Obama's New Vision Of Foreign Policy

One area where we've almost unequivocally seen good Obama is in the area of foreign policy, where, despite what the media wags want to claim, he's been remarkably consistent in his vision for placing Iraq in geopolitical context, strengthening alliances, finding and eradicating loose nukes and offering a more hopeful vision to the world. He's put together another national security ad which stresses that judgment and a change in mindset is what's needed, and in particular putting an end to this idea that problem-solving can only be achieved with guns and rockets. This was endorsed today by, of all people, Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates warned yesterday against the risk of a "creeping militarization" of U.S. foreign policy, saying the State Department should lead U.S. engagement with other countries, with the military playing a supporting role.

"We cannot kill or capture our way to victory" in the long-term campaign against terrorism, Gates said, arguing that military action should be subordinate to political and economic efforts to undermine extremism.

Gates is of course accurate. The State Department, NGOs, and anti-poverty organizations have been sidelined in favor of private military contractors, the police state and the World Bank trying to hold rogue states for ransom. The reliance on supreme military power means that no military action can fail, lest we look weak in front of our enemies. And as Robert Farley notes, this leads to some sunk costs.

To the extent that the United States must devote years, billions upon billions of dollars, and hundreds of thousands of troops to "winning" in Iraq, the very purpose of the invasion is undermined. It does no good to "throw some little country against the wall" if in doing so our own capacity to act is severely wounded; other little countries that might have been intimidated take note of the fact that we are incapable of acting. This was, of course, why Don Rumsfeld bitterly resisted proposals to go into Iraq with substantially more troops, why he resisted the idea of increasing troop levels, and why he resisted the shift to counter-insurgency; he understood that such moves undermined the purpose of the invasion in the first place. To the extent that the war has been about the extension of American imperium, it has failed disastrously.

But that was one of the real purposes of Iraq - to show those A-Rabs who's boss, and to project massive military power over the Middle East. This does nothing for stability, only for hegemony. And our faltering approach has even screwed that up.

This is what Obama is reacting against. He offers a new strategy based on common interests and mutual respect; he wants to place everything on the global stage in full context and allow one element of our foreign policy to connect to all the others. McCain is about separation, about "winning in Iraq" and "winning in Afghanistan" without noting the relationship between the two. And despite Obama's approach being as far removed from George Bush as possible, that's McCain's latest area of attack:

The McCain campaign is taking their effort to distance their candidate from the unpopular President Bush to a whole new level: McCain's advisers are now openly attacking Bush on Iraq -- and not only that, they're also saying that Barack Obama is the one who is like Bush on the war!

On a conference call just now with reporters, McCain foreign policy adviser Randy Scheunemann compared Barack Obama's insistence on a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq to Bush's insistence that we were winning even as things went badly for years.

Considering Scheunemann's past as the author of the Iraqi Liberation Act and a close confidant of AHMAD CHALABI, ferchrissakes, you'd think he'd be careful not to ever question anyone else's judgment again. But of course, that would require a passing familiarity with the concept of shame.