Ben Rhodes： 美國馬的監軍？

【Comment】

感謝椰子樹Ajin提供這篇老文章。

《紐約時報》在一年前注意到年輕的猶太裔歐巴馬文膽 Ben Rhodes 在美國外交政策的重要性──不僅是緊密的個人關係，更有思想上的同調性。他主導美國對以色列、埃及、利比亞與敘利亞政策，還「幹掉」 Hillary Rodham Clinton, Robert Gates, David Petraeus（的意見）。

他在敘利亞事件上獲勝（不支持與裝備反對派）。但「支持」阿塞德＝（看起來）「不支持以色列」的政策卻一團亂。凱瑞近日證實敘利亞政策大失敗。會是紅旗與紅旗的辯證關係嗎？

Ben Rhodes 看起來像某種「監軍」。

凱瑞敗給「監軍」嗎？有趣！

Ben Rhodes也是緬甸開放的幕後推手。

在他背後的操縱下，白宮凌駕國務院與國防部的美日安保戰略，而採取越過日本的親中（韓國趕緊選邊站）的策略，勢將形成未來的G-2共管東亞格局。結局將會是：中日正面衝突，美國觀虎鬥或被拖下水？

值得注意！

Worldly at 35, and Shaping Obama’s Voice○NY Times（2013.03.15）http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/16/world/middleeast/benjamin-rhodes-obamas-voice-helps-shape-policy.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

WASHINGTON — As President Obama prepares to visit Israel next week, he is turning, as he often does, to Benjamin J. Rhodes, a 35-year-old deputy national security adviser with a soft voice, strong opinions and a reputation around the White House as the man who channels Mr. Obama on foreign policy.

Mr. Rhodes is drafting the address to the Israeli people the president plans to give in Jerusalem, but his influence extends beyond what either his title or speechwriting duties suggest.  Drawing on personal ties and a philosophical kinship with Mr. Obama that go back to the 2008 campaign, Mr. Rhodes helped prod his boss to take a more activist policy toward Egypt and Libya when those countries erupted in 2011.

Now that influence is being put to the test again on the issue of Syria, where the president has so far resisted more than modest American involvement. After two years of civil war that have left 70,000 people dead, Mr. Rhodes, his friends and colleagues said, is deeply frustrated by a policy that is not working, and has become a strong advocate for more aggressive efforts to support the Syrian opposition.

Administration officials note that Mr. Rhodes is not alone in his frustration over Syria, pointing out that Mr. Obama, too, is searching for an American response that ends the humanitarian tragedy, while not enmeshing the United States in a sectarian conflict that many in the White House say bears unsettling similarities to Iraq.  Three former officials of the administration — Hillary Rodham Clinton, Robert Gates and David Petraeus — favored arming the opposition, a position Mr. Rhodes did not initially support.

“It’s hard for Ben in the same way it’s hard for the president,” said Denis R. McDonough, the White House chief of staff, who worked closely with Mr. Rhodes in his previous job as the principal deputy national security adviser.  “He cares about people.  You can’t see what’s happening in Syria and not be torn by it.  At the same time, he’s very realistic.”

Normally, the anguish of a White House deputy would matter little to the direction of American foreign policy.  But Mr. Rhodes has had a knack for making himself felt, not just in the way the president expresses his policies but in how he formulates them.

Two years ago, when protesters thronged Tahrir Square in Cairo, Mr. Rhodes urged Mr. Obama to withdraw three decades of American support for President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt.  A few months later, Mr. Rhodes was among those agitating for the president to back a NATO military intervention in Libya to head off a slaughter by Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.

“He became, first in the speechwriting process, and later, in the heat of the Arab Spring, a central figure,” said Michael A. McFaul, who worked with Mr. Rhodes in the National Security Council and is now the American ambassador to Russia.

Samantha Power, another former National Security Council colleague who joined him in advocating intervention in Libya, said: “He has a very high batting average in terms of prognostication.  I don’t understand where Ben gets his ‘old man’ wisdom.”

Remarkably, Mr. Rhodes seems to have amassed his influence without rankling older and more seasoned advisers — a testament, colleagues say, to a diplomatic style not always common to members of Mr. Obama’s inner circle.

Mr. Rhodes has exerted influence outside the Middle East as well.  In 2011, he worked with Jacob J. Sullivan, a top aide to Mrs. Clinton, to persuade Mr. Obama to engage with the military rulers of Myanmar, formerly Burma, after gaining the endorsement of the pro-democracy leader, Aung San Suu Kyi.

“The person behind the scenes who played the largest role in the opening to Burma and the engagement with Aung San Suu Kyi was Ben Rhodes,” said Kurt M. Campbell, a former assistant secretary of state who led the negotiations with the Myanmar government.

Engineering a shift in Mr. Obama’s Syria policy is probably more difficult than persuading him to reach out to Myanmar, officials said, given the complexities of Syria, the volatility of its neighborhood, the grinding nature of the conflict, and the president’s deep aversion to getting entangled in another military conflict in the Middle East.

Not only is the United States limiting its support of the Free Syrian Army to food rations and medical supplies, the White House has designated one of the main Sunni insurgent groups, al-Nusra front, as a terrorist organization — a policy that alienated many Syrians because of the group’s effectiveness in fighting President Bashar al-Assad.

Colleagues say Mr. Rhodes opposed that decision, which was pushed by intelligence advisers.  He also favors equipping the rebels with more robust nonlethal gear and training that would help them in their fight against Mr. Assad’s government, a position shared by Britain and other allies.

Mr. Rhodes declined to comment in detail on his role in policy deliberations, saying “my main job, which has always been my job, is to be the person who represents the president’s view on these issues.”

In many ways, Mr. Rhodes is an improbable choice for a job at the heart of the national security apparatus.  An aspiring writer from Manhattan, he has an unfinished novel in a drawer, “Oasis of Love,” about a woman who joins a megachurch in Houston, breaking her boyfriend’s heart.

The son of a conservative-leaning Episcopalian father from Texas and a more liberal Jewish mother from New York, Mr. Rhodes grew up in a home where even sports loyalties were divided: he and his mother are ardent Mets fans; his father and his older brother, David, root for the Yankees.

“No one in that house agreed on anything,” said David Rhodes, who is now the president of CBS News.

Benjamin Rhodes, who worked briefly for Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani’s re-election campaign in 1997, was living a writer’s life in Queens on Sept. 11, 2001, when he watched from the Brooklyn waterfront as the World Trade Center towers collapsed.  The trauma of that experience, he said, led him to move to Washington in 2002.

Mr. Rhodes went to work for a Democratic foreign-policy elder, former Representative Lee Hamilton, helping draft the 9/11 Commission report as well as the Iraq Study Group report.  That report was a template for the anti-Iraq war positions taken by Barack Obama, then a senator, whose campaign Mr. Rhodes joined as a speechwriter in 2008.

At the White House, Mr. Rhodes first came to prominence after he wrote Mr. Obama’slandmark address to the Muslim world in Cairo in June 2009.  The speech was notable for Mr. Obama’s assertion that governments should “reflect the will of the people,” prefiguring his policy in dealing with Mr. Mubarak and Colonel Qaddafi.

In writing Mr. Obama’s speech next week, Mr. Rhodes is likely to focus on America’s unshakable support for Israel. But if history is any guide, he will slip in a reference to Syria’s democratic future.

“Ben always holds on to the pen,” Mr. McFaul said. “Because of his close personal relationship with the president, Ben can always make policy through the speeches and statements made by President Obama.”