Strategic Failure 1 A MAN OF CHANGE Hand in hand, the President and First Lady strode toward the center of Hradçany Square through a cloud of rapturous applause that overwhelmed the Czech symphony wafting from the loudspeakers. Youth predominated among the crowd, and Americans among the youth, to the dismay of a blogger from the Economist who had shown up to ask Czechs their opinions of the new American president. The official cameras had been positioned to capture Prague''s medieval castle in the background, adding Old World gravitas to the excitement generated by the New World couple. Barack and Michelle Obama circled the podium for sixty seconds, their faces beaming with the joy of people who had been in the White House for only a few months. As the First Lady took her seat, the President''s mouth opened into a wide grin that revealed two rows of large, gleaming, and perfectly white teeth. With the rectangular gray boards of his trademark teleprompters on his flanks like oversized rearview mirrors, Obama thanked the crowd and launched into the usual pleasantries. Obama had come to Prague to deliver his first speech on nuclear weapons, a subject that had long been dear to him. During the presidential race against Senator John McCain, Obama had convinced quite a few people of high reputation that he was a foreign policy realist, cognizant that interests and force ruled international affairs.

Yet he aimed the opening salvos of his Prague speech at the views of realists, including the view that nuclear weapons had become a permanent fixture on the global landscape, and the view that nuclear deterrence preserved peace. "If we believe that the spread of nuclear weapons is inevitable," Obama said, "then in some way we are admitting to ourselves that the use of nuclear weapons is inevitable." Peace, Obama continued, could be achieved not through military strength, but through international cooperation on disarmament. "When we fail to pursue peace, then it stays forever beyond our grasp," Obama intoned. "We know the path when we choose fear over hope. To denounce or shrug off a call for cooperation is an easy but also a cowardly thing to do. That''s how wars begin. That''s where human progress ends.

" Peace-minded people needed to come together to drown out the siren songs of those counseling war. "I know that a call to arms can stir the souls of men and women more than a call to lay them down. But that is why the voices for peace and progress must be raised together." ··· Among journalists, bloggers, talk show hosts, and other political junkies, Obama''s Prague speech rekindled interest in an article he had written in college, twenty-six years earlier, on student opposition to nuclear weapons and the military. Near the end of his senior year at Columbia, Obama had decided to write about student activism for the campus publication Sundial. At the time, left-wing political activists were struggling to stay above water at America''s universities, including Ivy League schools like Columbia where they had flourished in years past. The United States was in a conservative mood, having recoiled at the radical excesses of the late 1960s and early 1970s, which had been centered on university campuses. With the end of the draft and the Vietnam War, student organizers had been deprived of issues that could easily rouse the passions of their classmates, whether they be passions of idealism or self-preservation.

In comparison with their predecessors of the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Ivy League students of 1983 were more focused on traditional college activities. They were far more likely to go to class, drink beer, or frolic with members of the opposite sex than to attend political rallies or drive to Washington to picket members of Congress. Among the politically minded, of whom there still existed a considerable number, some had figured out that more could be gained by advancing within the once-despised "system," by getting good grades and good jobs, than by shouting slogans on the sidewalk. Disconcerting quietude could be found even at Columbia, which had been rattled by some of the fiercest of the protests against the Vietnam War. Fifteen years earlier, student radicals had occupied five university buildings in opposition to a university administration that they considered to be too supportive of the U.S. government and its war in Vietnam. They held on to the buildings for a week, sustaining themselves on fried chicken that their supporters tossed into the windows.

It took an army of New York City policemen wielding clubs and tear gas to evict them. In March 1983, the student body was "tame if not apathetic," in the words of Obama biographer David Maraniss.1 Obama went to interview campus organizers at Earl Hall, once the bustling nerve center of the 1968 student protests, which was now a sorry shell of its former self, like a California mining town fifteen years after the Gold Rush. The two campus organizations that young Obama was covering in his article, Arms Race Alternatives and Students Against Militarism, were both struggling to attract members beyond the single digits. Rob Kahn, a member of Students Against Militarism whom Obama would quote in his article, remembered thinking at the time, "This is a group of fifteen people that meets once a week and doesn''t do much." In his view, the earnest student journalist with the unusual name took the group more seriously than it deserved.2 "By organizing and educating the Columbia community," Obama wrote in his Sundial article, the campus activists were laying "the foundation for future mobilization against the relentless, often silent spread of militarism in the country." He observed that "by adding their energy and effort in order to enhance the possibility of a decent world, they may help deprive us of a spectacular experience--that of war.

But then, there are some things we shouldn''t have to live through in order to want to avoid the experience." Obama''s only reservation about the two campus groups was that they did not go far enough. By concentrating on freezing nuclear weapons, the members of Arms Race Alternatives were not tackling the larger problem of the military itself. "The narrow focus of the Freeze movement, as well as academic discussion of first versus second strike capabilities, suit the military-industrial interests, as they continue adding to their billion-dollar erector sets," Obama lamented. One of the leaders of Arms Race Alternatives, Mark Bigelow, told Obama that the "narrow focus" on nuclear arms control reflected a recognition that abolishing the military entirely was excessively ambitious for the time being. "We do focus primarily on catastrophic weapons," Bigelow explained. "Look, we say, here''s the worst part, let''s work on that. You''re not going to get rid of the military in the near future, so let''s at least work on this.

" As is customary for articles in college publications, Obama''s Sundial reportage disappeared soon after it was published. It evaded journalists and opposition researchers during the 2008 election, before mysteriously showing up on the Internet in January 2009. As soon as it came to light, Republicans pounced on its contents as evidence of Obama''s misguided views on national security. Obama''s own aides did not dismiss the article as the high-minded musings of an immature college student, as might have been expected, but instead described the opinions expressed therein as "deeply felt and lasting," according to author James Mann.3 It would be the only early marker of Obama''s views on war and the military. Although numerous books have been written about Barack Obama already, including Obama''s two pre-presidential memoirs, the evidence on his views of the military between 1983 and 2001 is surprisingly thin. Obama chose to keep quiet on the subject, at least outside of conversations with friends and family. For nearly twenty years, Obama wrote nothing about national security and said nothing that was recorded by others.

His resurfacing came in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attacks, when he decided to pen an op-ed on the cataclysm in the Hyde Park Herald. A small community newspaper, the Herald served a few affluent neighborhoods in the otherwise poverty-stricken south side of Chicago, where Obama was then living as an Illinois state senator. For the Obama of 2001, the devastation of 9/11 did not provoke anger at the terrorists, as it did for so many other Americans. The attack was most significant to him because of what it said about global poverty and America''s neglect of it. Terrorism, wrote State Senator Obama, "grows from a climate of poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair." America needed "to devote far more attention to the monumental task of raising the hopes and prospects of embittered children across the globe--children not just in the Middle East, but also in Africa, Asia, Latin America, Eastern Europe, and within our own shores."4 Over the course of the next year, Obama''s position on terrorism underwent a dramatic shift. When he appeared at an antiwar rally at Chicago''s Federal Plaza on October 2, 2002, Obama began by saying, "After September 11, after witnessing the carnage and destruction, the dust and the tears, I supported this administration''s pledge to hunt down and root out those who would slaughter innocents in the name o.