" Barack Obama As The War President"

Republican John McCain accused Democrat Barack Obama of inexperience and reckless judgment for saying Iran does not pose the same serious threat to the United States as the Soviet Union did in its day.

The likely GOP presidential nominee made the criticism Monday in Chicago, Obama's home turf.

"Such a statement betrays the depth of Senator Obama's inexperience and reckless judgment. These are very serious deficiencies for an American president to possess," McCain said at the restaurant industry's annual meeting.

He was referring to comments Obama made Sunday in Pendleton, Ore.: "Iran, Cuba, Venezuela — these countries are tiny compared to the Soviet Union. They don't pose a serious threat to us the way the Soviet Union posed a threat to us. And yet we were willing to talk to the Soviet Union at the time when they were saying, `We're going to wipe you off the planet.'"

McCain's campaign on Monday distributed a video clip of Obama making the comments.

McCain listed the dangers he sees from Iran: It provides deadly explosive devices used to kill U.S. soldiers in Iraq, sponsors terrorists in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East and is committed to Israel's destruction.

"The threat the government of Iran poses is anything but tiny," McCain said.

Responding to McCain, Obama told a town hall rally later Monday in Billings, Mont., "Let me be absolutely clear: Iran is a grave threat." But the Soviet Union posed an added threat, he said. "The Soviet Union had thousands of nuclear weapons, and Iran doesn't have a single one."

Obama said the threat from Iran had grown as a result of the U.S. war in Iraq. "Iran is the biggest single beneficiary of a war in Iraq that should have never been authorized and should have never been waged," he said. "And John McCain wants to double down that failed policy." If McCain is elected, Obama said, "We'll keep talking tough in Washington, while countries like Iran ignore our tough talk."

The alternative, Obama said, is to follow the example of Presidents Kennedy and Reagan, who negotiated with the Soviet Union. Obama called for "tough, disciplined and direct diplomacy."

"That's what Kennedy did; that's what Reagan did," he said.

Although the Democratic primary race rolls on, McCain and Obama have criticized each other as if they are in the general election campaign. On Friday, Obama called McCain's foreign policy "naive and irresponsible"; McCain questioned whether Obama has the strength and judgment to be commander in chief.

At the heart of the dispute between the candidates is Obama's assertion that, as president, he would meet with leaders of these rogue countries without preconditions. Obama insists that direct engagement with the Soviets helped prevent nuclear war and, over time, helped to bring down the Berlin Wall.

McCain strongly disagrees with Obama's position; he argues such a meeting would lend international prestige to U.S. foes.

"An unconditional summit meeting with the next American president would confer both international legitimacy on the Iranian president and could strengthen him domestically, when he is very unpopular among the Iranian people," McCain said.

Later Monday, McCain said it makes no sense that Obama would not negotiate with the Islamic terrorist group Hamas but would meet with Iran, a sponsor of Hamas.

"It shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the issues we face, particularly in the Middle East," McCain told reporters in Savannah, Ga.

(Joseph C. Wilson IV is a former diplomat and U.S. ambassador. He was senior director for African Affairs in the Clinton administration. In 2003 he wrote a New York Times opinion piece, "What I didn't find in Africa," challenging the Bush administration's use of intelligence to justify the war in Iraq.)

Obama's campaign has been built upon his supposed transcendent qualities and intuitive judgment. His foreign policy experience is limited to having lived in Indonesia between the ages of 6 and 10, and having traveled overseas briefly as a college student. He further claims that a speech he gave against the war in Iraq six years ago to extremely liberal supporters in a campaign for state senator in Illinois is sufficient proof of his superior judgment in national security matters and qualifies him to be president and commander-in-chief of U.S. Armed Forces at a time when we are fighting two extraordinarily difficult wars. As with his relationship with Wright, a closer examination is warranted.

In the U.S. Senate, to which he was elected in 2004, a year after the launching of Operation Iraqi Freedom, he has done little to act on his asserted anti-war position, and has said repeatedly that had he been in the Senate at the time of the vote on the authorization for the use of military force he doesn't know how he would have voted. As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee on Europe, with jurisdiction over NATO, he has held not a single oversight meeting because, as he admitted, he was too busy running for president, even though NATO's presence in the Afghanistan war is critical to success in that venture.

Obama repeats the incorrect and politically irresponsible mantra that Sen. Hillary Clinton voted for the war and that therefore he is more qualified to be president. Unlike Obama, as the last acting U.S. ambassador to Iraq during the first Gulf War, I was deeply involved in that debate from the beginning.

President Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell made it clear publicly and in their representations to Congress that the authorization was not to go to war but rather to give the president the leverage he needed to go to the United Nations to reinvigorate international will to contain and disarm Saddam Hussein, consistent with the resolutions passed at the time of the first Gulf War.

With passage of the resolution, the president did in fact achieve a U.N. consensus, and inspectors returned to Iraq. Hans Blix, the chief U.N. inspector, has said repeatedly that without American leadership there would have been no new inspection regime.

SADDAM WAS A SERIAL VIOLATOR OF HUMAN RIGHTS, had started two wars in the region in the previous decade, continued to threaten his neighbors, including Israel, which he once said he would destroy with weapons of mass destruction. We may not have fully understood how little remained of his WMD arsenal, but were we really willing in the aftermath of 9/11 to give him a free pass, as Obama's rewriting of history suggests he might have done?

The approach of tough diplomacy backed by the threat of military action was the correct one and it yielded exactly the desired results, a unanimously passed U.N. resolution and the capitulation of Saddam when he readmitted the inspectors.

The betrayal occurred not when the president was given the tools he needed to secure international support for inspections, but rather when Bush refused to allow the inspectors to complete their work and decided preemptively to invade, conquer and occupy Iraq.

That decision and power was his alone -- not the Congress' and certainly not Hillary Clinton's. Obama is wrong to turn Bush's war into Clinton's responsibility. And Obama is dangerously na•ve in failing to understand the need in international crises to blend tough diplomacy with the other foreign policy tools at our disposal to achieve a strong national security posture.

Judgment and leadership in foreign policy are not intuitive. They are learned through experience. Obama's long and close relationship with the anti-American hate-monger Wright, his inattention to his responsibilities in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and his careless approach to Iraq all suggest that he would benefit from more experience. We should ask whether we want those lessons to be learned in the White House.

    Among the many dire realities that will face the next President of these United States of America is the reality of two very difficult occupations and wars in the Middle East. Both Democrat contenders have promised a phased two year withdrawal of "combat" troops from Iraq (leaving troops to guard the American embassy and the "Green Zone" plus contain al qaeda-in-Iraq. No candidate is talking about withdrawing from Afghanistan and Obama implies he would expand the war in Afghanistan into Pakistan). To put it another way the next President, like the current one, will be a "war President", like it or not. The current Iran regime is clearly arming and training Shite militias in Iraq , as well as Hamas militias in Gaza and Hezbollah militias in Lebanon. The preemptive invasion and occupation of Iraq, by the Bush Administration, has greatly destabilized that region. It is the moral responsibility of the next Presidential administration to rectify the errors of the Bush neocons, in my opinion. The next President, through military and diplomatic options, will have to finish "a fight someone else started", justly or unjustly. Though Senator Barack Obama is very good at condemning Hilary Clinton's and John McCain's very difficult and nuanced decision to give the authorization for military action against Iraq and reminding America of his anti Iraq war speech while running for his US Senate seat, as showing he is qualified to be Commander In Chief, subsequent statements and inaction on his part concerning foreign policy leads me to think that Senator Obama lacks the experience and judgement to be a "war President" engaged in two war fronts and occupations. In short Barack Obama doesn't have what it takes  to be Commander In Chief of these United States of America in 2008, in my opinion. He does much better giving speeches about foreign policy and national security. He can do that as a junior Senator, and begin chairing his NATO/Afghan sub-committee to get more experience. Superdelegates need to seriously think about this matter, in my opinion.

tags: barack obama  obama  iran  iaq  takebackamerica  2008  politics  president  us  war on terror  

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