Obama & Foreign Policy: Experience is a Poor Substitute for Good Judgment & Rational Thinking

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Obama & Foreign Policy: Experience is a Poor Substitute for Good Judgment & Rational Thinking

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Over the past week, Barack Obama has come under fire for his comparative lack of experience and his views towards foreign policy. McCain has attacked Obama as being “naive” and failing to understand “the fundamental elements of national security and warfare.” The old man is in search of a balcony, as Jimmy Breslin might say, and his comments would be only ridiculous, if they weren’t so terribly and ironically wrong and hypocritical. It was Obama, after all, who had it dead on from the beginning about Iraq and the proper execution of a successful US foreign policy. Among the remaining candidates, Obama alone had it right, had the foresight to see beyond emotion and arrogance and to understand that Iraq was at best a distraction from our real goal of eliminating the threat of al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups. At worst, it was a foreign policy decision that would squander the international good will that the US acquired after 9/11; that would alienate allies who had never stood so strongly in support of our cause, even when that meant we must go to war in Afghanistan; perhaps most devastatingly, however, it was a foreign policy decision that would create, rather than eliminate, new enemies, destroy our economy, cost many thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars, and leave us as unwelcome imperial occupiers for what McCain proposes could be a hundred years. Obama alone understood the psychology of the situation. In fact, this country was led to war in Iraq by emotion and naiveté.

McCain assured Larry King in September of 2002: “I believe that the success will be fairly easy,” and according to the LA Times, he corrected Wolf Blizer, claiming “we’re not going to get into house-to-house fighting.” In March 2003, the LA Times reported, McCain stated: “There’s no doubt in my mind...we will be welcomed as liberators.” The country was led into the Iraq war by fear and emotion drummed up by the attacks on 9/11. It was McCain and not Obama who fell prey to this emotion and who accepted the faulty intelligence of the Bush administration as irrefutable fact and who misunderstood with shocking disregard the unstable region in which we had chosen to launch an unprovoked war. Obama and not McCain was aware that this instability existed in concert with the atrocities of Saddam Hussein. He understood also the outcome.

On October 2, 2002, the then Illinois State Senator Barack Obama spoke out against the war in Iraq, warning the people and the government of our present situation. His remarks went unheeded, however, and we are in precisely that quagmire that McCain and Bush promised we wouldn’t be in.

Obama began the 2002 speech by distinguishing the Iraq campaign from the one that needed to be fought: “Let me begin by saying that although this has been billed as an anti-war rally, I stand before you as someone who is not opposed to war in all circumstances...What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.”

It was Obama, not McCain, who saw that this was an ideological agenda independent from our justified and necessary cause, but it’s doubtful anyone would be so cynical as to expect that agenda to change its premise, its promise and its cause so recklessly and so often in the years to follow.

Obama continues:

What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income - to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression. That's what I'm opposed to. A dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics. Now let me be clear - I suffer no illusions about Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal man. A ruthless man. A man who butchers his own people to secure his own power. He has repeatedly defied UN resolutions, thwarted UN inspection teams, developed chemical and biological weapons, and coveted nuclear capacity. He's a bad guy. The world, and the Iraqi people, would be better off without him.

 

But I also know that Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States, or to his neighbors, that the Iraqi economy is in shambles, that the Iraqi military a fraction of its former strength, and that in concert with the international community he can be contained until, in the way of all petty dictators, he falls away into the dustbin of history. I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a US occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of Al Qaeda. I am not opposed to all wars. I'm opposed to dumb wars.

 

So for those of us who seek a more just and secure world for our children, let us send a clear message to the President today. You want a fight, President Bush? Let's finish the fight with Bin Laden and Al Qaeda, through effective, coordinated intelligence, and a shutting down of the financial networks that support terrorism, and a homeland security program that involves more than color-coded warnings. You want a fight, President Bush?

 

Let's fight to make sure our so-called allies in the Middle East, the Saudis and the Egyptians, stop oppressing their own people, and suppressing dissent, and tolerating corruption and inequality, and mismanaging their economies so that their youth grow up without education, without prospects, without hope, the ready recruits of terrorist cells. You want a fight, President Bush? Let's fight to wean ourselves off Middle East oil, through an energy policy that doesn't simply serve the interests of Exxon and Mobil. Those are the battles that we need to fight. Those are the battles that we willingly join. The battles against ignorance and intolerance. Corruption and greed. Poverty and despair.

 

The consequences of war are dire, the sacrifices immeasurable. We may have occasion in our lifetime to once again rise up in defense of our freedom, and pay the wages of war. But we ought not -- we will not -- travel down that hellish path blindly. Nor should we allow those who would march off and pay the ultimate sacrifice, who would prove the full measure of devotion with their blood, to make such an awful sacrifice in vain.

With eery precision Obama was correct about Iraq: the effects it would have abroad and the effects it would have back home. With reckless judgment and irrational and naive thinking, McCain was wrong, terribly and tragically wrong. And now, with foolishly self-righteous indignation, he claims authority on the situation in Iraq after having stumbled so distastrously through the event since he aided in its conception.