News from the New Party

Change you can believe in?

With the race for the Democratic nomination still wide open, Barack Obama's policy statements are now beginning to receive some serious scrutiny.  Alan W. Dowd takes issue with his foreign policy in the Weekly Standard:

Obama, who launched his presidential bid less than three years after being elected to the Senate, has worn his inexperience like a badge of honor at times, contrasting his politics of hope with Hillary Clinton's "politics as usual" and John McCain's "party of yesterday." But the Oval Office is not a good place for on-the-job training. No matter what fans of The Daily Show say, things actually can get worse.

Give Obama credit for consistency. The centerpiece of his foreign policy has always been an immediate withdrawal from Iraq. Reasonable people can and do disagree over whether it was right to invade in March 2003, but even some of the loudest critics of the war warn that withdrawing now could derail the fragile progress made during the surge and make a difficult but tenable situation worse.

How much worse? Imagine a Balkan-style ethno-religious war with more guns and less restraint, a Rwanda with arsenals of modern weaponry instead of machetes, or a California-sized Beirut. And then imagine what an American retreat would do to U.S. standing outside Iraq.

Trying to address such worries, Obama assures us that "Nobody is proposing we leave precipitously." But actually, somebody is proposing that--and that somebody is Barack Obama.

In January 2007, for example, he outlined a plan to begin "redeployment of U.S. forces no later than May 1, 2007" and "remove all combat brigades from Iraq by March 31, 2008." Today, he vows to "immediately begin to remove our troops from Iraq."

That is the very definition of precipitous.

Hedging a bit, Obama recently explained that "If al Qaeda is forming a base in Iraq, then we will have to act in a way that secures the American homeland and our interests abroad."

McCain couldn't resist pointing out the obvious: "Al Qaeda is in Iraq. And that's why we're fighting in Iraq."

Obama's foreign policy flakiness is not restricted to Iraq, however.  In Obama's mind, genocide is not a good enough reason for humanitarian intervention:

The AP reported it this way in July 2007: "Presidential hopeful Barack Obama said Thursday the United States cannot use its military to solve humanitarian problems and that preventing a potential genocide in Iraq isn't a good enough reason to keep U.S. forces there."

His defense of this position sounds surprisingly, jarringly, similar to that of isolationists on the far fringes, who always justify non-intervention somewhere by pointing out that America has not intervened everywhere.

"If that's the criteria by which we are making decisions on the deployment of U.S. forces," Obama explained, referring to genocide, "then by that argument you would have 300,000 troops in the Congo right now--where millions have been slaughtered as a consequence of ethnic strife--which we haven't done." He continued: "We would be deploying unilaterally and occupying the Sudan, which we haven't done."

In other words, if we can't do everything, we should do nothing. On foreign policy Obama is clearly not offering "change we can believe in".  In fact the Obama view of the world is startlingly retro: back to the seventies' ditzy "realpolitik" of Jimmy Carter.  Barack Obama likes to deflect the charge that he is inexperienced with the claim that judgement is more important than experience.  This may not help him.  Even if he fends off the challenge from Hillary Clinton, John McCain will have plenty of time to rip Obama's programme to shreds.  Whether "change you can believe in" will win the presidency for Barack Obama will depend heavily on how much the American people are prepared to take on trust.