Second, it’s obvious Obama’s crack foreign policy advisors haven’t done a great job. His position on Iraq, the most important foreign policy issue of the last decade, is a mess.
“Six years ago, I stood up and opposed this war at a time when it was politically risky to do so,” Obama intoned during the first presidential debate. It’s a familiar line, but an incorrect one. It wasn’t actually politically risky for him, since he was only an Illinois state senator at the time. Who cared what he thought about foreign policy?
Obama added that “we hadn’t finished the job in Afghanistan. We hadn’t caught bin Laden.” And he concluded that the problem with Iraq is that “from a strategic national security perspective, al Qaeda is resurgent, stronger now than at any time since 2001.”
That’s not true. Last May, CIA Director Michael Hayden told The Washington Post we’ve seen, the “Near strategic defeat of al Qaeda in Iraq. Near strategic defeat for al Qaeda in Saudi Arabia. Significant setbacks for al Qaeda globally -- and here I’m going to use the word ‘ideologically’ -- as a lot of the Islamic world pushes back on their form of Islam.” The fight against terrorism is going well.
The idea that the war in Iraq was a distraction from the true war on terror is a leftover soundbite from John Kerry’s 2004 campaign. You’d think, after four years, all those Washington experts could have come up with a better talking point -- maybe one that’s even accurate.
William F. Buckley once wrote he’d “rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.” The same thing goes for the vaunted “Washington insiders.” Surely a group of ordinary Americans -- business people, parents, blue-collar workers – could run the country as well as the “experts” we’ve got doing so now.
Of course, they’ll never get the chance to do so. Because that would involve actual change, instead of what we’ll end up with in 2008: mere rhetorical change.