senators weaken his health-care plan. Washington pundits, for their part, intoned throughout 2009 that in taking on health care, energy, and financial reform in his first year, the president was attempting “too much.”

Yet the now-prevalent pessimism about Obama’s presidency is surely unwarranted. True, we can no longer expect Obama to be the agent of a post-partisan politics, or an uncorrupted anti-politician incapable of spin or triangulation, or America’s most civil-libertarian president, or a socialist. But in the modern age, presidents are never able to meet such expectations. Our hunger for presidential intervention, leadership, and salvation now exceeds any individual’s capacities. So the eclipse of these campaign-trail fantasies about Obama’s presidency hardly signals its death. On the contrary, it marks the true beginning.

“If there is anything that history has taught us,” John F. Kennedy said on the campaign trail in 1960, “it is that the great accomplishments of Woodrow Wilson and of Franklin Roosevelt were made in the early days, months, and years of their administrations. That was the time for maximum action.” But Kennedy was wrong—unless you choose to focus exclusively on the word years instead of days and months. As rich in opportunity as presidential honeymoons can be—and the best executives have used them to get important things done—a president’s real work doesn’t occur when he has what Obama calls the righteous wind at his back. It occurs when he has to soldier on into a fight, despite blustery headwinds.

Like the unit of 100 days, the benchmark of a president’s first year matters a lot to journalists but relatively little to historians. The 100-days concept itself, which originated with Roosevelt’s flurry of activity in early 1933, soon devolved into a transparent public-relations gimmick, as media-age presidents sweated over how to boost their grades on what soon came to be recognized as the president’s initial report card. Similarly, the now-ritualized year-one evaluation, though harmless as an exercise in journalistic stock-taking, offers a weak basis for predicting future performance. Indeed, none of the three presidents Obama has taken as his role models—Lincoln, FDR, and Kennedy—enjoyed a first year that foretold the direction of his presidency. Transformation doesn’t happen overnight.

Abraham Lincoln is Obama’s favorite president and his aspirational model. In 2007, the senator from Illinois launched his bid for the Oval Office in Lincoln’s shadow, on the steps of the Springfield Old State Capitol. With his message of national conciliation, Obama often echoed Lincoln’s second inaugural address. Even when he attacked his rivals, he suggested that he was merely combating their retrogressive politics, while he was summoning the better angels of our nature. At times, the Lincoln comparisons taxed credulity: Obama’s devotees even pointed to Lincoln’s one-term service in Congress—and his subsequent rise to become America’s greatest president—to answer the charge that Obama hadn’t accomplished enough in his career to earn him the White House. It was no surprise when, in January 2009, the incoming president took his inaugural oath on the Bible Lincoln had used, and presided over festivities branded as “A New Birth of Freedom.”

Yet as Obama surely knows, Lincoln—a transformative president if there ever was one—started his administration on a shaky note. His inaugural address fumblingly extended an olive branch to the seceding states of the South, promising (to no avail) that he would enforce the fugitive-slave law and uphold slavery in the states where it was legal. The Confederate attack on Fort Sumter forced Lincoln to change course. But on the crucial matter of slavery, the president—who had never considered himself an abolitionist—remained fairly conservative. “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it,” he wrote to Horace Greeley in 1862, “and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.” Few foresaw that his presidency would end with the abolition of slavery and a redefinition of freedom, union, and equality.

Lincoln also needed time to gain his footing as commander in chief. Unsure of himself in military affairs, he was at the mercy of his generals, including the aging and detached Winfield Scott. Dispiriting defeats—notably at the First Battle of Bull Run, in July 1861—emboldened the South. Even after Lincoln mustered the wisdom to replace Scott, George B. McClellan, his new top commander, frustrated the president by declining to advance against Confederate forces. As for his domestic agenda, Lincoln, like most 19th-century presidents, followed Congress’s lead. But even there, despite a Republican leadership eager to exploit the sudden absence of Southerners, major laws—the Homestead Act, the Pacific Railway Act, and the Morrill Land Grant Act—didn’t get the president’s signature until 1862.

No one could say that Franklin Roosevelt began his first year in office hesitantly. His first 100 days were indeed a whirlwind of legislative and executive feats. But FDR geared his first-year efforts almost entirely toward recovery—a necessary but hardly transformative goal.

Certain measures—like solving the banking crisis, which had reached catastrophic proportions on the eve of his inauguration—made a palpable difference. But the core elements of FDR’s “First New Deal” turned out to be, on the whole, ineffectual or unconstitutional—or both. The National Recovery Administration, the centerpiece of it all, which relied on industry leaders to agree to production codes, was flawed in both conception and execution, and it failed miserably. When the Supreme Court unanimously ruled it unconstitutional, Roosevelt’s aide Robert Jackson called the decision a blessing in disguise, since it spared the president from having to watch Congress decline to renew the act. The Agricultural Adjustment Act, which regulated farm production through central planning, was also struck down. And then there was Roosevelt’s Economy Act, a misguided effort in budget balancing taken up before Washington discovered the wisdom of deficit spending.

Most of the New Deal’s lasting elements didn’t come until 1935. Only after taking a beating on the airwaves from demagogic populists like Senator Huey Long of Louisiana and the radio priest Charles Coughlin did FDR sign on to the Social Security Act, which created unemployment insurance, old-age pensions, and a safety net for the disabled. And not until his second term did his administration embrace a Keynesian strategy of aggressive spending to lift the economy out of crisis. If Roosevelt’s first year was historic for its activist spirit and purposeful intervention, its economic philosophy left little mark.

While Obama styled himself Lincolnian in his rhetoric of reconciliation, and Rooseveltian in his steadfastness in the face of economic distress, he just as often summoned the Kennedy mystique, presenting himself as the telegenic, inspirational torchbearer of an ascendant generation. Obama suggested that he wanted to “move the country in a fundamentally different direction,” as he believed Kennedy had. Just as Kennedy’s election shattered the anti-Catholic taboo in presidential politics, Obama’s promised to topple an age-old wall of racial prejudice. The Baby Boomers who flocked to Obama’s candidacy said he brought back memories of JFK. The claim was echoed most tellingly by the fallen president’s own brother, who anointed Obama as JFK’s successor after perceiving a slight to the family name in Hillary Clinton’s assertion that the skill of Lyndon Johnson—she didn’t mention Jack—had been instrumental in passing the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

In fact, on civil rights, as in other areas, Kennedy’s first-year performance dismayed his enthusiasts. As a candidate, he had vowed to desegregate federal housing with “a stroke of the presidential pen.” But once in office, he demurred; fearful of alienating powerful southern Democrats whose support he needed on other issues, he focused instead on foreign-policy problems. Not until he’d cleared the 1962 midterm elections did Kennedy issue the housing proclamation. Caution likewise informed his response to the Freedom Riders—the activists who rode buses across the South starting in May 1961 to force the government to uphold the Supreme Court’s desegregation of interstate travel. When white southerners brutally beat the activists, Kennedy and his aides, unprepared, at first tried to stop the rides, sending in federal marshals only when it seemed that the violence might turn deadly.

In foreign policy, too, the biggest developments of JFK’s debut year yielded little positive transformation. The Bay of Pigs invasion, an ill-conceived CIA scheme hatched under Dwight Eisenhower, redounded to Kennedy’s benefit only because he had the sense not to duck responsibility. At his June summit in Vienna with Nikita Khrushchev, the new president felt he was verbally pummeled by the Soviet premier, in what Kennedy called the “roughest thing in my life.” Kennedy’s tepid response may have encouraged Khrushchev to erect the Berlin Wall that fall. When that happened, too, JFK was slow to act (Kennedy: You can’t stop tanks with words, read one West Berliner’s protest sign), and even his decision to send retired General Lucius Clay and Vice President Johnson to West Berlin to boost morale did nothing to deter the Soviets. At the end of 1961, Kennedy’s aide Ted Sorensen mentioned that two reporters were considering writing books about the year gone by. Kennedy was mystified: “Who would want to read a book on disasters?”

The presidency that Obama’s resembles most so far isn’t any of these but, ironically, that of Bill Clinton—ironic because Obama, speaking in January 2008 about what makes a good president, implicitly denigrated Clinton even as he praised Ronald Reagan for having “changed the trajectory of America” and “put us on a fundamentally different path.” Obama, many speculated at the time, may have been playing head games with his peevish predecessor, goading him into another outburst that would thrill the press pack. Even so, it was a strange reading of history. Reagan’s election, after all, did not initiate but culminated a long conservative effort to gain control of the levers of power; his decisions as president moved his party to the right, but they also introduced fissures and frustrations into the conservative alliance. Clinton’s tenure, in contrast, began a new era for the Democrats, and after his eight years, virtually all of the party’s leading lights embraced what had been controversial stands in 1992: an internationalist foreign policy, a growth-centered economics, and a willingness to link social policies to family values.

The point would be trivial had Obama not reached for Clinton’s 1992 playbook during the fall 2008 campaign. Obama’s battle with John McCain, which centered on the hard-pressed middle class, showed that Obama represented less a repudiation of Clinton (as the primaries had suggested) than a continuation. His rhetoric wafted to earth to focus on everyday economic concerns. His convention speech opened, after the preliminaries, not with soaring visions of post-partisan unity but with issue-based, it’s-the-economy-stupid plain language:

Tonight, more Americans are out of work and more are working harder for less. More of you have lost your homes and even more are watching your home values plummet. More of you have cars you can’t afford to drive, credit-card bills you can’t afford to pay, and tuition that’s beyond your reach.

Obama discovered this idiom just in time for the financial chaos and the debates with McCain.

Obama’s successes and struggles in his first year bear striking resemblances to Clinton’s. Both men were elected with similar mandates—Clinton won 370 electoral votes, Obama 365—and majorities in both houses of Congress. Both opened their first years well by signing a few queued-up executive orders and bills—including the Family and Medical Leave Act, for Clinton, and the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act and the expansion of the Children’s Health Insurance Program, for Obama. And both made economic revival their first priority. Both men also entered office facing tooth-and-nail resistance from a right wing that had just lost the presidency. The right imagined Clinton, as it does Obama, to be far more radical than he really was, and it thus tried to delegitimize him. A short line connects the “Who shot Vince Foster?” conspiracy theories to those surrounding Obama’s citizenship.

Republicans also forced Clinton to pass his first economic plan without their support, much as they tried to scuttle Obama’s stimulus package. And despite losing the legislative battle, they succeeded in shaping public perception of these economic bills after their passage. Clinton’s 1993 budget—which not only set the government on course for a record surplus, but also cut taxes for millions while raising them on very few—was nonetheless portrayed, and viewed by most Americans, as a tax hike. In parallel fashion, economic evidence suggests that Obama’s spring stimulus bill has already done some appreciable good. But according to an August Gallup poll, Americans consider it too big and are uncertain about its benefits. And while Obama seems likely, as of this writing, to emerge from his first health-care fight with more to show for it than Clinton did from his, the final bill probably won’t be more than an incremental step or two forward—less like Medicare than like the 1996 Kennedy-Kassebaum Act, a now-forgotten consolation prize that Clinton garnered later in his presidency.

The reassertion of political limits and the deflation of campaign-season euphoria make it unlikely that Obama’s presidency will be “transformational” in the sense that he spoke of on the campaign trail—Lincolnian in its boldness, Rooseveltian in its activism, or Kennedyesque in its uplift. More likely, it will resemble Clinton’s presidency, with eight years of muddling through, frequent bouts of sharp partisan opposition, fluctuating poll ratings, and dashed hopes.

This should be no cause for distress. Obama could do worse than to emulate Clinton, who, at the end of the day, left the country better off than when he took office. Clinton’s record remains undervalued, partly because a misleading narrative took hold (that his impeachment cost him the chance to do more), and partly because many of his gains were achieved not through the big-ticket stand-alone legislation that journalists recite in their year-end summaries but through less visible allocations within the interstices of the federal budget. No single law or presidential order gave us the longest economic expansion in history, the lowest unemployment rates in three decades, or the declines in poverty, crime, and teen pregnancy. Nor does Clinton deserve sole credit for these feats. But all were accomplished during his eight years.

Twenty-five years ago, the political scientist Theodore Lowi published a book called The Personal President. It argued that the increasingly large responsibilities placed on the president since Franklin Roosevelt’s time—of regulation, social provision, and economic management, to say nothing of the leadership of the free world—have exploded into impossible expectations. Every postwar chief executive, Lowi noted—and the observation still holds—has begun his presidency with high approval ratings and left office with the public chastened of its early optimism, if not disillusioned altogether. (The president who has exited the White House with the highest approval ratings, post-FDR, is Clinton.)

It is easy to propose that we lower our expectations for our new presidents—even, or perhaps especially, for presidents who come bearing lofty promises of transformation. But we can’t correct the problem, Lowi’s diagnosis suggested, simply by resolving to demand less from our chief executives or by vowing to learn from the past. The problem is rooted in nothing less than the presidency’s assumption of immense powers, and of a central role in our imagination. Candidates have no better path to victory than by inspiring us with dreams of a new political era, and presidents have no choice but to attempt “too much.” In doing so, however, they can only disappoint us.