Expect The Worst
In the forthcoming issue, Prof. Bacevich offers the conservative case for Obama, which is largely the conservative case for voting on Iraq and nothing else. In many respects, it mirrors the arguments I was making in 2006 for a Democratic victory in the midterms: hold the GOP accountable, don’t trust their flim-flam on domestic policy and move towards ending the war. As the last year has shown it is control of the executive that matters far more as a practical matter, so in this sense Bacevich’s argument is potentially even more compelling: unlike the ineffectual House and Senate Democrats, a Democratic President could follow through on getting out of Iraq. On the other hand, a Democratic President would be able to do many other things that clash directly with at least five of the six points Bacevich lays out in his definition of conservatism. Unlike the largely symbolic protest of throwing out the Republican majority, which has had essentially no effect on U.S. foreign policy anywhere and which seems not to have driven home the message that most Americans are sick of Iraq, the election of a Democratic President could do real harm to the United States in many other ways, including inaugurating other, post-Iraq imperial adventures in the name of global “leadership.” The latter would be politically possible for a Democratic President in ways that no Republican will enjoy for decades.
Americans believed that they were voting for an end to war in 1968, and instead got five more years of direct American involvement and casualties. If Obama has, as Prof. Bacevich correctly notes, “little affinity for serious realism,” but prefers “internationalist bromides,” he may be unable or unwilling to end the war, or at least he will be unable to end it quickly, since he will be more inclined to heed appeals from the United Nations and European governments not to leave Iraq. If we know from past experience that the GOP’s promises on domestic social policy are empty, vote-buying rhetoric, why would we assume that Obama’s antiwar message is anything other than a well-crafted appeal to keep antiwar progressives on board? In essence, the argument for Obama centered around the war is that we should trust that Obama is not conning us, despite the evidence that his foreign policy outlook is fundamentally no different from the people who landed us in this mess, but we should assume that everything else the GOP nominee says is a calculated lie. Cynicism about the GOP is certainly justified, and I share it completely, but why should we be any less cynical about Obama’s promises?
For some on the antiwar right, backing Obama is a risk worth taking, but I would offer a few additional notes of caution.
It seemed possible that repudiation at the polls in 2006 would chasten the hegemonists, or at least weaken them politically long enough to begin the process of withdrawing from Iraq, but this did not happen. Their defeat in 2008 may also change nothing. The 2008 election outcome will not necessarily determine the judgement of later decades on the worthiness or folly of the Iraq war, and even our extrication from Iraq will not mean a turn away from empire, but simply a moment for the supporters of empire to regroup and prepare for the next conflict. The 1920 election was a crushing repudiation of Wilsonian foreign policy, yet here we are in the twenty-first century still confronting the same madness. Meanwhile, if the “freedom agenda” has not already been discredited after the empowerment of Hizbullah, the election of Hamas and the creation of a sectarian government in Iraq, I fail to see what Obama’s election could do to drive the point home. As with Vietnam, there will be dead-enders on Iraq who will never acknowledge that the war was a gross error and a case of profound injustice, and in the decades that followed Vietnam it was not the Vietnam super-hawks, but the doves (who were right about the war) who suffered the gravest political setbacks. Electing Obama to end the war will politically free the GOP, and the hegemonists in particular, of the consequences of withdrawal, even though these consequences would have been impossible without the original invasion and occupation. Just as old Vietnam hawks dishonestly waved (and continue to wave) the bloody shirt of the Cambodian genocide to shame and discredit war opponents in later foreign policy debates, there will be post-Iraq accusations not only of the “stab in the back” but also of enabling whatever humanitarian catastrophes may emerge from Iraq in the wake of our departure. Indeed, this is another case where Obama’s instinct for interventionism will probably prevent withdrawal from Iraq, or will require an immediate re-deployment for the sake of “stopping genocide.” A hardened realist might wash his, our, hands of Iraq and refuse to be drawn back in; Obama’s foreign policy-as-moral preening would demand another intervention. Immediately the political debate would be inverted, as progressives suddenly discovered the virtues of interventionist warfare once again and Republicans would be outraged at the “distraction” from our real security threats.
If there is one thing that has been true about the Iraq war, it has only become less popular over time. An administration that actually continues the war for several more years will find the public extremely dissatisfied by the time of the 2010 midterms, and the GOP would risk an even deeper humiliation than they stand to suffer in Congressional races this year. The same political cynicism that Prof. Bacevich correctly identifies in Republican domestic policy promises may eventually prevail over the resistance of ideologues. While the GOP leadership has identified the party with Iraq, Iraq does not command anything like the unanimity of support in the party that anticommunism once did. As Iraq erodes public support for the GOP in Congress, the need to find a way out will become acute. Politically, the GOP has and will have a much greater incentive to cut itself free of Iraq, and McCain’s opportunism over the years, his willingness to turn against his party for the sake of good press and the realist advisors he has in his campaign all suggest the remote possibility of an end to the war, or at the very least a reduction in the numbers of Americans there. The interventionist Obama seems instinctively drawn towards the consensus of the moment, and the consensus in Washington is that the deployment to Iraq is going to continue for many more years. Arguably, if we cannot believe anything that the Republicans say about any other kind of policy, we cannot assume that they really intend to stay in Iraq indefinitely. To the extent that a bipartisan establishment foreign policy consensus exists that will prevent a President from either party from withdrawing from Iraq, the question may be moot anyway.
All of this is a long way of saying: vote for Obama if you believe it is the best choice for the good of the country that you can make under the circumstances, but don’t be at all surprised when the end to the war he promised does not materialise.
[...] Philip Klein criticises Prof. Bacevich’s article more or less along the same lines that I did earlier this week, but one of his final statements strikes me as wrong: But more than anything, I think the self-delusion exhibited by Bacevich in his article underscores how formidable Obama can be. [...]
[...] Kara’s post on Prof. Bacevich’s article makes sense to me, and I am inclined to agree that an end to the war in Iraq under Obama could reinvigorate neoconservatism more than almost anything else. Such is the perversity of aggressive war that its advocates could conceivably gain political advantage from both continuing and ending the war.  I would add that there is something else that creates a different problem for the pro-Obama case. James Barnes at National Journal describes Obama’s main advisors, and the section on national security is sobering for anyone hoping for much in the way of a shift in foreign policy paradigms. Indeed, the list of advisors in Barnes’ article might be enough to satisfy Joe Lieberman, whose most recent denunciation of supposed Democratic “weakness” (i.e., supporting policies that Lieberman opposes) during his endorsement of McCain has been generating a lot of discussion. While many mainstream conservatives are getting themselves into a lather talking about Obama’s “hard left” views on this and that, several of the advisors populating Obama’s campaign are perfect representatives of failed “centrism.” With five advisors from the Brookings Institution, including Ivo Daalder, Obama’s administration could easily see a return to hawkish meddling in the name of liberal internationalism. Remember that Daalder co-authored this pro-intervention op-ed with Robert Kagan, who, as Brendan O’Neill’s article on Obama’s foreign policy reminds us, expressed great enthusiasm about Obama’s interventionism. If marginalizing neoconservatism entails empowering hawkish neoliberalism 2.0, the only things that will change are the targets. [...]
[...] Of course, everything rests on that conditional statement. For what it’s worth, I don’t know that Obama will be worse, but I see the potential for him to be just as bad. As it happens, I share Dr. Hadar’s impatience with trying to game the system by basing my vote on what politically strategic goals it might advance, which is exactly why I think backing Obama does not make sense. To justify it, there seems to be a tendency to build up an ornate architecture of rationalisations of what his victory will represent, when what it will represent is the endorsement of reckless liberal internationalism more ambitious than the New Frontier. We can develop elaborate arguments about what an Obama administration might do that we would find more agreeable, but so much of it, whether on Israel-Palestine, NAFTA or even Iraq is at best based on things Obama did before he was on the national stage or things he has said in an election year. When the pressure has been on and he has been in the national spotlight, to say that he has been uninspiring in terms of what he has done with respect to foreign policy would be an understatement. [...]
[...] Jim Antle notes that he fits the Obamacon profile pretty well, and I have to say that the same goes for me, except for the small problem that neither of us supports Obama’s election. You’d think that a paleo in Hyde Park would be the quintessential Obamacon, but that is not so.  A repeal or amending of the PATRIOT Act is not likely forthcoming under an Obama administration, when he voted to reauthorise the Act in 2006. Jim’s reservations about Obama’s position on Iraq and mine are very similar. Here is Jim’s point: Second, given that Obama’s proposed Iraq exit is conditional upon there being no ”security vacuum filled with terrorism, chaos, ethnic cleansing and genocide that could engulf large swaths of the Middle East and endanger America,” he might not actually end the war in any meaningful sense. [...]
[...] Meanwhile, my pessimistic skepticism of Obama’s antiwar position seems to be more justified all the time. [...]