Is Barack Obama a liberal hawk or a Democratic dove? The
freshman Illinois senator doesn’t seem to have made up his mind
yet.
At the last Democratic debate Obama was a peacemaker, pledging
summits with Cuba, Iran, Venezuela, Syria, and North Korea in his
first year as president — a stance Hillary Clinton derided as
“irresponsible and naive.” Then at the Wilson Center he was a
terror-fighter, delivering a tough (by the standards of his party)
speech pledging to pursue al Qaeda terrorists in
Pakistan whether the government in Islamabad gives us permission or
not:
“There are terrorists holed up in those mountains who
murdered 3,000 Americans. They are plotting to strike again. It was
a terrible mistake to fail to act when we had a chance to take out
an al Qaeda leadership meeting in 2005. If we have actionable
intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President
Musharraf won’t act, we will.”
Call it operation “shock and audacity.” A few prominent liberal
bloggers were predictably incensed, with Jerome Armstrong going so
far to
accuse Obama of being a convert to the
“Bush-Cheney Doctrine.”
More surprisingly, some conservatives also pounced. John
Podhoretz scoffed, “[E]very serious person knows the
United States won’t invade Pakistan.” Peter Brookes, writing in the
New York Post, called Obama’s comments a “blunder,” arguing
such a move would destabilize Musharraf’s moderately cooperative
government and risk plunging nuclear-armed Pakistan into radical
Islamic rule.
“The last thing we need is for Islamabad to fall to the
extremists,” Brookes wrote. “That would exacerbate the
problem of those terrorist safe havens that Obama apparently thinks
he could invade.”
Perhaps chastened by this bipartisan reaction, Obama reverted
yesterday to dovish form, telling the Associated Press that he
would not use nuclear weapons to fight terrorism “in any
circumstance,” first with the qualifier “involving civilians” and
then saying “scratch that” to all caveats. “There’s been no
discussion of nuclear weapons,” the senator concluded. “That’s not
on the table.”
Don’t try to piece together Obama’s logic in foreswearing the
use of nuclear weapons while threatening an unauthorized incursion
into a nuclear-armed country. These statements have less to do with
serious foreign policy thought than trying to jockey for position
against Hillary Clinton, whose lead appears to be widening in some
national polls of Democratic voters. It may also
foreshadow a general election strategy of hitting President Bush
and the Republicans from the left on Iraq and from the right on al
Qaeda.
At least Mike Gravel has finally gotten an answer to his
famous
query, “Tell me Barack, who do you want to nuke?”
BUT THE CONSERVATIVE REACTION is more intriguing. Obama was
obviously reacting to a New York Times report that the Bush administration had aborted
a proposed 2005 special operations raid on al Qaeda leaders in
Pakistan. The mission was reportedly backed by Donald Rumsfeld and
Porter Goss, then defense secretary and CIA director,
respectively.
The administration apparently decided the raid wasn’t worth the
price of alienating or endangering Musharraf’s government, an
imperfect ally vastly preferable to a situation where Islamic
fundamentalists command a nuclear arsenal.
If Rumsfeld and Goss had gotten their way, how many conservative
bloggers would have called it a blunder? And if President Obama or
President Clinton were to abandon a “snatch and grab” operation
against al Qaeda chiefs, how would conservatives have reacted?
According to the New Republic’s Jonathan Chait, “a key
part of the psychology of the right” explains the apparent
contradiction. “In the conservative mind, it is axiomatic that
President Bush takes the maximal hawkish position,” he claimed. “If Democrats are to his left, then they are
appeasers. If Democrats are to his right, then they are taking an
irresponsible position, because everybody knows that President Bush
wants to kill the bad guys.”
Judging from conservative criticisms of Bush for being
insufficiently hawkish, however, this seems an exaggeration if not
a total misreading. Partisans on both sides are more likely to
trust their own candidates’ instincts — and to be skeptical of the
military interventions of opposing parties.
But perhaps this isn’t entirely bad. Democrats need to be
reminded that the projection of American military strength will
play a vital role in protecting this country from Islamist terror.
It’s also good for Republicans to remember how military action,
like other government interventions, can have dangerous unintended
consequences — a discussion that would have been helpful
concerning Iraq and will be essential in figuring out how to deal
with Iran.
Just don’t ask Obama to sort it all out. He’s too busy trying to
out-triangulate a triangulator.
