Obama’s swinging pendulum
Obama’s a newbie, and it shows.
Last week he got into trouble for being too eager to negotiate with the enemy. In the You Tube debate, he acquiesced to the idea of Presidential meetings—no preconditions necessary—with the likes of N. Korea, Iran, Syria, Venezuela, and Cuba. This drew wide criticism—even from Democratics—for naivete.
Perhaps this week’s Obama faux pas was an effort to correct the perception that he’s too wedded to the magical powers of talking. He threatened to use military action along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border if we got actionable intelligence that Osama and his cohorts were there and President Musharaff wouldn’t strike. The tough talk, however, was too tough, and the opposition (both Democratic and Republican) was eager to jump in to criticize.
Obama not only needs to learn a bit about foreign policy, he needs to learn a bit about diplomacy—and campaigning. Insulting Musharaff for an affront that hasn’t yet occurred, in a situation that is purely hypothetical anyway, isn’t a great way to go about impressing anyone. Obama needs to be wary of the error of overcorrection; the pendulum can swing too far.
The media, of course, takes sound bites from Obama’s speech and accentuates the most potentially controversial parts. The speech itself, however, seems more complex.
In it, he doesn’t actually back off from his earlier contention that talking with countries such as Iran and Syria would be good. But he adds the phrase “I will do the careful preparation needed.” Perhaps that was meant to counter the main problem with his previous stance, which was that he was agreeing that no preconditions would be necessary for such talks.
More importantly, Obama’s speech contains an internal contradiction. He attempts to balance a “let’s withdraw quickly from Iraq” position with a “let’s hang tough in Afghanistan” approach. If al Qaeda is in Afghanistan, there’s no doubt it’s in Iraq as well (whether it was there to begin with or not). Why abandon the fight in the second instance and intensify it in the first?
Obama tries to argue that the two situations are very different, but his rhetoric seems unconvincing, and the underlying reason for the distsinction may be that it’s politically expedient. Obama has consistently opposed the war in Iraq and therefore it must go poorly. And yet he can’t seem to be soft on terrorism, so the Afghan terrorists become the ones to beat—in his phrase, the latter is “the right battlefield.”
Why is it so very “right” to fight al Qaeda in Afghanistan and so very “wrong” to fight them in Iraq? Obama says that al Qaeda is not the primary source of violence in Iraq, and that the population there has turned against them.
Although I’ve read Obama’s entire speech, I unfortunately don’t have time at the moment to go over it with the proverbial fine-tooth comb. But I can’t find any statement of his that asserts that al Qaeda, rather than the Taliban, is actually the primary source of violence in Afghanistan (he talks a lot about the Taliban instead), or why an al Qaeda presence in Afghanistan is so much more dangerous to the US than one in Iraq. For that matter, he doesn’t say why it’s so much more important to fight the Taliban in Afghanistan than the non-al-Qaeda “insurgents” in Iraq, or why cleaning up the former country is so much more important (or would be so much easier) than cleaning up the latter.
Whether or not al Qaeda is actually the primary source of violence in Iraq is anybody’s guess, but the US military seems to think it may be. At the very least, it’s a hugely important factor (please read Belmont Club’s post on the matter):
So while taking on al-Qaeda now seems the obvious choice [for the surge], in retrospect there were many other candidates vying for the title of Center of Gravity. Those bad guys still remain, but MNF-I saw al-Qaeda in Iraq as the key to the position and that choice, according to O’Hanlon and Pollack [of the Brookings Institute and the NY Times], appears to be the right one….by attacking al-Qaeda, the US took engaged not only the most fanatical force in Iraq but the one with the most powerful narrative.
As Obama says, the al Qaeda forces in Iraq have alienated the Iraqi people by their attacks on the population. But when Obama declares that our leaving will somehow mysteriously create pressure on the Iraqi government to act against al Qaeda there, it’s a case of wishful thinking. It’s a good guess that Al Qaeda would dearly love to use Iraq as a base for operations, both for the central location and the propaganda value. The Iraqi government simply doesn’t have the forces to combat them right now, and it won’t gain them by default when we leave.
Obama states that his withdrawal plan for Iraq would maintain sufficient forces to target al Qaeda within Iraq. According to the plan, he would have withdrawn US troops already, with all US combat brigades gone by March of 2008. If he thinks this would do the trick, I wonder what he’s smoking these days.
General Petraeus doesn’t seem to agree with Obama; targeting al Qaeda in Iraq is a goodly part of what the surge has been about. But, after all, what does Petraeus know?
[ADDENDUM 8/3: Not too surprisingly, Pakistan isn’t about to hop on the Obama bandwagon.]
Point is, Obama’s lying.
He was trying to recover from his idea that talking to the worst bastards on the planet with no pre-conditions (except whatever concessions need to be made to pay for the meeting).
He tried to sound as if he, 1, knew some geography, and, 2, would “do something”.
But he won’t. Even if it were, by all metrics imaginable a good idea, he wouldn’t do it. He is simply incapable of taking forthright, violent action.
That’s tough enough in the civilian world, which is why criminals get away with so much. Going to trump is tough. Going to trump internationally is starting a war, or at least opening another theater with all the uncertainty that entails. While muddling along defers the obvious negative possibilities. The fact that we would have been/are used to the current downside means it doesn’t really bother us nearly as much as a new one would.
If a president could give the order and then not have to charge off to the restroom, I wouldn’t want him as president. But if he couldn’t give the order when necessary, I wouldn’t want him babysitting my Pet Rock.
Obama simply cannot do it–my opinion–and thus his “I am too….brave or whatever it is I’m supposed to be.” is a lie.
Lemme understand the Obama logic. Threaten those that are (at least on the surface) cooperative with the nation he wants to lead while begging for an audience with said nation’s sworn enemies.
I don’t have a Pet Rock but if I did I wouldn’t let him babysit it. He shouldn’t be allowed to go to the bathroom unsupervised.
I agree with Richard Aubrey: Obama is lying. Everyone with any maturity and sensibility knows he’s lying. He may even intend for his own supporters to know he is lying, and to realize he is just throwing a bone to the voters in the middle, even as the words come out of his mouth.
And calling what he is doing by a more polite name is… so polite as to almost itself be misleading. Obama is lying, period.
Even though I know Obama is cotton candy, I am still sometimes taken aback at his wispy understanding of economic and foreign policy. He is extreme cotton candy empty-headed in these areas, and what he does “know” amounts to dangerous and shallow misconception.
HOWEVER: Obama might not be a lightweight forever. If he has a sensible brain – and he very well might, then campaigning will educate him. He could become stronger in the future, and then his charisma could really count for something.
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I know Musharaff makes an easy target for the Lefties. This is especially so when they are speaking to people who don’t bother to think through what they hear.
I personally am sick of hearing Americans castigate Musharaff and the Pakistani government. I know they are not pristine; in fact they aren’t even close. However, they are the only people in that part of the world who are even half-way cooperating with us. Without Musharaff’s support we could have never got started in Afghanistan.
One of the Bush triumphs, never acknowledged naturally, was to gain the support of Pakistan for the move into Afghanistan.
The situation in Pakistan is very complicated, and fraught with peril. It is simply ludicrous, and irresponsible, to complicate it further.
Everybody makes up stuff about Iraq/Afghanistan, nobody knows why we are there or what we’re supposed to be doing. Obama less than most. At least he had the foresight to say, from the very beginning we shouldn’t have gone.
Nice bit of ethnocentric racism, couldn’t have done better myself, except to say that none of the chickenhawks who run this country have much in the way of a pendulum to swing.
“couldn’t have done better myself”
Noticed it crossed your mind first….
The one stereotype that’s not denied.
Musharaff is under terrible pressure, and unlike the U.S. President he is likely to die if he makes a wrong political call. Either Obama is ignorant of the world around him, or uncaring of it in the face of the need to get elected. This problem seems to affect most of the Democratic candidates this year.
You can bet that if a Republican candidate said something like that, it would be the end of his campaign.
The Democratic Party looks like the victim of (ahem) the soft bigotry of low expectations.
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nobody knows why we are there or what we’re supposed to be doing.
Well that’s a pretty global statement, isn’t it?
Don’t you mean to say “I don’t know why we are there or what we’re supposed to be doing, because I refuse to listen when told?”
One of Iraq’s major problems is being between Syria and Iran. Both nations set out to destabilize Iraq by killing folks in it.
Afghanistan, however, is not in a similar position. In point of fact, the Taliban’s stronghold in Pakistan is surrounded by both the Afghanistani forces as well as the Pakistani security forces. The Pakistani security forces aren’t as effective as Iraqi police, but it is better than having a fully supported insurgency funded by Iran with safe houses in the entire country.
Iran is trying to get a piece of the Afghanistani action by sending in agents and what not into West Afghanistan. But that doesn’t seem a priority to them. Iraq is. If the Left gives Iraq to Iran then Iran will turn on Afghanistan next. It is logically inevitable. And when Afghanistan turns into more of a problem, do you think Democrats will authorize the correct Petraeus actions to stomp down on Iran? Hell no. More bodies will be sent into the shreder, ala Lyndon Johnson. More troops to satisfy the war lobby but make sure to impose restrictions on those troops to satisfy the casualty prone Congresscritters.
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