Archives for June 2010

In the interests of fair dealing, I have to say the UK Ministry of Defence disputes my suggestion that British troops will be among the last to leave Afghanistan. They say that what Dr Liam Fox meant was that Nato allies should come to Helmand province and help the British fight.

What the UK defence secretary actually said was:

"The bottom line is that, because we are in one of the most difficult parts of Afghanistan, and sometimes I think we think that is the only part of Afghanistan, the likelihood is that will be one of the last parts to transition over to Afghan security charge, and I think that we, together with the Americans, need to ensure that we have done what we have done already, is to have a fully integrated mission and part of a genuine coalition."

My source's interpretation of the latter half of this sentence is that we all should be the last to leave. There is no suggestion that the UK should go, to be completely replaced by US or other Nato forces.

Given my original question was whether British troops would stay as long as US combat troops, all this rather suggests, via a very circuitous route of Dr Fox's reply and diplomatic interpretation, that the simple answer is "yes".

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The UK defence secretary Dr Liam Fox who is in Washington has hinted that British troops may be among the very last to get out of Afghanistan.

You can read his speech to the Heritage Foundation about the alliance with the US and the need for "strategic patience".

He told me British troops were fighting in one of the hardest parts of the country and the bottom line is "the likelihood is that it will be one of the last parts to transition over to Afghan charge".

"The mission in Helmand is one of the most difficult ones and I imagine one of the last places they will be able to transition from," he added.

His met his counterpart, US Defence Secretary Robert Gates today, the fourth such meeting in four weeks.

It strikes me there is something of an axis forming between the US and UK defence departments, with both insisting that the strategy be given time to work.

President Obama has put great emphasis on December's review, mentioning it several times in a weekend news conference, to judge what is going right and what is going wrong.

But the military seems less keen on this being a big examination of strategy.

In his speech, Dr Fox talked about people keeping their nerve and said that the enemy would be comforted by talk of leaving before the job was done.

"It would send the signal that we did not have the morale, resolve and political fortitude to see through what we ourselves have described a national security imperative."

In the interview, he quoted his opposite number at the Pentagon saying "we've got to give it time to work, we can't pull a plant up every day to look at its roots to see how it is growing", and that leadership is all about being positive.

"We've got to give the strategy time to work on the ground without constantly trying to change and question it," he said.

It is always possible that I am over-interpreting but I suspect there is quite a battle ahead - and not just in Afghanistan.

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General David Petraeus, who is giving evidence to senators on the Hill who are looking to confirm his appointment as the top US military commander in Afghanistan, has said he will look "very hard" at the rules of engagement.

It is a big issue in the military - many soldiers feel the current rules, which are designed to prevent the loss of civilian life, put them at risk and allow the enemy to escape.

The most striking phrase in his testimony so far has been: "Helping to train and equip host nation forces in the midst of an insurgency is akin to building an advanced aircraft while it is in flight, while it is being designed, and while it is being shot at. There is nothing easy about it."

I suppose the trouble with this analogy is that it is not merely difficult. It is plainly impossible. I am sure the general did not mean us to draw this conclusion, but it is the obvious one.

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For once, a Senate hearing may just generate light rather than heat.

The senators hero-worship the super-fit intellectual warrior (aren't they all these days?) Gen Petraeus and the chances of them blocking his appointment to the top military job in Afghanistan are just about nil.

But what he tells them will be interesting.

I've got little doubt President Obama wants to be on something like a five-year track to withdraw combat troops from Afghanistan.

At the end of the G20 summit in Canada I asked British Prime Minister David Cameron whether he had meant to say British troops "can't" be in Afghanistan in five years. His answer was robust. He meant what he said, and stressed the next two years were vital.

In his news conference President Obama was asked if he agreed with this timetable. He didn't quite come out and say "yes" but he said this was now America's longest war.

He urged people to have a little optimism, said he was expecting the strategy to work and observed that every target for withdrawing from Iraq had been hit.

So his answer boils down to a hope that in the near future the Taliban will be licked, Afghan forces will be in good shape to take over, and the withdrawal that will start next summer can accelerate.

But senators will want to know what happens if the president is not right. Will the general ask for more troops to finish the counterinsurgency job?

Or will there be a point where the strategy is judged to have failed and there is a move back to the vice-president's preferences for a counter-terrorism strategy (hit the bad guys, rather than build an environment where they can't thrive).

Few are likely to be as bold as academic, Daniel Drezner. Writing in Foreign Policy he suggests that the current threat from al-Qaeda is simply over-exaggerated but there should be a lively debate about what happens next.

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The allegations read like a spy novel. The FBI says highly trained Russian secret agents were sent to live under deep cover in the United States in the 1990s, living as married couples. Their task was to infiltrate policy-making circles. Among their successes were getting close to a scientist involved in designing bunker-busting bombs and a top former intelligence official.

Moscow Centre - Russia's intelligence headquarters - allegedly asked them for information on Washington's perception of Russian foreign policy, Iran's nuclear programme and Obama's intentions at a summit last year and what he intended to offer Russia to "lure" it into co-operation.

It is said they communicated with the spy masters in Moscow by posting apparently innocent pictures on the internet which contained detailed texts. They also used special radio signals and computer technology. The FBI observed older techniques as well, money buried next to a beer-bottle marker, and "brush pasts" in the park.

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Toronto

Toronto doesn't quite know what hit it over the weekend. This city prides itself on its diversity and laid-back charm. Tear gas, baton rounds and burning police cars are always upsetting if they happen in your city, but Toronto's natives were particularly hurt and angry that it happened here. It followed hard on the heels of an earthquake, another freakishly alien event for locals. Was Toronto's pain worth it for the world?

The seismic activity can't be blamed on the twin peaks of this summit, the G8 and G20, but the attempt at riot was a direct reaction to the presence of all these world leaders.

Not all of Canada is happy with the bill - $1.1bn (£732m) it cost, to talk about the need for greater austerity. This includes $57,000 for a fake lake in the media centre. The G8 meeting was held in a lakeside resort some 100 miles north of Toronto, so to bring some spirit of place inside this vast aircraft hanger of an exhibition centre, they've build a deck flanked by racks of canoes, with spacious wooden chairs, overlooking a cinema-sized screen playing scenes of boating or tracking shots across forests and lakes. Huge speakers twitter bird song which unfortunately competes with the coarse shrieks and roars of "homo footballus" watching another big screen nearby.

Despite this, it is still more relaxing to sit and ponder a script line here, rather than hunched at the trestle tables that serve as desks in the work space. But I can understand the Canadian taxpayer baulking at the bill to reduce my stress levels.

But is the bill worth it for the world? It is easy to see this meeting as an attempt to paper over the cracks. We came to Toronto talking about the split between Europe and the US. Whether to stimulate, whether to cut. We end up with President Barack Obama praising a "courageous" British budget, and a communique that within the same paragraph talks of both the "need to follow through on delivering existing stimulus plans" and stating that "those countries with serious fiscal challenges need to accelerate the pace of consolidation".

Facing two ways at once, or adopting a sensible, flexible approach? Perhaps a bit of both. President Obama's real worry is that countries that don't have a big deficit, like Germany, aren't doing enough to encourage spending. Particularly spending on US exports. Maybe I am not enough of an economist to understand this argument. But it is culture and quality that means Germans buy German hi-fis and cars, not some fiscal measure.

At their separate news conferences both David Cameron and President Obama dismissed the idea of a split. The president, in a nice phrase, talked of a "violent agreement".

The truth surely is that getting 19 economies (the 20th seat is for the EU) to agree even a rough-and-ready broad direction of travel is very difficult. Presuming that it is a worthwhile endeavour in the first place, it has to be slow. The details are not the stuff of headlines and the headlines are not the stuff of drama. But not that long ago it would have seemed like the purest fiction to get Russia, the US, China, France and the UK agreeing economic policy, let alone them welcoming a say from the likes of Brazil, South Africa and India. Talking may not be enough. But it is a start.

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Toronto

President Barack Obama hasn't sat down to talk to David Cameron in Canada yet, but the UK prime minister may have turned it into a rather awkward affair. The prime minister's comments about withdrawing troops from Afghanistan are bound to alarm the White House.

Mr Cameron has said that British troops should be out of Afghanistan before the next election in five years' time. "We can't be there for another five years, having been there for nine years already."

Some reckon this question will define the Obama administration. At any rate, it is going to be the big question on Capitol Hill next week, when Gen David Petraeus will face senators in a hearing to confirm his new role in Afghanistan. They will want to know how strongly he backs the president to start bringing some troops home by July next year.

But the president has never talked about a date to withdraw all American troops. The unspoken assumption is that's because that would be in a distant future. I seem to remember Hillary Clinton once remarking that there are still American troops in Germany, although World War II has been over for more than half a century.

It does more, though, than raise awkward questions. Britain is the United States's biggest partner in Afghanistan, by far. If all UK troops withdraw, the Americans could be left just about alone.

No doubt contributions from others will provide some fig leaf but the feeling that the US is on its own could cause resentment among the American public. We haven't yet had any White House reaction, but my guess is that this is a very unwelcome intervention ahead of the first official meeting between prime minister and president.

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"We lead the world in financial reform." That is the White House message to the G8 and G20 summits.

President Barack Obama has arrived in Canada with something to crow about. At the last G20, it was agreed that the world had to have new financial rules, although it would be left to individual countries to design their own laws.

After a late-night session, Republicans and Democrats agreed a framework for new rules curtailing some practices on Wall Street and giving consumers more protection.

He's had to make some sacrifices to get here: in particular there won't be greater regulation of loans by car dealers. Still, this puts the US ahead of Europe and there may be some jitters about the extent of the new laws.

But it will be a political tool for Obama. He's trying to take the initiative after a difficult few months and, on the White House lawns, before he left for Toronto, he portrayed it as yet another victory.

"Over the last 17 months, we passed an economic Recovery Act, health insurance reform, education reform, and we are now on the brink of passing Wall Street reform. And at the G20 summit this weekend, I'll work with other nations not only to co-ordinate our financial reform efforts, but to promote global economic growth while ensuring that each nation can pursue a path that is sustainable for its own public finances."

He didn't, of course, note that his latest stimulus package, worth $100bn, has bitten the dust for the third time in the Senate.

Asked if he could get financial reform through the Senate, he said "you bet". I wouldn't put any of my own money on this after the health care thrills and spills but he'll be willing to have an argument, in an election year, with Republicans he can portray as sticking up for Wall Street bankers against middle American consumers.

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McChrystal's gone: who's next?

In his speech announcing the general's departure, President Barack Obama also gave other senior colleagues a dressing-down:

"I've just told my national security team that now is the time for all of us to come together. Doing so is not an option, but an obligation."

Of course some of Gen Stanley McChrystal's talkative team will go. But what about those civilians who had so annoyed the general? There's the notably abrasive special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke. And his former military boss, retired Gen Karl Eikenberry, the US ambassador to Afghanistan.

Senator Kit Bond, vice chairman of the intelligence select committee, has called for the sackings on Fox news.

"That would be a good start," said Senator Bond. "That's the kind of plan that I hope the president was referring to yesterday when he said we must have the entire team working together."

Thomas Ricks, author of a book on Petraeus and with another on the way about American generals since 1945, also says they should go.

In the New York Times, he writes that Holbrooke and Eikenberry should be fired for past indiscipline and that "Mr Obama should then replace them with a team that has a single person clearly in control, with the power to hire and fire the others. And he should send that new group to Kabul with clear orders that they should get along, or expect to be relieved." They are civilians, of course, but the interesting article goes on to argue the military should revert to past practice with swifter and more frequent firings.

Over at Slate, Fred Kaplan also argues that they should be sacked, on the grounds they don't really agree with the current strategy and don't see Karzai as a proper partner.

I suspect if Gen David Petraeus wants them gone, then they are toast. Mr Obama has to give him a pretty free hand, which makes for an interesting relationship in the future. Gen Petraeus is said to be a better politician than Gen McChrystal, and one who makes sure he has a good relationship with the civilian side of operations, so he may not charge in demanding that heads roll.

We may hear more of this at his hearing next week. We will certainly hear more about the sixty-million-dollar question: will the troops really start coming home next year if the war isn't being won? More on that next week (or sooner).

UPDATE: 2045 BST

President Obama's just been asked about further sackings. He indicated he was happy with the team but expected "extraordinary performance" from now on in.

On the issue that will dominate the Petraeus hearings on Tuesday at the Senate, he said that troop withdrawals from Afghanistan would begin in 13 months' time but that wouldn't mean it would be a quick exit.

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It was a tricky moment but President Obama has got this one right.

Sacking McChrystal looked tough. But on its own it would have been a move fraught with danger.

The risk was great. He could have been accused of sacrificing the best man for the job, undermining the war effort because of a few ill-chosen remarks.  

Picking Petraeus was smart and neutralised that threat. Even the opposition in Congress applauded. Leading Republican John Boehner said he was the right man for the job.

The man nicknamed "Peaches" when he was a cadet at West Point is something of a darling of the politicians on the Hill, the hero of the Iraq surge, which allowed America to pull itself out of the maelstrom. 

By choosing McChrystal's boss he has avoided charges that he's sacked the most senior man available. He's actually found somebody with more experience.

The strategy at risk? The president's plan is pretty close to  McChrystal's enthusiastic six-page document outlining a counter terrorism strategy for Afghanistan.

So what? Petraeus wrote the book. Literally. Or at least the Army's field manual which says "Soldiers and Marines are expected to be nation builders as well as warriors. They must be prepared to help re-establish institutions and local security forces and assist in rebuilding infrastructure and basic services. They must be able to facilitate establishing local governance and the rule of law."

Petreaus is also judged to be a very good politician, although he constantly denies he has ambitions to actually become one and run for president as a Republican. 

I suspect that part of the reason that the decision to fire McChrystal was taken so quickly was because Obama felt pushed around and manipulated by the Pentagon in the past, and he wasn't going to let a general get away with it again. 

In the book I mentioned yesterday, The Promise, Jonathan Alter argues Obama forgave McChrystal for his previous insubordination, last October, because he thought he was being used as a pawn by Petreaus to box him in to sending more troops to Afghanistan. 

If that is the case at least now he'll be dealing with the organ grinder, not the monkey.

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General Stanley McChrystal will go into the White House as possibly the most important soldier in the world.

It's not certain he will emerge with any job at all.

Summoned to Washington to attend the National Security Meeting on Afghanistan in person, it promises to be an uncomfortable experience even for such a hard nut.

After all, across the table, will be a president who disappoints him, a vice president he's dismissed with a "who's he?", special representative Richard Holbrooke whose e-mails he can't bear to read and the US ambassador to Afghanistan who he says "betrayed" him. Oh, and the national security advisor who an aide says is "a clown". 

All this rudeness is quoted and not denied in a profile in Rolling Stone Magazine. The article by Michael Hastings is a brilliant piece of journalism, combining a world class scoop, a convincing and vivid profile of McChrystal and his inner circle with profound reflections on the strategy in Afghanistan. 

McChrystal's disappointment with the president was established at their first meeting. The general apparently felt Obama wasn't very interested.

He's indirectly quoted as saying the president seemed uncomfortable meeting the Pentagon's top brass. This I can well imagine.

While he's not the anti-military pacifist that propagandists love to portray, Obama sees the military as a tool to be used, and war as occasionally necessary rather than glorious.

He frequently pays tribute to men and women in uniform, but you can tell this is respect for duty and sacrifice rather than the veneration some Americans feel. He has none of the fascination for the tools of war - guns and hardware - that is common for so many men. It's a rather complex mixture.

McChrystal, as painted in the profile, is on the other hand straight out of Hollywood. Once a hard drinking rebel, who spent much of his time at military school on punishment duties, he became a charismatic, no-nonsense leader, without respect for authority or the rules - an ascetic hard man, whose top team is anarchic but fiercely loyal.

A lead from the front sort of guy who's as happy employing a techno geek with a nose ring, as a crew cut Marine, as long as more of the enemy die as a result. In America it is sometimes hard to work out if art mirrors life, or life imitates art. 

This is not the first time McChrystal has stepped out of line. He was seen as using a speech where he spoke of "chaosistan" to box the president in, and force him to send more troops to Afghanistan.

He was given a presidential telling-off in Air Force One in Copenhagen.

According to Jonathan Alter's new book on Obama's first year - "The Promise" - the president concluded all generals wanted more troops and this one was a pawn being played by more political operators in the Pentagon. This time he may not be so forgiving.

Alter, who says Obama hates internal disputes becoming public above just about anything else, argues McChrystal and the Pentagon's behaviour triggered the "most direct assertion of presidential authority over the military" since Harry Truman sacked General Douglas MacArthur.

So is this a MacArthur moment? Even if McChrystal walks, I don't think so. MacArthur was trying to expand the Korean War into China, deliberately defying the chosen policy of his commander in chief. 

McChrystal has been loose-tongued, ill-disciplined and recklessly rude to his colleague and civilian superiors. That is more than enough to cost someone their job. But he has not disobeyed orders, and is faithfully implementing the policy that the president has ordered.

But Afghanistan is back in the spotlight again. While oil has washed the conflict off the front pages (president's may be able to walk and chew gun at the same time, we journalists can't) it strikes me things haven't exactly been going to plan. 

At the time of the intense US deliberations over what to do in Afghanistan, it struck me as odd that just about all the think tankers and military intellectuals who abound in Washington were enthusiasts for a counter insurgency strategy (Coin) that had been so ignored in the past, particularly in Iraq. 

While it may be true that a full blooded desire to win hearts and minds, to build a civil society from a functioning democracy to good roads and drinkable water may be the only way to win such a war, it requires a degree of commitment to a new world order, neo-imperialism or what ever you want to call it which America may not have the stomach for.

When the headlines about McChrystal's fate fade, the most important part of the Rolling Stone article may be the last sentence. "Winning, it would seem, is not really possible. Not even with Stanley McChrystal in charge."

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BP chief executive Tony Hayward, now routinely identified by the media here as the most hated man in America, had to sound extremely contrite.

He has.

But that is only part of the job. The US Congressional panel hearing he is facing is about what went wrong, what caused the disaster.

His repeated insistence that the investigation is still going on, that it is too early to tell, that he wasn't part of the decision making process, is infuriating and exasperating the politicians who want and expect clear answers.

This is going very badly for Mr Hayward and for BP.

While it is obvious Mr Hayward will continue to get a rough ride there are interesting tensions in the committee, along political lines.

A Texan Republican congressman Joe Barton, talking about the $20bn set aside for the victims of the leak, said the White House had subjected BP to a shakedown and had forced them to set up what he called a slush fund.

He said it bordered on the criminal and made him ashamed of his country.

Democratic congressman Ed Markey replied that it was not a slush fund, but proof the US government was working to protect its most vulnerable citizens.

The exchange is a timely reminder that for many American politicians big business is always preferable to big government.

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BP's chairman has so far kept way in the background, letting his chief executive become the target of America's ire with the company.

Today he spoke before the assembled media just outside the White House, and he may have wished he'd stayed out of the limelight.

The Swedish former boss of Eriksson, Carl-Henric Svanberg, said that although oil companies were seen as greedy, BP wasn't like that and cared about "the small people". He said it three times.

OK. English is not his first language and we all know what he meant. But it didn't sound great, and I wait to see what the small people make of it.

But what of the substance?

Well, $20bn sounds like an awful lot of money. It's what BP has agreed to put into an independent fund to pay the claims of Gulf residents affected by the spill. That's £13.5bn, about a quarter of the company's entire worth, £63bn, and considerably more than their profit last year of £8.75bn.

The president went out of his way to say this wasn't a cap, a limit, on what BP ends up paying, although I am sure they hope it is more than enough. But there seems to me to be a problem.

The man who will run the fund Kenneth Feinberg was also in charge of the pay-outs for victims of 9/11, so I am sure he knows how to estimate hugely difficult claims. And there must be a procedure, standards and rules that have been established over years.

But just how far does BP's liability extend?

Take Fred Simmons, who owns a company selling and renting properties, a hotel and an idyllic beach-front bar in Pensacola, Florida. I watched the president's Oval Office speech with him and he liked what he saw. But he's worried about the future.

After six grim years, bookings were up this year, the highest ever, and he was looking forward to a great season. But with the threat of the oil, which has not in fact reached the pristine Pensacola beaches, most people have cancelled. He has lost at least $125,000.

But there is a way forward. BP asked him to get people to put in writing that they cancelled because of the oil. He's done that and has high hopes of getting his money.

But what about next year? If there is still oil around people may not book in the first place, so how do you estimate the business lost? What if it goes on for years? Fred tells me of a great new restaurant that's opened on the beach and has virtually no customers. How much do they claim? Can and should BP underpin the economy of the Gulf Coast for years to come?

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Pensacola, Florida

It is a sombre moment when the American president addresses his nation from the Oval Office. Hands clasped before him, Barack Obama summoned the imagery of war. He talked of a "battle plan", oil "assaulting the coast", "a siege" and a promise to capture 90% of the oil soon. He underlined the sense of gravity, the sense of the challenge he was dealing with.

"Already, this oil spill is the worst environmental disaster America has ever faced. And, unlike an earthquake or a hurricane, it is not a single event that does its damage in a matter of minutes or days. The millions of gallons of oil that have spilled into the Gulf of Mexico are more like an epidemic, one that we will be fighting for months and even years.

"But make no mistake: we will fight this spill with everything we've got for as long it takes. We will make BP pay for the damage their company has caused."

If this was a war, there is no doubt who is the enemy. A recent opinion poll suggested more than 70% of Americans thought Mr Obama not tough enough with BP. He wasn't letting that go unanswered.

"I will meet with the chairman of BP and inform him that he is to set aside whatever resources are required to compensate the workers and business owners who have been harmed as a result of his company's recklessness. And this fund will not be controlled by BP. In order to ensure that all legitimate claims are paid out in a fair and timely manner, the account must and will be administered by an independent, third party."

He promised to heal the Gulf and to find out what caused this disaster. One problem was a lack of an alert watch-dog, and he took swipes at the Bush administration and his opponents' view that government is always the biggest problem. The symbol of failure: the Minerals Management Service, which would get a new boss, a tough former prosecutor.

"Over the last decade, this agency has become emblematic of a failed philosophy that views all regulation with hostility - a philosophy that says corporations should be allowed to play by their own rules and police themselves. At this agency, industry insiders were put in charge of industry oversight. Oil companies showered regulators with gifts and favours, and were essentially allowed to conduct their own safety inspections and write their own regulations."

Accused by some of being too passive, of not dealing firmly enough with BP, basically with not taking charge, Mr Obama admitted only to not moving fast enough to deal with that agency. But then his big political push: not letting a crisis go to waste, as a top aide once said of the financial meltdown. The president said the tragedy was a powerful and painful reminder that America used 20% of the world's oil and had only 2% on its own soil. The switch away from carbon fuels could not be a distant vision.

"The one approach I will not accept is inaction. The one answer I will not settle for is the idea that this challenge is too big and too difficult to meet. You see, the same thing was said about our ability to produce enough planes and tanks in World War II. The same thing was said about our ability to harness the science and technology to land a man safely on the surface of the moon. And yet, time and again, we have refused to settle for the paltry limits of conventional wisdom. Instead, what has defined us as a nation since our founding is our capacity to shape our destiny - our determination to fight for the America we want for our children."

It was a measured, sober speech of quiet power, the speech of a president projecting absolute command, if not empathy. But the last quotation says much: a strong, very American invocation of the country's might and optimism, its ability to muster its strength and overcome.

It was intended to rally a people who were rather feeling he'd not gripped this crisis. He gripped this opportunity, at least, and White House officials will hope they are right that this is an inflection point, a crux where negative becomes positive.

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Florida

The walls of the naval base where President Obama made his last speech of this trip to the Gulf of Mexico are lined with picture-sized exhortations.

One caught my eye.

"Leadership is action not a position."

That spells out perfectly the challenge for the president in tonight's speech from the Oval Offfice. Presidents tend to only make such live broadcasts when they want to underline the gravity of what they are discussing, and Obama's decision is very deliberate.

His officials say it is what they call "an inflection point" - a mathematical term to describe the point where a wave on a graph changes direction. In other words, it is a moment where they hope views will change from negative to positive.

It seemed as if his mind was on the bigger speech when he spoke to the military in Florida, delivering his words quickly without much inflection. But it may point to a wider problem.

His speech, in its content, was sensitive, spending as much time praising the military as talking about the Gulf.

But every time he mentioned the Marines the boys would let out an impressive, coordinated whoop. It wouldn't have cost much to acknowledge their high spirits with a joke or a reference.

But he ignored it.

The president's real problem is whether he has gripped this crisis hard enough from the start.

But the perception that he is too cool, too detached, is a big part of it. He must hope tonight is indeed an inflection, not a confirmation of an existing trend.

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Alabama

While Congress gears up to rip into BP, accusing the company of taking careless short cuts to save money, the president has been in Alabama in a public display intended to demonstrate to America that the Gulf Coast states are open for business.

Barack Obama ordered crab claws and crawfish tails at Tacky Jack's in Orange Beach. Later, he announced new measures to ensure that seafood from the Gulf is safe. But this attempt at jaunty confidence is at odds with some of his own words and with the reality we see around us.

On the boardwalk, people are emerging from the sea washing themselves off in the open air showers with a sense of disgust. A woman from Missouri has been body-surfing with her young daughter - they come here every year. But their boards have a light coating of oil and the bottoms of her daughter's feet are tacky with the stuff.

It's not dramatic. You can hardly see it. But you can feel it.

She tells me there's a light sheen on the ocean. Should BP set up a fund to pay for the clean-up? "Well I didn't do it," she tells me. "It's not my fault."

The beach's bleached sand is so white its glare hurts your eyes. A young man walking along the strand wears a T-shirt mentioning BP that is too rude for you to be told about here. He's been collecting a petition to get the oil company stripped of all its assets so it can pay for the clean-up.

An older woman holding a bottle of water paddles glumly. She's not much of a TV interviewee, understated, just repeating that someone has to clear it up, that she worries about what is out there, worries about the people who rely on the sea for their livelihood. She's been coming here for 20 years and her sadness is poignant.

Around the tourists, workers in overalls clear up the beach as best they can. This only started coming in at the weekend and lumps of oil litter the beach looking very much like a scattering of dog mess fouling a public park.

Although the president's two-day trip is intended to reassure, his words are also alarming. He's compared the spill to 9/11 in the way it may change a nation's policy. He is giving his first ever address from the Oval Office, a deliberate sign that this is of grave concern, and says:

What we're dealing with here is unique because it's not simply one catastrophic event. It's an ongoing assault whose movements are constantly changing. That's what makes this crisis so challenging. It means that it has to be constantly watched. It has to be tracked. We're constantly having to redeploy resources to make sure that they're having maximum impact. And we also need to make sure that we are constantly helping folks who have been hurt by it, even as we're stopping the oil from spreading into more and more areas.

The fuss from Britain about an assault on a British company has gone almost unnoticed here, by the people and by the media.

The prime minister's phone call has certainly not induced the president to go soft on BP. Since the call, the White House has set a deadline for BP to speed up their clean-up efforts, which they've done, and has called for a fund to be held in trust for the spill's victims.

But the moral pressure on the company will only grow by the end of this week. A congressional committee, which meets on Thursday to question BP chief executive Tony Hayward, has accused the company of a series of decisions in the days before the disaster that cut corners to save time and money and led to catastrophe.

It concludes that if the facts of its detailed investigation are correct, the company's carelessness and complacency has led to the people of the Gulf paying a heavy price.

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After such a sweet beginning, could Cameron be on collision course with Obama? No, not over THAT. I'm pretty sure the two men just about see eye-to-eye over both BP's responsibility and its economic importance, but have to do a bit of posturing for their public, by which I mean their media.

The pressure on Cameron to "stand up" to the president has more to do with internal conservative politics than the special relationship.

But there could be a falling out down the road. Or even just up the road, at the G8 in Canada at the end of this month. Just as the new prime minister is warning that what is on the way is not so much belt-tightening as a crash diet, the president is calling for the belt to be let out a little more.

President Obama's relationship with Gordon Brown always seemed rather frosty. I am told that Mr Brown's assumption that things would be done his way, and his "working methods" didn't go down well at the White House, although I am not sure if this tension was genuinely between the two men or just their officials. But at least Mr Brown was an
enthusiastic supporter of the president's plan to spend to avoid economic catastrophe.

On this side of the Atlantic the plan continues. Mr Obama has just written to leaders in Congress urging them to approve a $50bn plan to stop teachers, firefighters and police being laid off, to continue spending on scientific research and to pay for tax cuts of small business.

He says: "Taken together, these measures to jump-start private sector job creation, avoid massive layoffs at the local and state levels and help the unemployed are critical and timely ways to further the economic recovery and spur job creation. At this critical moment, we cannot afford to slide backwards just as our recovery is taking hold. We must take these emergency measures."

But the UK and much of the rest of Europe is following a different path. The model is Mrs Merkel's Swabian house wife, scrimping and saving, rather than a WAG on a spree, spending to fend off a Great Depression. Will American conservatives swallow hard and urge the president to follow Europe?

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One side appeals to a people who are hurting, with populist attacks on big oil, while the other warns of the dangers to big business. It's familiar enough in Louisiana. The editor of Radio 4's Today programme had the great idea of getting me to look at the career of the Kingfish, Huey Long, and his attack on the oil companies in the 20s and 30s in the light of his old state's current plight, and the mood of ire towards BP. You can hear the results by clicking here.

Until now Huey Long had been a rather peripheral figure in my vision, an off-stage presence or walk-on part in other people's biographies. My hazy image was of a buffoonish comic opera fascist who FDR called "one of the two most dangerous men in America" (the other was General McArthur). After talking to Professor Raphael Cassimere of New Orleans University I wonder if I and others are doing him an injustice.

The professor says that while most politicians "promise the moon and give you sparklers" the Kingfish delivered on his promises, and while he used unconstitutional and illegal means, so did his opponents, who then got to write the history. Chatting to colleagues about Long, one of the most common things that springs to their minds is racism. But my limited research indicates that while he might not have been an early leader of the civil rights movement, racism was one form of populism he disdained.

Still, he was often compared to Mussolini and Hitler at the time, and not without reason. He was a bully and a tyrant - a flamboyant, sinister, comic one. He dragged his state into the 20th Century, building thousands of miles of road, smashing down old buildings and erecting new ones to his greater glory. But I wonder if this slightly misses the point and I wonder whether "Louisiana's Lenin" might be more apt.

I am not suggesting that being like this dictator rather than the other two is any better - simply that the caricature isn't entirely accurate. While Long wasn't a communist, his commitment to socialism was rather more than the skin-deep nod of most fascists. He really did redistribute wealth, tax big business and argued for a 100% tax on all incomes over a million dollars.

I know labels of left and right are shifting and can be fairly pointless when looking at the past, but it does thrown up another question. While populists of the right are two-a-penny in America these days, there are no populists of the left. Left-wingers carefully moderate their language, praise big business and calibrate towards the centre. The right has little hesitation appealing to its own, using only the most threadbare disguise. Why is this?

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Should I be investing in a tin hat and boarding up my home? If I believe everything I read in the British press, it would be a wise move. According to them, there is a wave of anti-British sentiment sweeping the United States, on the back of the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster.

It's news to me.

I have just come back from my third trip to the Gulf Coast and have not found a shred of evidence for this. I reported a couple of weeks ago on a few jokes about my accent and one historical jest. Not even that this time. Knowing the interest in this "story" back home, I deliberately asked if there was any such resentment. No-one took the bait.

I can't read every blog, every supermarket tabloid and listen to every radio talk show and cable channel, but I haven't heard or read anything to support the thesis. That may change. Indeed the media has a magic that sometimes turns what it wishes for into reality.

On the other hand, you can hardly underplay the fury towards BP and the dislike of the British energy giant's chief executive, Tony Hayward, in the US Gulf, in the media and among those politicians who deal with them. The fact that Mr Hayward is not American has probably made him all the more irritating to his US audience.

The fury directed at BP may be stronger because they are a foreign company. It's hard to say. The executives of Goldman Sachs may feel their American nationality has not helped them. The Japanese bosses of Toyota would probably see it slightly differently.
There is no doubt that the attacks on BP have made it very clear how much the company has been damaged and that may well have a huge effect in Britain.

Politicians and the public are rightly concerned about that. President Obama's increasingly harsh rhetoric, which now appears to be at an intensity and volume to satisfy the Washington press corps, may have played into this. His suggestion that BP should not pay dividends has hurt.

US Attorney General Eric Holder has said he will take "what ever steps necessary" to make sure BP pays the full cost of the clean up. A reporter asked Mr Holder if he was looking at measures to stop the company paying out a dividend to shareholders.

He replied: "It is our aim, and I can make a pledge to the American people that they will not pay a dime towards the clean up of the gulf region and BP will be held to its responsibility to pay for all damage, and we will take all necessary steps to make sure that occurs."

Pressed if that meant taking out an injunction, he said: "we will take whatever steps are necessary."

Hardly reassuring for BP shareholders.

But anti-British feeling?

I suspect the facts will never get in the way of a good story for some, but I'll forgo the tin hat for now.

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Louisiana

The man in charge of the government's operation in the Gulf is complaining that BP isn't being open enough.

Admiral Thad Allen, of the US Coast Guard, has written to BP's boss, Tony Hayward, reminding him of the company's promise and obligation to pay "just and timely" reimbursement to families and business that have suffered economic damage because of the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

His essential complaint is that BP has not allowed the authorities access to its data base to check that it is making the payments. He says the government needs more openness and detail on what he calls "this critical issue". This is "riding herd" on BP, as President Barack Obama promised.

When I quoted the president in a radio piece, a colleague said he'd never heard the phrase and asked me to explain it. But to me it is a rather graphic metaphor of a cowboy tightly controlling cattle, making sure no beast wanders off. I can almost smell the rawhide. But it is not clear whether the rodeo performance is all for show.

The letter comes less than 24 hours after a statement from BP proudly saying that it had paid out $49m and issued nearly 18,000 cheques from its 25 claims offices. Importantly, the company adds, it has not denied a single claim.

People here say BP is paying out, but slowly. The boss of a crab processing factory told me he had been forced to ransack his house for every last piece of paper. "I've given them everything except my birth certificate: I've given more than I have to give the tax people." But he had got a cheque for $5,000.

But he was worried that this only covered last month. And he didn't think his Mexican workers, in tears on the phone when told they were being laid off, would see any of the money, although presumably they are entitled. Of course, BP can't be expected to pay any claim without evidence - but the last thing fisherman, oil workers and small business people here feel like doing is paperwork.

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Crises can destroy reputations. They can also make them.

Outside the Southern Sting Tattoo Parlour in Lafourche country, owner Bobby Petrie uses art to make his point.

It's a mural showing a skeletal figure of death in tattered black robes looming over a map of the Gulf, the letters BP on its back. Next to it, a picture of President Barack Obama scattered with question marks, "what now?" across his forehead. But it is the small sign propped at the bottom that interests me: "Bobby Jindal for President".

Bobby Petrie is full of praise for Louisiana's governor.

"He's doing a real good job," he says. "He knows what we need. He knows what needs to be done to protect us. I don't think the president does, not in the way that Jindal does."

We are on the way to see Jindal at a news conference.

Louisiana's youthful governor was once seen as the Republicans' answer to Obama. He is an Ivy League intellectual, personable, the face of modern America, the son of Indian immigrants, with social and economic views that tick most conservative boxes.

Then he was chosen to answer the president's first State of the Union address and was widely thought to have bombed. Some wrote him off for good. I suspect they were wrong. This crisis is putting him back on the national map and is likely to be the making of him.

At a news conference at Grand Isle he pulls off something of a publicity coup. He was due to entertain the New Orleans Saints at the governor's mansion to celebrate their stunning win in the Super Bowl. Instead he's persuaded the team to go down to the Gulf coast and meet those suffering because of the oil leak.

He said this would be "fitting and symbolic". Indeed it is. The Saints were underdogs for a long while, then their stadium was home for many of those made homeless by Hurricane Katrina. Their victory was a huge source of pride for New Orleans.

But it's Jindal's passion that shines through. There's a certain lack of polish that some might see as a welcome absence of slickness. Southern accents should be drawled out slowly, but his delivery is machine-gun rapid. Words tumble over one another as though he's worried he will run out of time to make all his points.

He uses a piece of cardboard stuck with nine photographs to illustrate his point. Earlier, this rather old-school prop fell on the head of a CBS radio man who I noted - with pride in my profession - did not flinch or move his microphone.

Jindal had just been on a boat trip out to the wetlands where the oil is doing the most damage, taking a senior representative of BP with him.

"You have to smell it, touch it, see it for yourself," he says, noting the first thing you notice is "the deafening silence of the marsh that should be teeming with life".

He is passionate too about his plan to build berms, dredged-up isles of sand, to link barrier islands and the keep the oil away from the main shore line. He seems excited that the coast guard has approved more projects and BP has agreed to pay off the $36m build. As the man from BP makes the announcement some of Jindal's staff hug and the small crowd applauds. It's obviously an emotional time for the politicians of this state that has been through so much.

The mayors beside him praise his "unbelievable leadership" and say he's been "wonderful".

Jindal says the spill threatens a way of life but the people of Louisiana are resilient, strong and generous. He calls this crisis "a war". He could be one of the victors.

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The flashing smile has disappeared, the inspirational invocations of hope are absent.

In their place are words like "catastrophe", "disaster", "risk" and "danger". But watching President Obama's performance over the last few weeks I can't help feeling his heart isn't really in it.

Americans living along the Gulf of Mexico feel pummelled, upset and furious and the media here are insistent their commander-in-chief holds up a mirror to their emotions. As I watch this theatre unfold a scene from a play keeps popping into my head.

The presidential sternness seems forced - he appears relieved when he can take refuge in wonkish detail of blowout preventers, marine risers and other underwater arcana.

That scene I keep thinking about ? Hamlet... beside Ophelia's grave when he asks:

Woo't weep? woo't fight? woo't fast? woo't tear thyself? Woo't drink up eisel? eat a crocodile? I'll do't. Dost thou come here to whine? To outface me with leaping in her grave?

Laertes has just jumped into his sister's grave and Hamlet is insisting that he's willing to match this histrionic performance. His lack of extravagant display so far is no measure of his grief.

The president might sympathise. He is under constant pressure to weep, fight and tear himself in flamboyant demonstration of his anger at this undoubtedly awful disaster.

His spokesman Robert Gibbs is daily pressed by reporters to share evidence of presidential fury, forcing him to reply earnestly: "I've seen rage from him, Chip. I have."

That was not enough. Questions went on. Can you describe it? Does he yell and scream? What does he do?

Gibbs suggested the president clenched his jaw in meetings. This clearly isn't good enough. I've seen pictures of the situation room. Could the water glass not be filled brimful with eisel - that's vinegar by the way.

And while eating crocodiles might not be on, alligator burgers are a speciality of the Gulf region. Such symbolism might be lost on the White House press corps.

But perhaps the president shares a problem with Hamlet that goes to the heart of what it means to be a leader, and what leading means to Barack Obama. They are both earnest.

Because he rose to power on a tide of dazzling rhetoric one can forget Obama had to force himself to perform, that in the early days his team despaired that he was too earnestly professorial, too dismissive of cheap political tricks.

For a while he rejected what became his most famous sound bite - "yes we can" - as stomach-churningly trite.

And he still doesn't like the nasty stuff - as president he is wary of too much anger. The airwaves in the US are full of ham actors sawing the air, ripping their shirts.

For them there can never be an honest disagreement about policy - the president has to be in league with terrorists, un-American, a reincarnation of Chairman Mao. Obama has trouble finding his own way of being angry without resorting to pantomime.

But what this president shares with Hamlet is being an unfamiliar character in a familiar setting.

Hamlet is of course a tragedy of many depths, but it is in part a reaction to what went before - Shakespeare's reflection on the tradition of the revenge tragedy, those blood-soaked Jacobean dramas of such horrific violence that they would make even Tarantino blush.

Shakespeare is reflecting on what happens if you plonk a new man, the new emerging man of the renaissance, learned and intellectual, reflective, with a rich inner life, in the middle of a fairly hackneyed plot. What happens to a new sort of man in an old sort of drama.

You might remember it didn't turn out too well.

The president is not the prince, even his critics don't argue he's holding back from one rapier thrust, one obvious decisive action that could save the day.

But it does seem sometimes that reflection is prized above action in the Obama administration.

The man once nicknamed "No drama Obama" sees leadership as the careful consideration of conflicting views, pulling together of the best strands to build a solid consensus.

It would be neat to see this as a reaction to the decision making style of President Bush, who was so obviously an actor in a revenge tragedy - making instant judgement calls based on gut instincts without much reflection or debate about the consequences.

But Obama's been like this for years - in his late twenties at Harvard law school he was known as a moderator, solving problems by asking questions.

A new biography reveals that friends gently ribbed him about it. When they went to the cinema they would ask in mockery of his style: "Do you want salt on your popcorn? Do you even want popcorn?"

One can imagine Obama engaging in agonised soliloquy - he does seem consumed by the Gulf conundrum rather than relishing the opportunity to display leadership and seize this crisis by the scruff of its neck.

It is too easy to forget he's barely been in office for 18 months. We're barely out of act one and there's still time for him to learn on the job. Unlike Hamlet, he gets another chance. This is not yet a tragedy for the president .

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A bad call by an umpire has become a lesson in good sportsmanship that Washington could do well to emulate, according to White House spokesman Robert Gibbs.

As far as I understand it, which is not very much, the Detroit Tigers' pitcher Armando Galarraga should have had a perfect game, not only getting all his Cleveland Indians opponents out but without any one of them even reaching a base.

But the umpire made a bad ruling which deprived him of this triumph. It's a big deal: there have only been 20 perfect games in more than 100 years of Major League Baseball.

This article is a superb take on the emotion after the game, even if the details of the play are written in a language that completely eludes me. But the point is, the umpire was kicking himself for the mistake, apologised and the apology was accepted with good grace.

About to walk out of the room after his regular briefing, Robert Gibbs was asked a question about the match and came back to the podium.

Joking that he was speaking with the full weight of the federal government, he said he hoped that the pitcher would be awarded a perfect game by the baseball authorities. When the assembled hacks, obviously kept up-to-date on their blackberries and iPhones, chorused that that wasn't going to happen, he joked again - that he'd seek an executive order.

His next remarks were unexpectedly serious. He reflected he had a six-year-old who had just started playing baseball and that this was an example both to seasoned fans and to children like his son.

"To watch an umpire take responsibility, to watch a pitcher do what he did, that type of sportsmanship exhibited was tremendously heartening."

He continued: "Somebody made a mistake, somebody accepted that apology. It's a good lesson for baseball, perhaps a good lesson in Washington."

"It's just not cricket" is a common, if old-fashioned, English expression for something being unfair, but perhaps Galarraga's graciousness should become a new byword for accepting the unfairness of life.

Play up, and play the game, chaps, and football (soccer) players take note.

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The distinctive sound of the fiddle soared as Cajun music blared out of the speakers, precariously balanced on a supermarket seafood cart selling uncooked scallops and boiled crab.

The man serving was saying to the customer in front of me: "You notice BP didn't get going for a while. They didn't want to lose the oil, they were trying to make money rather than solve the problem."

The customer agrees that BP have behaved disgracefully, but the specific accusation is ludicrous. It doesn't make any sense at all. But it shows the depth of anger towards the company.

But the point is, despite the Cajun music the exchange took place not in the bayou but in my local supermarket in the Washington suburbs.

The sense of solidarity with the people of the Gulf and of anger with BP is growing. The company's name is officially those lone initials, not standing for anything. But their origin is not lost.

In Louisiana when people heard my accent, they were sure to stress that it was once British Petroleum. Not in a nasty or vindictive way, more in the nature of teasing, and I am not sure that it will do any direct damage to our country's image.

One man went on to point out this came on top of British responsibility for expelling his forefathers from Nova Scotia, the original Acadia, some 255 years earlier.

Louisiana would be a less interesting place without this piece of colonial ill treatment but I nevertheless apologised and dissociated myself from the Government of the Duke of Newcastle. It is likewise necessary politely to dissociate oneself from BP.

For the company this is only going to get worse. One British analyst I heard on National Public Radio suggested that the whole thing may cost them a year's profit. US attorney general Eric Holder is in the gulf today with senior colleagues, talking to prosecutors to see if there are sufficient grounds for a criminal prosecution.

In a Rose Garden statement that was largely a repeat of his short speech on Grand Isle on Friday, the president said that if new laws were needed to prevent such catastrophes in the future, they would be bought in and, "if our laws were broken leading to this death and destruction, my solemn pledge is that we will bring those responsible to justice on behalf of the victims of this catastrophe and the people of the Gulf region".

Of course, a criminal prosecution would be terrible news for any company but it is those new laws, tighter regulations that may be worse.

One thing that struck me about the NPR interview was that the administration's reaction to the disaster is likely to make off shore drilling a lot more expensive in the future. BP may find other oil companies joining the chorus of blame.

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