I appreciate Justin Raimondo’s smart comments in his latest column on my earlier Obama post, and I take his point that antiwar conservatives and libertarians shouldn’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.  Despite his cautious positioning over the last few years, Obama does oppose the war in Iraq and seems entirely serious when he says that he will bring it to an end.  That is a very desirable outcome, and indeed what I had been hoping, obviously unrealistically, that the new Democratic majority would begin doing successfully last year. 

My reservations about Obama come precisely from the focus on foreign policy and issues of war and peace that Mr. Raimondo quite rightly emphasises as central in this election and in our political system as a whole.  Obama’s domestic agenda does nothing for me, though I do find his use of economic nationalist rhetoric on trade intriguing, but if there is one thing that the last seven years has shown me it is that neither major party candidate is going to be offering a domestic policy agenda that I would find worthy of actually supporting, and so it is again.  There is certainly no “sentimental attachment to the GOP” in my case, unless disgust can be counted as a kind of sentimental attachment.  So what worries me about Obama? 

I remain wary of his broader foreign policy vision not simply because it theoretically may commit the United States to interventions throughout the world, which it will, but because Obama’s vaunted foreign policy judgement has clearly been lacking in almost every other case except for Iraq.  I did find it slightly gratifying that his remarks on Kosovo were not entirely the sort of shameless pro-Albanianism that I expect from Democratic candidates (Hacim Thaci was  a guest of honour at the 2004 convention, for goodness’ sake), but even so he remains fundamentally on the wrong side of that question.  To my mind, getting Lebanon wrong in the summer of 2006 is almost as bad as being wrong about Iraq, because Obama’s support for the Lebanon war as it was actually fought makes me doubt his ability to discern which wars are “dumb” and “rash,” to borrow the words from his famous 2002 address.  His remarks about sending forces into Pakistan, regardless of the Pakistani government’s consent, have had the bizarre effect of making McCain seem relatively more reasonable and restrained in the use of military force in that country.  His position on Iran is nearly as confrontational and dangerous as any, and he has made explicit calls to intervene in Darfur, which would presumably entail a deployment of American soldiers to the Sudan.  It isn’t just that he isn’t as anti-interventionist as I might like, but that he seems markedly more interventionist than the current administration and not much less so than McCain.  He has not elaborated on any ideas on Russia policy beyond the no-brainer of securing loose Soviet-era nukes, which strikes me as a glaring oversight, but possibly one that could be remedied.  His relative openness to employing diplomacy and a willingness to ease restrictions on travel to Cuba are two bright spots in what is otherwise a very grim picture. 

If it simply came down to Iraq, where McCain has always been wrong and Obama has, more or less, always been right, I could probably see my way to cheer some modest cheers for Obama, but it isn’t and can’t be just about Iraq, even as important as the war is.  Indeed, one thing Obama has right about Afghanistan and Pakistan is that that is the theater that is far more crucial for our strategic interests, but I have no confidence that Obama has any better grasp on what do with Pakistan than his future general election opponent.  He has been right that Washington has only had a “Musharraf policy” and not a Pakistan policy, but nothing he has said about Pakistan leads me to think that he has one, either.  Granted, on everything I have mentioned above, McCain is just as bad or worse, so I suppose I would prefer that Obama win given a choice between two frankly unpalatable and terrible options, but I cannot bring myself to cheer for him, much less to vote for him.  More worrying to me now is the possibility that Obama’s candidacy, which has been so often compared to a souffle, will collapse for one reason or another and drag down the public’s opposition to the war with it.  The Democrats ought to win this election in a walk, and the fact that the GOP is going to campaign explicitly on the war with a McCain nomination should make it even easier, but I simply don’t think Obama will win, which tends to dampen whatever cheering I might be willing to do.

Thanks again to Reihan for this very generous post.  A couple clarifications: my decentralist idea would entail at least having Kennan’s dozen independent countries, and preferably many, many more depending on their realistic viability, and they wouldn’t be doctrinaire “pacifist,” but might collaborate with their neighbours in a loose confederation much more like the original Confederation was before the usurpation constitutional convention in Philadelphia.  I wouldn’t insist that all these states all be agrarian, since half the genius of such decentralism is that they would not all pursue uniform economic and political goals, but I would see that as an optimal outcome.  Besides, identical regime types might not suit each state, so that would depend on the natural constitution of the inhabitants and their habits.

So it seems that a significant part of the Obama military anecdote that so many have denounced as nonsense that shows Obama’s ignorance of such matters was independently confirmed by the officer in question (the weapon shortage element was not confirmed).  According to the report of the officer’s story, his platoon had 15 of its members reassigned before their deployment in mid-2003.  One of the standard lines of attack I have seen leveled against this anecdote is: they would never split up a unit, because this hurts unit cohesion.  The more appropriate response would be, as far as I can see, grave concern that the anecdote might be true, given the administration’s reputation for incompetence, and anger if it was confirmed.  After all, this would be one of those concrete examples of how the obsession with Iraq directly, measurably harmed not only the Afghan war effort but also the cohesion and effectiveness of military units.  That’s the sort of thing that ostensibly “pro-military” people would have (correctly) found outrageous and appalling if it had it happened on Clinton’s watch, but which they regard as a legend when it brings disrepute on the administration and U.S.. Iraq policy.  What’s even more strange is that we already know that intelligence and linguistics personnel were pulled away from Afghanistan to be used for the war in Iraq, so why would it surprise us that a similar hollowing out of combat units sent to Afghanistan took place, at least in certain cases?

Update: When the critics aren’t accusing Obama’s source of lying, they are emphasising that he didn’t support every detail of the story as Obama recounted it and that reassigning soldiers from a unit is so perfectly normal that there’s nothing to see here.  Which is rather different from the legions of geniuses who said that it never happens.  The point of the story, of course, is not whether it is normal to reassign soldiers to units that are going into combat, but that the one military campaign pulled personnel away from the Afghan war and that this has put the units deploying to  Afghanistan at more of a disadvantage than they would otherwise be.  The point of the story is that full-strength units were important enough for Iraq, and not important enough for Afghanistan, which confirms the larger argument that Iraq has diverted resources away from Afghanistan.  Resources have been diverted, and the unnecessary war in Iraq has detracted from the necessary one in Afghanistan.  That is the argument these people don’t want to have, because they are no closer today to having a compelling rationale for being in Iraq than they did in 2003.

Okay, I’m on a short break.  Here’s a quick post. 

George Will has fun at Hillary Clinton’s expense, concluding with this non sequitur paragraph:

The president who came to office with the most glittering array of experiences had served 10 years in the House of Representatives, then became minister to Russia, then served 10 years in the Senate, then four years as secretary of state (during a war that enlarged the nation by 33 percent), then was minister to Britain. Then, in 1856, James Buchanan was elected president and in just one term secured a strong claim to being ranked as America’s worst president.  Abraham Lincoln, the inexperienced former one-term congressman, had an easy act to follow.

Buchanan gets his bad reputation not for anything he did for almost his entire term, but for what he refused to do during the final months of his administration.  Most people have no clue what Buchanan did during his term, but they all know that he did not mobilise an army to kill tens and hundreds of thousands of Americans.  For this, he is judged an egregious failure, while the man who did just that continues to be revered as a deified hero.  This follows the typical rule of nationalist historiography here and in almost every country: the politicians and rulers who are responsible for the most deaths are judged the greatest because they oversaw “great crises.”  Even though these crises didn’t necessarily have to result in bloodshed, and even if the pols in question blundered or willingly made the crisis worse, the more blood that is shed the better for their posthumous reputations.  Of course, when the same things are done by rulers of other countries, people are able to spot very easily the sketchy arguments for regarding them as wise and great leaders of men.  French nationalists will revere Napoleon, while we see him as a blood-soaked despot, and the same used to be true of Germans and Bismarck before it became entirely impossible to be a German natonalist, and Chinese nationalists admire either the modern Mao or have reached way back to raise Shih huang-di on a pedestal.  The general rule of such “great leaders” is that you probably didn’t want to live under their government, since the chances were good that you would be conscripted, killed or otherwise harmed by their policies.

As I read Will, he seems to be arguing on behalf of the least experienced contender in the presidential race, who happens to be Hillary Clinton at this point, which means that he has just compared her to Abraham Lincoln.  So is he saying that Hillary Clinton’s election would usher in an era of mass fratricide, or is he saying that she is the next Great Emancipator?  Maybe both?

As I try to finish the draft of my final dissertation chapter, I won’t have much new posting for the next day or two, so hereisacollectionofafewpostsfromthismonththatmightbeworth your time if you haven’t seen them before.

At the risk of Obama overkill this week, here is a post of mine at Takimag on Obama and foreign policy.

Via Patrick Appel, this leaves all of those awful Clinton supporter-created musical numbers in the dust.  Huckabee is the obvious tribune of religious disco voters everywhere, which means that he has locked down the support of Josh, the strange hymn-singing guy from the third installment in the epic Stillman trilogy, The Last Days of Disco.  He was the one who declared, “Disco will never be over.”  Huckabee seems to have the same view of his presidential campaign.

A different point about Obama’s legislative record: forget the debate over whether “Obama has substance” (he has, but a lot of his supporters couldn’t tell you what it is) for a moment, and consider what his most notable achievements are.  For the great Unifier, he has done most of his successful bipartisan work on things that are fairly uncontroversial (ethics reform, securing loose Russian nukes).  On anything contentious, Obama has not shown much facility for “bringing people together,” because he knows that these issues are contentious because people have genuine, perhaps even principled, disagreements over them, and he has many of the same disagreements as his most liberal colleagues.  The lie behind the bipartisanship obsession is that there is a supposed lack of bipartisanship because of some failure of leadership or imagination, when, in fact, bipartisanship is lacking because of fundamental differences over certain questions.  When it is a procedural reform or a blindingly obvious national security issue, bipartisanship is easy because no one really disagrees or has strong opposition to the measure, and when it isn’t easy because there is actual political risk in crossing the aisle Obama is nowhere to be found.   

As others have said, by Obama’s own standard, Obama fails.

Skip to 8 minute mark in this recording of Michelle Obama’s speech at UCLA.  Shortly after that point she says this:

Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.

Apparently we are all activists now.  There is something amusing about the idea that a political movement that has so far thrived on uninformed people being won over by cheery slogans is going to become a dedicated band of civically-minded, “engaged” and hopeful Stakhanovites.  In a certain context, these remarks could be taken simply as expressions of strong conviction, but that doesn’t seem to be what she’s saying.  She isn’t expressing the extent of Obama’s conviction, but instead is telling the voters that they are going to have to shape up considerably if they are going to be worthy of toiling in the fields of hope.

Michael once wrote about Mike Huckabee’s candidacy representing the introduction of the “life coach” ethos into presidential politics:

Unlike Obama or Bush before him, Huckabee asks us not only to rise above partisanship but to rise above ourselves.

This is a vision of the executive as “Uplifter in Chief,” the role Huckabee seems most anxious to play: “The president of the United States ought to lead Americans to think the best, be the best and act the best. We ought not pander to the lowest common denominator of thought.” It’s a message alternately inspiring in its aspirations and smug in its condescension.

Now it seems clear that Obama is the one who wants to play that role, or at least he allows his wife to cast him in the role.  You have to marvel at the use of so many phrases implying coercion, rather than persuasion: require, demand, never allow.  I’m sorry, but in a still nominally free country the chief magistrate of a republic does not make demands of citizens, but enforces the laws enacted by their representatives.  That is what the President does, or is supposed to do.  He does not, cannot, rightfully require things of any citizen that the citizen does not already owe to his country, namely loyalty and patriotic service.  That is what he is allowed to ask from us, because it is something we are already obliged to render.  It is not he who permits and allows, but, at least in theory, we who permit him to serve us.  He will not be a jefe or archigos to whom we are swearing personal allegiance (despite the confusion of some Bush supporters on this point), but a public servant who executes the laws and obeys the Constitution.