Posted by
ClearCommentary.com on Wednesday, July 16, 2008 3:09:04 PM
In January of 2007, Barack Obama introduced legislation in the senate that would mandate the removal of all U.S. troops by March 2008. Since then he has revised his views on Iraq to neatly comport with changes on the ground, all the while denying progress has been made. Now that fifteen of the eighteen benchmarks have been met and Iraq is gearing up for its fall elections, Obama has again re-scripted his policy recommendations.
When circumstances change it's a sign that we understand the inner mechanisms of the issue at hand when we adjust our thinking. However, it's important to gauge to degree to which politics plays a role in these exercises, which means reverse engineering Obama's thinking and divining his contemporaneous motivations.
With respect to Iraq, the unavoidable conclusion is that his policy modifications were the equivalent of a gallows conversion and were therefore motivated by political realities and expedience, not merely a revision at the edges of an otherwise unchanged policy. Indeed, Obama's early positions reveal a deep and abiding ignorance of warfare and the dovetailed way in which a loss in Iraq would tarnish America's honor and vilify the sacrifice our military personnel made who perished there.
More broadly, Obama's insistence early in his campaign that we must leave Iraq belies the reality that Iran and al-Qaeda would decimate innocents while transforming it into a terrorist stronghold. It's that kind of unadultlike thinking that has led to the unnecessary loss of millions throughout history. Obama and his leftist acolytes seem determined to remain in their intellectual bell jar which is impervious to the lessons of war, of tyrants, and how best to defeat them.
Now Obama appears poised to bring the same misguided thinking on Iraq to Iran, where he would employ "aggressive diplomacy." It's quintessential State Department reasoning that lacks any hint of intellectual humility to suggest that his Harvard education will outwit the likes of Ahmadinejad, someone who has demonstrated his willingness to lay waste to Israel. Although diplomacy is an important component of our approach to Iran, it's only a stop on the way to serious threats, because that is the only language they understand.
In his most recent remarks about leaving Iraq, Obama continued to criticize our efforts there while continuing to insist that or resources should have been focused on Afghanistan. First, his thinking might be more credible if he had spent any time in either country, but instead his 'fact-finding' has consisted of discussions with aids and advisors. And, despite his serial revisions, the word "win" remains absent from his lexicon.
It taxes the imagination to think that millions of Americans will vote for this man, someone whose resume wouldn't even qualify him for a cabinet position, much less the presidency. It's a sign of collective desperation among Democrats, of the pathological way in which their hatred of President Bush has marred their judgment, and of their dim understanding of history.
If Obama represents the best the left has to offer, his candidacy may be an early warning that the decrepit and decayed policies of modern liberalism might finally be headed for extinction. In which case, we ight see a new generation of Democrats, one in the vein of Truman, Jackson, and Kennedy. That would be healthy for both parties.