phoenix80
Banned
[SIZE=-1]On Wednesday the U.S. Democratic presidential campaign officially underwent its time-honoured quadrennial metastasis into a contest of foreign-policy machismo. For about a week, Hillary Clinton's campaign had been goading Barack Obama over his opinion, ventured in the July 23 CNN/YouTube debate, that there is no foreign leader a U.S. president must categorically refuse to interview face-to-face. He would be perfectly willing, he had said, to sit down with Hugo Chavez, Kim Jong-Il or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to give them a stern talking-to about their policies and ambitions. "The fact of the matter is," he later argued, "when we talk to world leaders, it gives us the opportunity to speak about our ideals, our values and our interests, and I am not afraid to have that conversation with anybody."[/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1]Senator Clinton called this "irresponsible and naive." I'm honestly not sure how irresponsible it is; looking back over the last 10 years, it is, in fact, a little hard to understand how the tradition of summit diplomacy fell so quickly into desuetude. The United States' problems with Iraq arguably began in the first place because Saddam Hussein received mixed messages about the invasion of Kuwait from diplomatic functionaries, rather than an unambiguous "Don't go there" from the head of state. But a Democrat can't get away with saying that talk has value. When an average American voter hears that from a Democrat, what he hears is that only talk has value.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1]Candidate Obama can't afford to let people think that President Obama is likely to try solving U.S. foreign-policy dilemmas by going abroad, giving dictators all the propaganda victories a little uranium ore can buy, and spraying around the same "audacity of hope" soft-soap he does at home. In the first flush of fame, not long after his memorable 2004 Democratic convention speech, Obama won more headlines with a memorable apophthegm delivered at a peace rally: "I'm not against war, I'm against dumb wars." (By "dumb," he means "Republican.") But the criticism from the Clinton camp demanded a stronger response.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1]And what could be stronger than a tirade against an all-new enemy? On Wednesday Senator Obama delivered a speech at the Woodrow Wilson International Center, in which he promised the poor bloody American infantryman that he has every intention of pulling him out of Iraq if elected. The bad news is that he's not coming home. Obama intends to send him still further abroad, to the treacherous crags and narrow passes of northwest Pakistan. "There are terrorists holed up in those mountains who murdered 3,000 Americans," Obama told his audience (after circulating a copy of the speech). "They are plotting to strike again. It was a terrible mistake to fail to act when we had a chance to take out an al-Qaeda leadership meeting in 2005. If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won't act, we will."[/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1]It is easy to see why Obama was tempted to propose such a refocus in American foreign policy. Reminding Americans that there exists such a person as Osama bin Laden, and that he has eluded capture, is good for the Democrats. Holding out the hope of actually catching him, and suggesting that it has no chance of succeeding as long as the U.S. military is bogged down in Iraq, is even better. If Sen. Clinton attempts a critique, it simply provides Obama with another opportunity to remind Democrats that she voted for the "dumb war."[/SIZE]
So why does one get the uneasy sense that Barack Obama has just mounted his motorcycle, pulled on his leather jacket and jumped the shark with yards to spare? In waving aside any potential objections over his "actionable intelligence" from President Musharraf, the senator speaks of taking the troops that are currently struggling to control an ethnically divided country less populous than Canada and using them to put down resistance from a nuclear-armed state of 157 million citizens, roughly 156 million of whom loathe the U.S.
(Actually, he says he wouldn't use all of them; some would go to Afghanistan.) Assuming that doesn't lead to rampant civil chaos and Islamist extremists intercepting the nuclear football from Musharraf, those soldiers would still have to pull off the main mission: pacifying Pakistan's lawless Pashtundominated areas. No one likes to bet against the U.S. Army, but what Obama's talking about is a much taller order than the war of attrition now being conducted by a much broader coalition -- one which has the sanction of a sovereign government --in Afghanistan.
But perhaps the senator is not talking about a proper invasion. Perhaps he's talking about the kind of half-assed operation that went so well in Somalia back in '93. If you liked seeing dead American troops dragged through the streets of Mogadishu like sandbags bound for the levee, we bet you'll just love what Pakistan's goat-herding dope-fiends come up with.
[SIZE=-1]http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/columnists/story.html?id=9fe8c03c-c754-45f3-ad49-a06e3961231d[/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1]Senator Clinton called this "irresponsible and naive." I'm honestly not sure how irresponsible it is; looking back over the last 10 years, it is, in fact, a little hard to understand how the tradition of summit diplomacy fell so quickly into desuetude. The United States' problems with Iraq arguably began in the first place because Saddam Hussein received mixed messages about the invasion of Kuwait from diplomatic functionaries, rather than an unambiguous "Don't go there" from the head of state. But a Democrat can't get away with saying that talk has value. When an average American voter hears that from a Democrat, what he hears is that only talk has value.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1]Candidate Obama can't afford to let people think that President Obama is likely to try solving U.S. foreign-policy dilemmas by going abroad, giving dictators all the propaganda victories a little uranium ore can buy, and spraying around the same "audacity of hope" soft-soap he does at home. In the first flush of fame, not long after his memorable 2004 Democratic convention speech, Obama won more headlines with a memorable apophthegm delivered at a peace rally: "I'm not against war, I'm against dumb wars." (By "dumb," he means "Republican.") But the criticism from the Clinton camp demanded a stronger response.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1]And what could be stronger than a tirade against an all-new enemy? On Wednesday Senator Obama delivered a speech at the Woodrow Wilson International Center, in which he promised the poor bloody American infantryman that he has every intention of pulling him out of Iraq if elected. The bad news is that he's not coming home. Obama intends to send him still further abroad, to the treacherous crags and narrow passes of northwest Pakistan. "There are terrorists holed up in those mountains who murdered 3,000 Americans," Obama told his audience (after circulating a copy of the speech). "They are plotting to strike again. It was a terrible mistake to fail to act when we had a chance to take out an al-Qaeda leadership meeting in 2005. If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won't act, we will."[/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1]It is easy to see why Obama was tempted to propose such a refocus in American foreign policy. Reminding Americans that there exists such a person as Osama bin Laden, and that he has eluded capture, is good for the Democrats. Holding out the hope of actually catching him, and suggesting that it has no chance of succeeding as long as the U.S. military is bogged down in Iraq, is even better. If Sen. Clinton attempts a critique, it simply provides Obama with another opportunity to remind Democrats that she voted for the "dumb war."[/SIZE]
So why does one get the uneasy sense that Barack Obama has just mounted his motorcycle, pulled on his leather jacket and jumped the shark with yards to spare? In waving aside any potential objections over his "actionable intelligence" from President Musharraf, the senator speaks of taking the troops that are currently struggling to control an ethnically divided country less populous than Canada and using them to put down resistance from a nuclear-armed state of 157 million citizens, roughly 156 million of whom loathe the U.S.
(Actually, he says he wouldn't use all of them; some would go to Afghanistan.) Assuming that doesn't lead to rampant civil chaos and Islamist extremists intercepting the nuclear football from Musharraf, those soldiers would still have to pull off the main mission: pacifying Pakistan's lawless Pashtundominated areas. No one likes to bet against the U.S. Army, but what Obama's talking about is a much taller order than the war of attrition now being conducted by a much broader coalition -- one which has the sanction of a sovereign government --in Afghanistan.
But perhaps the senator is not talking about a proper invasion. Perhaps he's talking about the kind of half-assed operation that went so well in Somalia back in '93. If you liked seeing dead American troops dragged through the streets of Mogadishu like sandbags bound for the levee, we bet you'll just love what Pakistan's goat-herding dope-fiends come up with.
[SIZE=-1]http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/columnists/story.html?id=9fe8c03c-c754-45f3-ad49-a06e3961231d[/SIZE]
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