Why Obama Matters
On Thursday Tom Engelhardt posted one of his customarily circumspect and informative essays about our situation in Iraq, “The Eight Inside-the-Beltway Fundamentals of the Iraq War“. It is worth reading in full, though two specific sections immediately jump out. The first was his list of three different scenarios (one for each of the three remaining presidential contestants) for what our involvement in Iraq will look like a year from now. The second was his titular list of eight depressing truisms of D.C. thinking that, in defiance of logic and public opinion, dominate our government’s foreign policy.
Engelhardt’s eight fundamentals describe the relentlessly militaristic thinking of the foreign policy establishment. They are ideas that existed in Washington D.C. long before Bush the Younger took office but which have grown so prevalent since his inauguration as to exclude all others. Having laid them out he concludes that no matter who wins the election in November this same ingrained thinking will continue. Thus our Iraq adventure, now at its fifth anniversary, will have a sixth and a seventh and so on. What’s worse, the mindset that got us into that war will continue, leading us inevitably into fresh catastrophes. If either Hillary Clinton or John McCain becomes our next President, I would agree with him; but I have greater, forgive me, hope for the Senator from Illinois.
Let us examine what Iraq policy might look like a year from now under a President McCain or a second President Clinton. John McCain is so gung-ho for the Iraq war that he is basing his presidential bid around it; if he is elected you can be sure that it will go on for at least a further four years. There, that didn’t take long; Hillary Clinton’s position is a bit more nebulous though.
She has promised (albeit in wishy-washy terms) to end the war, but she has never repudiated the mindset, Engelhardt’s eight fundamentals, that got us into it in the first place. A second Clinton Administration would have a very different Iraq policy from a McCain Administration, no doubts there, but were she to defeat McCain the general philosophy of American foreign policy would be little changed.
Then there is Barack Obama. The Senator from Illinois not only opposed the war from the outset (at a time when doing so was the equivalent of openly declaring yourself a communist during the 1950s), he has also made his anti-war stance a central part of his campaign. If Obama (the most anti-war of anti-war politicians) were to defeat McCain (the most pro-war of pro-war politicians) his electoral mandate would have one marquee theme: end the war in Iraq.
What’s more, the instant the television networks declared him victorious it would be abundantly clear to the entire world that direct American involvement in Iraq was coming to an end. The moment that happens there will be a sea change in what’s considered possible and impossible in Iraq. All of the interested parties, inside and outside of Iraq, would immediately have to scrap all of their expectations and begin anew.
One way or another we’re going to have a lot of troops between the rivers next year on the sixth anniversary, but if Obama is elected the seventh anniversary may pass very differently. Obama’s website has disclaimers about “combat troops”, 16-month schedules and leaving some troops to protect diplomats and strike at al-Qaeda bases, but those are mostly campaign fig leaves against charges of being a namby-pamby. Once it’s clear, to the troops and the brass, that we’re on our way out the decision will likely be made to do it faster rather than slower. Last man to die for a mistake and all that.
Obama’s messages of hope and change are easily dismissed when it comes to domestic politics and policy. But the office of the President, as its current tenant has sadly proved, has an almost unlimited power when it comes to matters of war and peace and international relations and in a nutshell that is why Obama matters. President McCain means war without end. President Clinton (the Vaginal) would at least try to wrap up the one in Iraq but would still likely view our military as the primary tool of foreign policy. President Obama’s foreign policy would be a complete 180 from our present one and with an electoral victory won by opposing the war he would have the strength to smash those decrepit fundamentals that so vex Mr. Engelhardt.
