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Phil, at least Andrew Bacevich's Obama endorsement makes a certain kind of sense: If you believe the war is the overriding issue, you vote your position on the war. If, in some alternate universe, the Republicans had nominated Ron Paul or even Chuck Hagel, you would see a lot of Weekly Standard types considering an endorsement of Hillary. Other conservative hawks would join them.

Where I part company with Bacevich -- other than the fact that I think the war, though important, is not the only salient issue -- is over the utility of trying to predict the long-term political consequences of a given candidate's election. Bacevich hopes that if Barack Obama defeats John McCain, neoconservatives will be routed electorally and the right will turn to other approaches to foreign policy. He might be right. But it could also have other unforseen, unintended consequences that result in exactly the opposite outcome, or something different entirely. And Obama is certainly a foreign-policy interventionist in his own right. In the end, it just makes more sense to vote for candidates who actually agree with you on policy issues.

Kmiec makes a few antiwar statements in his endorsement, but won't just come out and say that he is endorsing Obama based on the Iraq war. Instead he meanders around arguing that Obama will move the country leftward in a manner that is respectful to conservatives. Bacevich does some of this too in enumerating conservative principles that Obama violates as much as or more than the Republicans, but Kmiec's endorsement lacks any kind of logical consistency or coherence.

topics:
Foreign Policy, John McCain, Barack Obama, Iraq