A more inconvenient truth

By Jonathan Altman

On July 21^st, the United States military formally handed over the province of Qadasiyah to the Iraqi government, marking the 10^th of Iraq’s 18 provinces given over to the Maliki government. In fact, over the past year several such turnovers have occurred, with 6 more scheduled by January. At the same time, violence across the country has dropped to its lowest levels ever; prompting General Petraeus to remark that in some areas of the country violence seemed to be "latent". Even Al-Anbar, once the Iraqi equivalent of the American "Wild West", has been pacified enough to be given over to the Iraqi government. What then has happened to the "war without end" so eloquently described by Barack Obama and other doves? Surely we can all remember that even as recently as one year ago, Iraq was a "quagmire" with no end in site. In fact, Obama and other liberal members of Congress opposed the very plan, extensively supported by the experts at the Department of Defense, General Petraeus, and Senator McCain which has led to this resounding success: the surge.

Currently, U.S. and Iraqi Ground Forces are involved in one of the major last offensives they may have to make, wiping out the remnants of the once mighty Al Qaeda organization in Iraq in Diyala province (scheduled to be turned over in a few months.) This area has increasing been referred to in the press as one of the last strongholds of the insurgency in the country; clearly it is on its last legs. Yet even now, as the tremendous wisdom of the surge of 2007 (whose members are already largely stateside) and the implementation of true counterinsurgency warfare rings true, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama continues to refuse to acknowledge the obvious. As his voting record shows, Mr. Obama vociferously opposed all troop increases in Iraq, against the better judgment of those actually brave enough to put on the uniform, rather than writing about international law from the plush offices of Harvard Law Review. Senator Obama’s recent whirlwind tour of the world is a convenient attempt to distort the facts: Mr. Obama’s foreign policy experience is not only sorely lacking (which one cannot say about Senator McCain,) but clearly is misguided, pushing the love-all policies of Carter that led to the botched Iranian hostage crisis rescue as opposed to rooting himself in any kind of reality. Furthermore, Senator Obama deserves no credit for his withdrawal timetable as it essentially mirrors what the military was going to follow anyway; as a direct of the surge he thoroughly opposed. If Mr. Obama’s misunderstanding of the surge is not enough to discredit his foreign policy in and of itself, one need only look to his views on Afghanistan for further evidence of incompetence.

Senator Obama, along with some of his chief foreign policy advisors, have begun pushing for an "Afghanistan First" strategy, suggesting that they would redeploy two brigades from Iraq to Afghanistan in a sort of "mini-surge" (oh the irony!). However, as Victor Davis Hansson correctly points out in a recent Washington Times op-ed, the problems we’re seeing in Afghanistan don’t originate there. Instead, the problems stem from a Pakistani intelligence service playing both sides of the fence, which even the United States government has acknowledged, while an incompetent Pakistani government fails to shut down Al Qaeda’s bases in the FATA (Federally Administered Tribal Areas) region of Pakistan. What we need to pacify Afghanistan is to clean out the lawless tribal regions of Pakistan, not a meaningless increase in troops at a level too low to actually take the fight to the Taliban. Moreover, despite the naïve message of the Obama campaign that diplomacy trumps all, every diplomatic effort to eradicate the FATA problem has thus far failed. As Afghanistani President Hamid Karzai has suggested, the time has come for a military option, something that feel-good Barack Obama surely has no stomach for.

We must be fair in our assessment however; no candidate decides his own foreign policy, at least not for the most part. Like Senator McCain, Senator Obama too has a dedicated team (some report as many as 300 strong) that directs his foreign policy stances. Out of considerations of length, an in depth study of a just the key players shall have to suffice. Broadly, Mr. Obama’s team can be divided into three groups. The first of these are the dinosaurs of the team; former Carter appointees Zbigniew Brzezinski, Susan Rice and Anthony Lake. Aside from downgrading our military production to dangerous levels while in office, these three people were also part of the staff that oversaw the lowest retention rates in military history, as well as dozens of diplomatic failures. Brzezinski, Rice and Lake are long past their expiration dates; we’ve all seen where Carter’s naivety got us and would be foolish to welcome another disastrous crack at it. The second Obama foreign policy group consists of a younger crowd, notably Joseph Cirincione and Lawrence Korb of the Center for American Progress. This group can be characterized as nothing more than idealists, or peaceniks as they’ve been formerly called. They’d like to see environmental programs funded with defense money, and redirect our soldiers to countless humanitarian interventions rather than defending the United States and its interests. Finally, Senator Obama employs a third group of foreign policy advisors, typified by lawyer Samantha Power, a noted U.N. activist. This group completes the trifecta of destruction that is the Obama foreign policy team, encouraging the loss of our sovereignty and unwavering support of the U.N.

In sum then, judging by his advisors and positions on Iraq and Afghanistan, we should know exactly what to expect from an Obama presidency; drastic defense cuts, a large drop in American military prestige, failure to wipe out Al Qaeda, humanitarian efforts above security, and the Carteresque foolishness of the late 1970s reiterated. The only bright spot in all this is that the huge foreign policy mistakes Obama would make as president would likely preclude any chance of his reelection, at least among a sane voting bloc.