Consider your response carefully, Senator

So Barack Obama has an article coming out in the July/August 2007 issue of Foreign Affairs. In it, Illinois' junior senator appears to be laying out his vision of what foreign policy might look like under an Obama administration. And I have to agree with my fellow Kossack Jerome a Paris that what Obama thinks foreign policy should look like is pretty doggone creepy.

Let's have a look at some of the greatest hits:

Today, we are again called to provide visionary leadership. This century's threats are at least as dangerous as and in some ways more complex than those we have confronted in the past. They come from weapons that can kill on a mass scale and from global terrorists who respond to alienation or perceived injustice with murderous nihilism. They come from rogue states allied to terrorists and from rising powers that could challenge both America and the international foundation of liberal democracy. They come from weak states that cannot control their territory or provide for their people. And they come from a warming planet that will spur new diseases, spawn more devastating natural disasters, and catalyze deadly conflicts.

So far, so good. Obama spends the next little while pointing out exactly how the Shrubbery has managed to muck up things in Iraq. (All points I wish he would have made when he voted on the last supplemental funding bill to continue giving Bush carte blanche on the Great Iraqi Clusterfuck.)

Then we come to this bit:

Such leadership demands that we retrieve a fundamental insight of Roosevelt, Truman, and Kennedy -- one that is truer now than ever before: the security and well-being of each and every American depend on the security and well-being of those who live beyond our borders. The mission of the United States is to provide global leadership grounded in the understanding that the world shares a common security and a common humanity.

Again, no problem there. A refreshing change of pace to see a U.S. politician acknowledging that there are other people in the world and that most of them want exactly the same things we want--but have a much harder time getting them, because we in what we are proud to call the "First World" are disproportionately sucking up most of the planet's resources and telling the rest of the world to go screw.

I started worrying in that second quoted paragraph, when Obama lauded Franklin Roosevelt for building "...the most formidable military the world had ever seen..." but without providing any context for that achievement. Roosevelt was not responding to intelligence "chatter" about a possible threat that might materialize anywhere in the world, at any time, under any guise. He had an honest-to-God worldwide shooting war that finally landed on his doorstep and to which he had to respond with military force, after military force had been launched against us. Anyone who has read even a couple of good books on the Second World War and its preliminaries knows that Roosevelt had a hell of a time with a fiercely isolationist Congress that was solidly backed by the American people. He was barely able to get a military draft passed through Congress after France fell in the summer of 1940--and that just gave him manpower. It did nothing to equip those new enlistees, nor to address the gaping holes in matériel that had hampered our military operations for years and which played a large part in our total ineffectiveness in the first six to eight months of the war.

But that isn't what Obama is talking about. Let's read on. After again re-hashing the utter failure of the Bu$hevik Doctrine in the Middle East, here's what Obama has to say about how he might handle it:

Throughout the Middle East, we must harness American power to reinvigorate American diplomacy. Tough-minded diplomacy, backed by the whole range of instruments of American power -- political, economic, and military -- could bring success even when dealing with long-standing adversaries such as Iran and Syria.

And it gets better worse from there:

To renew American leadership in the world, we must immediately begin working to revitalize our military. A strong military is, more than anything, necessary to sustain peace.

...We must use this moment both to rebuild our military and to prepare it for the missions of the future. We must retain the capacity to swiftly defeat any conventional threat to our country and our vital interests.

...We should expand our ground forces by adding 65,000 soldiers to the army and 27,000 marines.

...I will not hesitate to use force, unilaterally if necessary, to protect the American people or our vital interests whenever we are attacked or imminently threatened.

The rest of the article is a fairly reasoned re-hash of the standard Democratic talking points on the major foreign policy issues facing us--nuclear proliferation, global terror, global warming, etc. But if Obama really meant that last sentence in the blockquoted section just above this paragraph, none of the remaining five pages of the article means diddly squat. Because what that last sentence means is, effectively, continuing the Shrubbery's policy of reckless pre-emptive war whenever it suits the American president. And that means continuing the policy of American exceptionalism. And that's precisely what most of the rest of the world is pissed off at us about: thinking that we're somehow special and that the rules we make for everyone else don't and shouldn't apply to us.

Continuing George W. Bush's "Fuck you" to the rest of the world, in the form of standing up for a bigger, stronger military that is more able to execute even more pre-emptive missions is not exactly what I would call an effective means of building "just, secure, democratic societies" or of "restoring America's trust," the titles of the final two sections of Obama's article. In fact, I would call that attitude the polar opposite of what we must do to repair the damage done to our network of alliances and our global reputation by seven years of unfettered Bu$hevism--meaning unilateral, pre-emptive use of military force for any reason or for no reason at all other than the fact that it looked good to a bunch of no-name Republican think-tank hacks who thought it would be a good boost for a president in popularity ratings trouble, and might get us some cheap oil to boot.

If America is ever going to regain the kind of leadership role it had under the very presidents Obama lauded at the start of his piece, it is going to have to renounce the Shrubbery and everything that it has stood for. No more American exceptionalism. No more unilateral action unless we have irrefutable evidence that we are not afraid to produce in the court of public opinion--and to "show our work" as to how we got it, so there can be no allegations of "sexing up" the facts. No more extraordinary renditions. No more torturing. No more attempts to dance around the protections afforded to anyone on American soil or in American hands by our Constitution--be they citizen or be they enemy.

But that is not Obama's vision. Obama effectively wants bigger and better toys to do what George W. Bush wanted to do, only Obama promises to do it better. And that's not good enough for me.

I've said all along that I don't think Obama is sufficiently seasoned or experienced to be president, and if the views he expressed in this article are in fact indicative of his thinking (and not just some staffer's idea of what would play well on the Sunday talk shows and at Beltway cocktail gatherings), then that's settled as far as I'm concerned. There is no way I can support four more years of Bu$hevik thinking, even if Obama promises, as he does in the Foreign Affairs piece, to cut out all the really objectionable stuff like torture. Not good enough, Senator.

So here's the question I want you to think very carefully about before answering: Are you sure that's really what you want your foreign policy to look like? Because if you tell me it is, then I will tell you this in return: There is no way on God's earth you will get my vote for president in 2008. Nor is there any way on God's earth that you will get my vote for a second term in the Senate in 2010, or for any other office of public trust or honor in the United States. Because what you say you want your foreign policy to be does not speak for me--and I tend to doubt that it will speak for many of my fellow Americans, either.

Comments

[Bryan]

The man doesn't get it.

I was concerned with a couple of his statements about Iran that indicate he doesn't understand the dynamics or history of the situation, and now he has added Syria to the mix.

There is no reason to consider either country as an outright adversary, both offered and delivered assistance after 9/11 and were ignored and then were pressured by the Shrubbery to do things they can't do.

Nothing about Israel-Palestine which is the root of all the other problems.

He just doesn't get it - a bigger stick is not the answer to foreign policy problems.

[Incertus]

I will not hesitate to use force, unilaterally if necessary, to protect the American people or our vital interests whenever we are attacked or imminently threatened.

I suppose I can see why you'd worry about that sentence, but I tend to think you and Jerome are both overreacting, if only because I tend to trust Obama (or any Democrat, for that matter) more to seriously respond only if we're in imminent danger than I would any Republican.

A lot of any process is a matter of trust--does Obama seem to be the kind of guy who would go off at a second's notice? Not to me--he was against the Iraq war from the beginning, after all, and nothing he's said up till now has made me question his judgment when it comes to use of force, at least not yet. Just because Bush was an utter douchebag doesn't mean Obama will be with the same power--and he will have it. Any president will. That's why elections matter, after all.

Think back to Clinton in Bosnia--the UN wouldn't back him and NATO didn't want to until he made it clear he was going in regardless, and that wound up being the right thing to do. But Clinton had earned our trust. Bush shat on it. Obama hasn't, not yet, and in the most important military conflict of our generation, he was on the right side at the beginning.

I haven't settled on a candidate yet, but I certainly haven't ruled Obama out, and this does nothing to make me think any less of him.

[Michael]

I'm afraid I can't go that far, Brian. The fact that you have a "D" after your name is no guarantee of moral rectitude, and it certainly doesn't automatically bestow infinite wisdom or military genius (as witness Joementum, alas). Plus, as Bryan noted in the first comment, his whole idea is ass-backward. It's the old conundrum of the man with a hammer seeing everything in terms of how he can use his hammer to solve it.

Besides, if Obama had done more than just read a few briefing memos on the swathe of problems he discussed in the Foreign Affairs piece, he should have seen that military solutions are the least likely to work and should therefore be the last to be tried--and then only when all else has failed. So we need a bigger, beefier military why? We already spend more on national defense than most of the rest of the world combined, and we still can't secure our borders or the safety of our citizens abroad. I've come to the conclusion that maybe, after 60 years of the military-industrial complex, it's time to try looking for alternative solutions.

On top of all that, the problems our military is going to be facing on the short-to-medium-term horizon are actually far more likely to require smaller, more flexible, and considerably better-trained and -equipped forces than we currently have. Where was that proposal in Obama's vade mecum? And where, for that matter, was his call to eliminate the criminally stupid "Don't ask, don't tell" policy that keeps costing us some of our best personnel simply because they happen to be sexually attracted to people with the same gender as their own? More men and more toys won't accomplish anything--especially if we don't fix some of the structural and ideological problems plaguing the military first.