Obama & the Liberal Warmongers
Source: Obama never presented himself as a candidate of peace. Rather, he used his prescient opposition to the Iraq war to create an image that attracted most people on the foreign policy Left.However, even his comments on Iraq were carefully calculated.
Disappointing as the administration seems likely to be, it never looked any other way to those of us who avoided being infected by Obamania.
The argument for Sen. Obama was that whoever he was, he was neither the warrior goddess nor the tempestuous, erratic Republican who sang about the possibility of bombing Iran and who thought President Clinton was a wimp for refusing to order a ground invasion of Serbia. Put bluntly: the alternatives to Sen. Obama were worse.
But Barack Obama never presented himself as a candidate of peace. Rather, he used his prescient opposition to the Iraq war to create an image that attracted most people on the foreign policy Left.
However, even his comments on Iraq were carefully calculated: he proposed a 16-month withdrawal and said he would rely on the advice of military commanders, but said ever less on the issue as it faded from public debate.
He joined his opponents in advocating an expensive expansion of the Army and Marine Corps.
On Afghanistan and Pakistan he was more hawkish than John McCain, proposing a troop buildup in the former and overt cross-border raids against the latter.
Sen. Obama attended the AIPAC convention and pandered as obscenely as his opponents. Although urging a dialogue with Iran, he promised to do "everything in my power" to stop Tehran from developing nuclear weapons and refused to rule out use of military force.
Sen. Obama started out with an evenhanded approach to the Russia-Georgia war, but quickly followed Sen. McCain in backing Georgia's impulsive, irresponsible Mikheil Saakashvili, who, evidence increasingly indicates, triggered the conflict with an unprovoked invasion of the territory of South Ossetia.
Sen. Obama proposed an extensive democracy-promotion program and advocated concerted action in humanitarian crises, such as Darfur. Never once did he question any of Washington's antiquated Cold War alliances.
In fact, after his election he called up South Korean President Lee Myung-bak and promised to "strengthen" an alliance which has lost any role in today's world.
To shore up his foreign policy credentials Sen. Obama chose his colleague Joe Biden as the Democratic vice-presidential nominee.
Yet Sen. Biden was an uber-hawk on the Balkans, pushed NATO expansion up to Russia's borders, backed the Iraq war, flew to Tbilisi to embrace Saakashvili in the latter's aggressive war, and speaking of Israel declared: "You don't have to be a Jew to be a Zionist."
Not only is Sen. Biden a master political panderer, but it has been decades since he, just like Sen. McCain, has seen a war that he didn't want America to fight.
In short, the Obama-Biden ticket never presented itself as anything but hyper-interventionist.
Some of Sen. Obama's supporters wanted to believe that he was dissembling on these and other issues for political reasons. And maybe he was, though his appointments so far suggest otherwise.
In any case, it is dangerous to assume that one's candidate is telling the truth when you like what he says, but that he is lying to the world to win votes when you disagree with him. After all, if he is an unregenerate and unashamed liar, why should you believe he ever is telling you the truth?
The argument for Obama really was primarily an argument against McCain: the latter saw war as a first resort against most everyone – Iraq, Iran, North Korea, and Serbia.
The only thing that seemed to occasionally hold Sen. McCain in check was the fear that the American people would not back new foreign adventures, such as engaging in nation-building in Africa.
And, in the important case of Iraq, Sen. Obama got the most important decision, whether to go to war, right. Unlike Sen. McCain, Sen. Obama appears to value rational judgment, believe there are some limits to Washington's power to transform the world, and recognize that war normally is not the best answer to every international problem.
The president-elect's rush to embrace the liberal interventionist establishment in choosing his foreign policy staff suggests that the next four years will be a lot like the last eight in substance if not tone, and a lot like the previous eight years in both substance and tone.
This means that anyone who believes in a foreign policy of peace and nonintervention must continue the battle. The fight against the Bush-McCain neocons is over.
The fight against the Obama-Clinton liberal interventionists is about to begin. More...