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28 September 2008

Understanding McCain’s Foreign Policy

During his debate with Senator Barack Obama on 26 September 2008, Senator John McCain repeatedly claimed that his Democratic opponent does not understand many aspects of the international strategic situation. He referred on numerous occasions to his own meetings with General David Petraeus, the U.S. commander in Iraq, as well as to his visits to Afghanistan, Bosnia, Kosovo, and other theatres of military operations.

What John McCain doesn’t understand is that there is a difference between international politics and military operations. He seems to assume that the foreign affairs job of a U.S. President is to find good spots for exerting American power through military action and subsequently to defer to the decisions of effective commanders in the field. In this way, he differs little from George W. Bush. His professed “Country First” ideals are very militaristic. They dictated his attempt to play a role in the creation of a rescue plan for the nation’s financial institutions. He appears to have been driven by the desire to preserve sufficient monetary resources to support America’s ability to deploy forces overseas.

Senator Obama’s approach is diametrically opposed. In his case, it is economic and social goals for the country that define whether and how to project American power in the world. His failure to make this distinction during the Candidates’ Debate conceded to Senator McCain the choice of power politics as the primary determinant of White House foreign policy. It’s as if the Presidency were a giant game of “Risk.” That’s better than Karl Rove’s reduction of the Presidency to an exercise in self-preservation. McCain’s goals may be loftier, but they are far removed from the welfare of average members of the country. It is that objective that Obama will strive to attain and he should make that clear between now and Election Day.

08 September 2008

The Edge

In his NYT Magazine article on 6 September 2008, “Right at the Edge,” Dexter Filkins concludes that Pakistan’s military and its intelligence agency, the ISI, have made fighting the Taliban in the country’s Tribal Areas and in Afghanistan a game the objective of which is to obtain financial aid from the United States. As long as the U.S. is a sucker for that charade, the Pakistani security forces will find it necessary to create the danger for which they advance themselves as one of the key solutions.

It’s time to call on Pakistan to take its responsibility for helping to produce order in Central Asia more seriously. That function should be Pakistan’s business, not a dramatic role. Instead of being paid to entertain, Pakistan can earn the equivalent of what the U.S. and NATO are spending on their own security operations in Afghanistan by supplanting them and becoming their prime contractor.

It may take some doing to convince Afghans to accept Pakistan as the deliverer of counterinsurgency and security services, training, even “community organizing.” The Afghan government should be commissioned to perform certain tasks now undertaken by NATO, including contracting for services that Pakistan might compete to supply. It wouldn’t cost the West any more to lay these security functions off to the institutions of the nations involved and to hold them to strict accounting, than to perform those functions themselves at great expense and risk of injury or death.

05 September 2008

Breaking Up Iraq

In his OpEd article in the August 29, 2008 Wall Street Journal, Dan Senor plays the retroactive justification game on behalf of the Bush Administration’s Iraq Invasion strategy. He calls on Senator Biden to admit that the plan that Biden had advocated for allowing the partitioning of Iraq had possibly been overtaken by events. In fact, the following may only be an academic exercise; but there are several inaccuracies in Mr. Senor’s distinction between Bosnia and the debacle in Iraq which, as a senior advisor to the Coalition, he helped to create.

1) The hostile parties in Iraq are not a monolithic entity. They cannot be lumped together as “the radicals.” Suppressing or defusing their fraternal violence only exposes their unresolved antagonisms.

2) Resolution of those antagonisms can only be achieved by bringing all the parties together, if necessary on a regional basis, in an atmosphere of non-violence. Negotiation of those issues would at best be chaoti, not bilateral.

3) The plan to hold Iraq together would surely require as many or more foreign troops than splitting the country into more manageable regional units under the supervision of an international organization.

4) There is really no need for any of those regional units to be culturally uniform. The partition of India and Pakistan resulted in integrated populations. Autonomy is ore important than uniformity. The settlement should allow individuals to decide whether or not to relocate for personal reasons and to take pride in belonging to one sect or another with its own territorial patrimony.

5) There will not be a windfall for the Kurds from Iraq’s regional division. The settlement between the regions must require all three to share wealth and hardship. Besides, Turkey and Iran, for geographic reasons, will always be able to prevent the Kurds in Iraq from obtaining independent outlets for their oil resources and thereby becoming a financial center of gravity for their neighboring Kurdish minorities.

The future of Iraq depends on whether the government there can hold the state together without outside enforcement. Is providing that enforcement a worthwhile U.S. goal? Wouldn’t it be no less expensive, and far less bloody, for the U.N. to take this on at our expense? The U.S. should admit that our mistake was to invade, not to propose possible strategies for correcting our rash error.

04 September 2008

Why Obama

As a graduate of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, I was startled by the statement of Al Hubbard and Noam Neusner in the September 3, 2008, Wall Street Journal that a weakness in Barack Obama's foreign policy approach is "knee-jerk preference for diplomacy ... over the security of the American people and our closest allies." They apparently believe that the objective of effective diplomacy is something other than the achievement of our international interests. Knee-jerk preference for the use of force may appear to make presidential candidates popular with American voters but it doesn't answer their need for thoughtful leadership.

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