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Jewish World Review
Feb. 21, 2007
/ 3 Adar, 5767
Obama's muddled stance on foreign intervention
By
Niall Ferguson
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
If politics were a fairy tale, Barack Obama would surely be the next president of the United States. With his melting-pot roots and his molten-hot rhetoric, Obama can seem like a cross between Martin Luther King Jr. and John F. Kennedy a living opportunity for Democrats to relive the '60s, but without the bitter arguments over civil rights.
An Obama victory in 2008 would also exorcise the memory of that other lingering 1960s nightmare: Vietnam. Last month, Obama introduced a bill that would mandate a phased "redeployment of U.S. forces with the goal of removing all combat brigades … from Iraq by March 31, 2008."
Obama's antiwar stance is widely seen as his trump card as he goes head to head with Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination. Despite her best efforts, Clinton finds herself in John Kerry territory, having voted for the war but now opposing it. Should Obama win this contest, his supporters reason, he would also be well placed to beat any of the Republican front-runners. John McCain is seen as particularly vulnerable on Iraq. Not only did he support the war, he has also backed President Bush's proposed "surge" of extra troops.
Yet conventional wisdom on presidential races at this early stage nearly always turns out to be wrong. Obama's stance on Iraq may yet prove to be his biggest vulnerability.
Take a look at Obama's arguments for a speedy U.S. withdrawal. Last month, he asserted that "redeployment remains our best leverage to pressure the Iraqi government to achieve … political settlement between its warring factions." The key is "to give Iraqis their country back" because "no amount of American soldiers can solve the political differences at the heart of somebody else's civil war."
But Obama's claim that a U.S. withdrawal would somehow "pressure the Sunni and Shia to come to the table and find peace" is a fraud. Withdrawal is much more likely to lead to an escalation of the internecine conflict that is tearing Iraq apart. In a devastating 2006 paper for the Brookings Institution, Daniel L. Byman and Kenneth M. Pollack pointed out that "the only thing standing between Iraq and a descent into a Lebanon- or Bosnia-like maelstrom is 135,000 American troops."
In fact, Iraq has already matched the level of violence witnessed in the Lebanese and Bosnian civil wars. And it could get much worse. If the U.S. pulls out, as Obama recommends, Byman and Pollack predict "a humanitarian nightmare" in which we should expect "hundreds of thousands (conceivably even millions) of people to die."
Obama's call for rapid withdrawal from Iraq would make some sense if he were an isolationist. But he's not. His memoir-cum-manifesto, "The Audacity of Hope," insists that, out of both self-interest and altruism, the U.S. has no alternative but to "help make the world more secure." Looking back on the Rwandan genocide, he reflects that "an international show of force … might have stopped the slaughter."
Obama also has accused the Bush administration of doing too little to stop the murderous policies of the Sudanese government toward the people of Darfur. In an article in December 2005, he went so far as to urge the deployment of "a U.N.- or NATO-led force."
Wait a second. Here are two civil wars, each likely to spiral out of control. But in one (Sudan), Obama recommends intervention, while in the other (Iraq), he recommends military withdrawal. Am I missing something?
What is particularly objectionable is that Obama appears to have forgotten Colin Powell's so-called Pottery Barn rule, as famously enunciated on the eve of the invasion of Iraq: "You break it, you own it." Far more than in Sudan, the U.S. has a moral responsibility to prevent Iraq from plunging into a bloodbath. When Obama refers to "someone else's civil war," you have to ask how he thinks this civil war got started. Sure, Barack, you didn't vote for the war, but that doesn't absolve you from dealing with the mess Bush has made.
In the acknowledgments section of his book, Obama thanks his advisor Samantha Power, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning "A Problem from Hell" was an indictment of Western impotence in the face of successive genocides. I assume Obama has read Power's book. Unfortunately, he doesn't seem to have grasped its implications.
Back to the political fairy tale. It is Jan. 20, 2009, and Obama is being sworn in as the 44th president. Just as he demanded, the last U.S. soldier was airlifted out of Baghdad's Green Zone the previous March. Since then, Iraq and its neighbors have been consumed by sectarian violence worse than anything seen since Rwanda in 1994. The death toll is estimated to be half a million and rising. The United Nations has condemned the Shiite government's murderous expulsion of the Sunnis in southeastern Iraq as genocide. In Washington, the question on everyone's lips is will President Obama call for U.S. military intervention to halt the killing?
Now, that would take real audacity.
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Niall Ferguson is a professor of history at Harvard University. He is the author of "Empire" (Basic Books, 2003) and "Colossus" (Penguin, 2004).
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12/20/05: History, democracy and Iraq
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11/15/05: Red plus blue equals purple
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11/01/05: Triumph of an über-wonk
© 2006, Los Angeles Times
Distributed by Los Angeles Times Syndicate
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