In the current New Republic, senior editor Jonathan Chait writes about the foreign-policy views of Senators Barack Obama and John McCain. He concludes his piece this way:
Obama, as Michael Crowley explained in the previous issue, understands that events could change his plans (see “Barack in Iraq,” May 7). But he also grasps that the risks of appearing indecisive outweigh the risks of appearing too dovish, which is why he so quickly disowned [Samantha] Power’s remarks. Republicans have arrived at the same conclusion. A reliable barometer of the GOP’s calculations is the writing of Peter Wehner, who recently left his post in the Bush Administration as director of strategic initiatives, a position that roughly translates to “minister of propaganda.” In a long Commentary article, Wehner detailed Obama’s record of statements on Iraq, from opposing the war at the outset, to favoring its prosecution once we were in, to finally favoring withdrawal in the fall of 2006. Wehner sneeringly described this as “a record of problematically ad-hoc judgments at best, calculatingly cynical judgments at worst.” My God: He’s tailoring his position to fit . . . changing circumstances! In the Bush administration, this kind of flexibility would never be tolerated.
To begin with the trivial first: To have one’s writing called ”sneering” by a writer for The New Republic is rich indeed. It is a magazine, after all, that has perfected a snide, adolescent tone among its writers. But such indulgences come at a cost. TNR was once an influential journal of opinion. Today, it is not. And to the degree that it creates any “buzz” at all, it tends to be because it has to apologize for fictional war accounts by people like Private Scott Beauchamp (The New Republic, you may recall, at first forcefully stood by Beauchamp’s account of misconduct by American soldiers in Iraq — but after pressure by others to actually investigate the facts, TNR decided “we cannot stand by these stories”).
As for my own attitude toward Obama, I actually credit him in
my Commentary essay:
Alone among this year’s major Democratic candidates, then, Obama can claim an unspotted record of opposition to American involvement in Iraq and even a kind of prescience as to the subsequent course of events there. In any account of his electoral success so far, this factor must weigh as heavily as his natural eloquence and his ingratiating personality.
Now to the substance of Chait’s charge. It would be useful if Chait, having cited my essay, might now make an effort to read it — or, if he has, to actually analyze what I wrote. If he does, he’ll find that I didn’t (and wouldn’t) fault Obama for tailoring his positions based on changing circumstances. If Obama becomes president, I hope he’ll jettison his stated commitment to withdraw all combat troops from Iraq within a year-and-a-half because of the catastrophe that would follow.
The problem with Obama is that his positions on Iraq were the wrong ones to embrace based on the facts on the ground at the time.
To be specific: When the Bush administration had the wrong counterinsurgency plan in place, Obama was supportive of it. He told the Chicago Tribune in July 2004, “There’s not that much difference between my position and George Bush’s position at this stage.” While John McCain was calling for more troops and a different counterinsurgency strategy in 2003, 2004, and 2005, Obama was not.
In late 2006, when the situation in Iraq was dire, Obama declared it was time to “execute a serious change of course in Iraq” — but rather than advocating a “surge” in troops, he was advocating a ”phased withdrawal.” His predictive judgment was this: “We cannot, through putting in more troops or maintaining the presence that we have, expect that somehow the situation is going to improve.”
In January 2007, when President Bush announced the administration’s change in strategy in Iraq — which included tens of thousands of additional troops and a new COIN strategy led by David Petraeus, Obama declared that nothing in the plan would “make a significant dent in the sectarian violence that’s taking place there.”
Then, in May 2007, Obama did what he had never done previously: He voted against funding for combat operations, claiming as a reason the fact that the bill included no timeline for troop withdrawal. And in September, just three months after the final elements of the 30,000-strong surge forces had landed in Iraq and fairly substantial security progress was discernible, Obama declared that we needed to withdraw combat troops “immediately.” “Not in six months or a year — now.”
It got so bad that Obama at first denied progress was being made, then denied that the surge had anything to do with the progress, and even insisted (in a debate in January 2008) that the reduction in violence was due not to the work of the American military but to the results of the 2006 midterm election in America. Finally Obama was forced by the overwhelming evidence to concede the surge had made progress — yet in the process Obama misrepresented his past position, insisting that when the surge was announced, he had “no doubt” that “if we place 30,000 more troops in there, then we would see an improvement in the security situation and we would see a reduction in violence.”
All of which led me to conclude this in my Commentary essay:
Unlike his presidential rival John McCain, an early and vocal and truly consistent critic of the Bush administration’s counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq, Obama . . . was opposed to doing anything about Iraq even when, like everyone else, he believed Saddam Hussein was a menace who was likely armed with weapons of mass destruction; became a supporter of the war after the fact and remained one even as things were going poorly; and morphed into an aggressive opponent again just as the prospects of an American victory began to brighten. If there is a consistency here, it would appear to be the consistency of one consistently divorced from the facts on the ground and, lately, almost hermetically sealed off from even the possibility of good news. In a politician admired for his supposed open-mindedness and his ready willingness to consider new evidence, this is, to say the least, striking.
As a cheerleader for Obama, I’m not sure Chait wants to draw scrutiny to Obama’s real positions on the war, which are at odds with the popular impression. Perhaps Chait could next turn his analytical powers to the fact that a foreign-policy adviser, Robert Malley, was just released from the Obama campaign after admitting that he had met secretly with Hamas. This, of course, follows the news that Obama was endorsed by a top Hamas political adviser, Ahmed Yousef (“We like Mr. Obama and we hope that he will win the election.”). When Sen. McCain said this endorsement was a legitimate point of discussion, Obama responded with a post-partisan, trans-political, dignified, let’s-turn-the-page-on-the-old-politics comment. McCain, Obama said, was “losing his bearings.”
What a clever and sophisticated put down, and done with such a light touch.
Perhaps if Barack Obama fails in his bid to win the presidency, he could apply for a position as a senior writer at The New Republic. He seems to be developing the right attitude for it.
— Peter Wehner, former deputy assistant to the president, is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
