That was it. Obama’s answer to a question of how, as commander-in-chief, he would change America’s “military stance” in response to an attack by al Qaeda did not involve using the military. ~Byron York

God forbid, a thousand times, that I should ever say anything really in support of Barack Obama or the other Democrats being targeted here, but it seems odd that Mr. York would be so dismissive of Obama’s view on when to use force overseas, since Obama’s stated view is not terribly different from the one that I assume most conservatives would endorse.  Only a few days ago Obama gave an unequivocal statement making clear that he was perfectly willing to use military force, even pre-emptively:

No President should ever hesitate to use force – unilaterally if necessary – to protect ourselves and our vital interests when we are attacked or imminently threatened. But when we use force in situations other than self-defense, we should make every effort to garner the clear support and participation of others – the kind of burden-sharing and support President George H.W. Bush mustered before he launched Operation Desert Storm.

In other words, Obama did not even rule out using force for reasons other than self-defense, which means that he has no principled or fundamental objections to interventionist wars as such.  This is a progressive foreign policy of the old Wilson-Roosevelt-New Frontier type, and I certainly don’t mean that as a compliment.  But why should conservatives who endorse activist, interventionist foreign policy find fault with it as a “weak” approach to foreign threats?  For someone who supposedly represents the wild and wooly antiwar fringe of the left–as Mr. York probably sees them–Obama sounds an awful lot like a dyed-in-the-wool CFR man.  

Obama didn’t repeat this line about the use of force during the debate, which means that he performed poorly in the debate (as many observers have already noted).  You can knock his ability to perform under pressure (I would be happy to chime in on this point), but if there is anything wrong with Obama’s approach to foreign threats it is that he believes that every crisis around the world is potentially a threat to American security.  He seems to have no sense of proportion of what constitutes a particularly dire threat and what poses a more long-term, manageable danger; diseased Indonesian chickens and loose Russian nukes seem to worry him equally.  But his lame debate performance has no necessary bearing on what Obama thinks about responding to terrorist attacks or foreign threats, since the man plainly stated his hyper-ambitious concept of American national security just this week.

Mr. York’s entire column is dedicated to belittling answers to a fairly obnoxious hypothetical question.  Without precise information about the nature and origin of simultaneous terrorist attacks, no serious person could answer the question with anything more than generalities about “swiftly responding” and so forth.  Were the two attacks the work of Al Qaeda alone?  Were they committed with only minimal or no collaboration from other groups?  Were they sponsored in coordination with a foreign government?  Were the attacks conventional, biological, or nuclear in nature?  Who knows?  Brian Williams will just keep asking his bad questions and make the candidates dance a jig to his tune.  Obviously, the nature of the response, beyond the obvious call to “retaliate,” and the “stance of the military” overseas (which was the phrase used in the question) would depend on what kind of threat America faced.  If there were  mustard gas attacks launched by a jihadi cell in a couple malls, that would call for a different change in military posture overseas than would the detonation of Pakistani nukes in Houston and Miami.  Obviously.   

This question was not quite as bad as the one that Williams asked when he pressed the candidates to list the top three allies of the United States.  What a stupid question.  Even in the Bush Era, we have managed to retain a few more than three very important allies and it is almost childish to demand that a candidate rank the relative importance of Britain, Germany, Japan, France, Canada, Russia, India, Italy and Spain, to name just a few of the more important.  In making that list, I have left off a number of countries allied with the U.S. in some fashion–does that mean that I don’t think they are valuable allies?  This is the ultimate triumph of soundbite politics over the responsible discussion of foreign affairs.  Different allies have different functions, different alliances have different purposes and good relations with all of them are obviously desirable.  A question like this will create uncertainty in foreign capitals if, say, Edwards rattled off a Britain-Japan-Israel list and Obama listed Britain-India-Germany (I believe he actually listed the EU and Japan before getting distracted).  The Japanese and Israelis will want to know why Obama has no respect for them, while the Indians will think that Edwards doesn’t think much of the relationship with New Delhi, when the list may have absolutely no bearing on the candidate’s view of other alliances.  I hope a future moderator puts the same stupid questions to the Republican field, so that they can be tripped up by having to give answers that will satisfy no one.   

Update: Meanwhile, Michael Goodwin at The New York Daily News had a completely different take on Obama’s answer to the very same question:

With only about five minutes to go in the sober Democratic debate last night, it seemed there would be no memorable moment, and thus no winner.

Then Barack Obama suddenly showed why he is the surprise of the political season. With a strong voice and a confident, focused look, he returned to a question about a hypothetical terror attack on two U.S. cities to deliver a minilecture about the need for a President to be willing to use our military might. Saying we face “a profound security threat,” he shattered the developing anti-war tenor of the debate to say there “is no contradiction” in using diplomacy and the military.

But on the southern borders of Russia, the salient Muslims are Shi’a. ~Marty Peretz

Perhaps this is being too picky, but I don’t think so.  The “salient Muslims are Shi’a,” are they?  What does salient mean?  It either means protruding or projecting forward, sometimes used to refer to a point in a line of fortifications, or it simply means “strikingly conspicuous or prominent.”  Scan the southern border of Russia, friends, and find me a prominent Shi’ite group anywhere along that very long border.  They are not to be found in any numbers at all–certainly not so that you could call them the “salient Muslims.”  Neither in Georgia, nor in Ukraine and Kazakhstan.  Where they are to be found, they are in the extreme minority.  Strangely, there are no prominent Shi’ite groups in Mongolia or China.  There are some more Shi’ites in Azerbaijan, but that’s it.  Presumably Peretz refers here to Iran and Iraq, which are distinguished by having no borders with Russia, or at least no borders on terra firma in the case of Iran. 

This prompts me to set down Larison’s Fourth Law of Foreign Policy Commentary: When writing on a particular region, actually knowing something about the region’s geography is mandatory.

She [Ann Devroy] was everything Broder is not: fearless, intellectually honest, scrupulously fair, and suspicious of power. ~Paul Begala

Kicking around David Broder has become quite the pastime lately, and no wonder.  He represents everything that thinking people (and even, when convenient, someone like Paul Begala) find repugnant about establishment media figures and the political consensus they slavishly protect (as they protect their positions by doing this).  Matt Yglesias asks whether the Post‘s circulation would be harmed by letting Broder go and answers in the negative, but I think he misunderstands the function that Broder serves.  As the Post is the reliable establishment rag, its editorial line painstakingly aligned to match the most dreadfully “centrist” of “centrist” consensus views, so David Broder is the most dreadfully “centrist” among dreadful “centrists.”  The Post could no more part company with him than it could become a newspaper dedicated to holding government accountable and serving the public interest.  You might as well askthe editors of The Wall Street Journal to not oppose the interests of Middle America or call on the Times to treat Christians with respect.  It would not be in the nature of the Post to send Broder packing.  They would have to admit that flacking for concentrated power and war was somehow, well, undesirable, which would mean that they ought to close their doors forever.

Jim Gilmore makes his announcement as a hokey soundtrack plays in the background.  The core of Gilmore’s message: “Keep the Reagan dream alive…Oh, and don’t vote for Rudy McRomney.”  He keeps using his “Republican wing of the Republican Party” line, which somehow sounds less and less interesting each time he says it.  There’s nothing really terribly wrong with the announcement itself (except for the blaring trumpets–is he entering Rome in triumph?), but also absolutely nothing that would make someone take a second look at Gilmore.  The biggest surprise has to be that he is still in the race after his heretofore dismal reception by activists and voters; Ron Paul has been picking up at least 2-3% support in some polls.  Gilmore remains trapped in asterisk country, and nothing in his announcement suggests that he knows how to move up.

Many thanks to both Dr. Ralph Luker and Peter Klein for kindly tagging Eunomia with the Thinking Blogger Award.  Each named Eunomia as one of the “five blogs that make me think” on the same day.  It is gratifying to know that Eunomia has such respect as a worthy and interesting blog in the eyes of the readers.  The award began here.  It is now my turn to tag five other blogs.  For those I tag, the rules are:

1. If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think,
2. Link to this post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme,
3. Optional: Proudly display the ‘Thinking Blogger Award’ with a link to the post that you wrote (here is an alternative silver version if gold doesn’t fit your blog).

In no particular order, I tag: James Poulos’ Postmodern Conservative, The American Scene, Gene Expression, In Media Res and Leon Hadar. 

Thinking Blogger: Not necessarily a contradiction in terms!

Yet, to concentrate on these things is to miss the most important argument of the speech which was that Obama’s mere presence as president would solve most of the problems of American foreign policy. Obama argued that as president he’d be able to counter “the terrorists’ message of hate with an agenda for hope around the world.” It is tempting to dismiss this as sheer hubris. But Obama is not alone in making this case. Just last week the New York Times’ foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman, one of the most influential journalists in America, wrote that Obama’s main selling point was that he could repair America’s relationship with the world. ~James Forsyth

Set aside for the moment that Obama is always talking about hope.  The line about countering hate with hope could have been taken from one of Mr. Bush’s speeches.  Knowing Obama’s penchant for “borrowing” other politicians’ lines, it probably was taken from one of Mr. Bush’s speeches.  It is no less vapid when someone fluent in the English language says it.

I don’t know which is more troubling: that a man might become President because he can recycle boilerplate optimism and cultivates a weird cult of personality, or that it can reasonably be said that Tom Friedman is one of the most influential journalists in the country.

Steven Clemons says remarkably sensible things about Obama and Cuba here.  Mr. Clemons notes some of the flaws with Obama’s big foreign policy speech (it’s so big and sprawling he calls it a “kitchen sink” speech), which echo nicely someof my concerns about “And-ism” and policy approaches that try to comprehend everything: Obama fails to make “hard choices” and doesn’t set priorities.  Another interesting point: “hard power” isn’t actually hard in the sense that it is ineffective; “soft power” achieves more and is therefore actually much more “hard” because it is more effective.

The fact that Petraeus is backing it, however, doesn’t then become an additional reason for further elements of the national political leadership to also back it. “Look, the general I put in charge because he was willing to defend my policy publicly is defending my policy” isn’t an independent basis for thinking the president’s policy is sound. ~Matt Yglesias

This is right.  It doesn’t make any sense to invoke Gen. Petraeus’ authority as a reason to support the plan, since any commander who accepts the assignment is bound to defend the merits of the plan–especially if he consulted in the drafting of the plan!  Saying that Gen. Petraeus supports the plan is like saying that he agrees with himself–one might expect such minimal coherence in a commander. 

Of course, one could just as easily cite other generals who think the plan is unlikely to succeed and that, according to Gen. Sheehan, the administration doesn’t know where it’s going.  Yet Gen. Petraeus has become the only figure who still possesses any credibility with the general public, because he actually knows what he’s doing to some degree and has been one of the few really outstanding commanding officers in the entire campaign.  One shudders to think how much worse things would be going if he were not in charge.  If you were going to try to run a successful counterinsurgency campaign, you would put someone with proven expertise in counterinsurgency, such as Gen. Petraeus, in charge of the effort.  To fail to do even this much would be to declare to the world that you are completely clueless.  However, the fact that Gen. Petraeus is very good at counterinsurgency tactics does not mean that he can save a situation that seems to be beyond our current means to save.   

But the Petraeus admiration had already reached such a point that, based on Gen. Petraeus‘ testimony alone, Hugh Hewitt and his legions of misguided followers made it their mission to penalise any Republican who opposed the “surge” because such opposition would “embolden the enemy.”  No word from Hewitt on whether the repeated massive bombings, the destruction of the Iron Bridge and the bombing inside the Green Zone constitute proof of an “emboldened enemy” despite the failure of all efforts to halt or change the “surge.”  Indeed, the existence of the so-called Victory Caucus (Hewitt’s mechanism for intimidating the Congressional GOP into slavishly follow the Bush line on Iraq) derived directly from this devotion to Petraeus.  Hewitt and friends are amazingly selective in the officers they choose to lavish praise on, naturally, since every military officer, active or retired, who can be found who questions or condemns the current plan or the war in its entirety receives scant respect from them.  When a few retired generals said that Rumsfeld should go (a view with which an overwhelming majority agreed by early 2006), we were treated to warnings about cabals and potential mutinies from some war supporters.  When Petraeus spoke, however, it was like the word of God for these people.  Funny how their respect for the officer seems to match up pretty exactly with their preconceived ideas about the war.    

The civilians and activists hide behind Petraeus because they have nothing else left.  It is also yet another example of the strange dichotomy of Bush’s approach to the war.  On the one hand, he is the War President, the Decider, the Numero Uno Honcho, and on the other he suffers from a case of chronic deference, constantly referring to “what our commanders on the ground” or “what our generals” say as his way out of every difficult question.  He would like to give the impression that he is a decisive leader who takes the bull by the horns, so to speak, while avoiding the impression that the mismanagement of the war has anything to do with him and the policies that he and his ministers set.  Instead of the buck stopping with him, he keeps giving it back to the generals, saying, “No, really, I want you to keep it!”  Because he is constantly deferring to the “experts,” he may think he has immunised himself from criticism (much as he has sealed himself off from the real world in all else), but as soon as someone in Congress attempts to fill the war leadership vacuum that he has left he suddenly rediscovers vast inherent powers in the role of Commander-in-Chief and insists that no one is in charge except for him.  Until, that is, he can find a war tsar to try to do his job for him.  It is a bizarre contradiction in an administration that wants to undo all the “damage” of the post-Watergate years to the imperial presidency while also being terribly concerned not to appear to be repeating the mistakes of Vietnam-era Presidents (with whom, of course, loyal courtiers will insist he has nothing in common–except perhaps for allegedly treacherous and insane opponents). 

Vast executive overreach when it comes to politics and policing at home has met diffidence, confusion, weakness and dilatoriness in the conduct of foreign affairs, which just happens to be the exact inverse of what the executive should theoretically be like.  It is not exactly surprising that Presidents have become worse at doing what they are assigned to do once they started making everything their business.  Referring to the administration’s weakness in foreign affairs probably seems counterintuitive to those who, Ledeen-like, continually mistake jingoism for a demonstration of strength, rather than the desperation response of men whose minds are choked with fear and paranoia about the rest of the world that it is.  There is no more clear example of weakness in foreign affairs than engaging in the use of force against a vastly inferior, weaker, poorer state in the name of panicked self-defense.  It would be rather like Germany invading Belgium in 1914, but not to strike at France and swiftly knock out a strategic threat in the west.  Instead, Germany would have invaded Belgium in order to neutralise the menace and threat of Belgium itself.  Any power that felt truly threatened by a state so much weaker than itself would be admitting stunning weakness in the eyes of the world, probably inviting far more challenges and attacks than if it had left things alone.  A superpower that claims to be threatened by a basketcase country on the other side of the planet has all but admitted that it is on the ropes.

I spoke with a half-dozen prominent GOP operatives this past week, most of them high-level officials in the Reagan and Bush I and Bush II administrations, and I heard the same devastating critique: This White House is isolated and ineffective; the country has stopped listening to President Bush, just as it once tuned out the hapless Jimmy Carter; the president’s misplaced sense of personal loyalty is hurting his party and the nation. ~David Ignatius

But just watch the man move to the beat of an African drum and tell me…oh, wait, that’s even worse.  Maybe it’s not as bad as all that.  Maybe the weaknesses of the administration have been exaggerated by wild-eyed bloggers!  Maybe not:

“This is the most incompetent White House I’ve seen since I came to Washington,” said one GOP senator. “The White House legislative liaison team is incompetent, pitiful, embarrassing. My colleagues can’t even tell you who the White House Senate liaison is. There is rank incompetence throughout the government. It’s the weakest Cabinet I’ve seen.”

In Chicago this week, Obama argued against the current tides of Democratic opinion. There’s been a sharp rise in isolationism among Democrats, according to a recent Pew survey, so Obama argued for global engagement. Fewer Democrats believe in peace through military strength, so Obama argued for increasing the size of the military.

In other words, when Obama is confronted by what he sees as arrogant unilateral action, he argues for humility. When he is confronted by what he sees as dovish passivity, he argues for the hardheaded promotion of democracy in the spirit of John F. Kennedy. ~David Brooks

Far be it from me to continue to advise Obama on how to run his campaign (I earlier told him that he shouldn’t run this time–and I stand by that advice), but this approach puzzles me.  Obama must feel confident that he has the antiwar voters locked up if he can make the kind of foreign policy speech he made the other day, which was not all together non-interventionist-friendly (to put it mildly).  The problem is that the antiwar voters still have a long time to rally around someone like John Edwards, who at least makes some effort to not sound like a rampaging interventionist these days (except, naturally, when it comes to Iran), which will leave Obama mouthing Clinton-like platitudes about “responsible” foreign policy while more consistent antiwar candidates who actually have foreign policy experience (e.g., Richardson) will be stealing his supporters.  I suppose we can give Obama credit that he is attempting to lead his party and moderate the extremes within it.  The problem is that one side of his party is, according to his own past estimations, dead wrong on their basic assumptions about the management of foreign policy; for some reason, he has chosen to embrace the overwhelming bulk of their conception of how to manage foreign policy.  I don’t know whether this is how he uses his “Niebuhrian instincts,” but it seems like awfully foolish politics to me.

Brooks goes on:

When I asked him to articulate the central doctrine of his foreign policy, he said, “The single objective of keeping America safe is best served when people in other nations are secure and feel invested.”

That’s either profound or vacuous, depending on your point of view.

Well, obviously I think it’s pretty vacuous, but what it is mostly is dangerous.