Monday, February 04, 2008
Barack Obama's experience or lack thereof
Is Barack Obama's inexperience a bug, or a feature? Robert DeNiro thinks it is an advantage, and Andrew Sullivan seems to agree. The implication, of course, is that the mere application of common sense -- available to anybody who is smart yet inexperienced -- would have kept us from invading Iraq. Of course, one is forced to wonder what alternative policy common sense would have dictated. Back in 2003, this argument struck many of us as very persuasive:
The permanent and transparent disarmament we need - the reassurance that the world deserves - cannot be accomplished while that duplicitous monster is in power. We should try for a second U.N. resolution, but we shouldn't be too disheartened if we don't get it. When you're dealing with the likes of Chirac, there can be no secure agreement. One reason the French get along with many of the Arab regimes, after all, is that they have the same approach to negotiation. They never mean a thing they say; and will pledge one thing one week (Resolution 1441 anyone?) and act as if it doesn't exist the next. And the interminable delays only encourage our other foes (North Korea), and sap the morale of the armed forces. It's time to act. It's good to know that forces are now at full strength, that we can achieve our goals without Turkey's help (a Kurdish blessing in disguise), and that the Brits are also ready to move. So let's roll. Sooner rather than later.
That was the point. Whether or not Ba'athist Iraq actually possessed WMD arsenals, Iraq's disarmament needed to be both permanent and transparent. Iraq's disarmament needed to be permanent because the aggressive containment of Iraq could not be sustained indefinitely. It needed to be transparent because Saddam was exploiting uncertainty over his WMD capabilities to coerce neighboring regimes, and would certainly do so more aggressively if the United States ever backed away. So, I ask the question again: If inexperienced common sense would have decided against removing Saddam Hussein by military action, what policy would it have formulated instead?
11 Comments:
By 
Purple Avenger, at
Mon Feb 04, 09:03:00 PM:
...what policy would it have formulated instead?
Relax weapons embargoes and provoke another Iran/Iraq war? That would have been a 2-fer.
By 
, at
Mon Feb 04, 09:46:00 PM:
We should not be in the disarmament business. Why not disarm Noth Korea under that rationale. If "experience" alone is a qualification then why aren't the republicans running on Bush's record? He had the experience of running a baseball team, the State of Texas, and the USA when he was re-elected, yet no one seems to want to repeat the decisions he made with all of his "experience."
Why is it Reagan that everyone wants to invoke, rather than another 4 years of Bush experience? I would rather have a real change than an "experienced" infighter and dissembler like HRC.
By Assistant Village Idiot, at
Mon Feb 04, 10:11:00 PM:
I'd go for Bush again, with the same reservations as before, but not seriously discomfited. I think that "no one" is a media creation, anon.
People think wars should last three years. If we get out sooner, we must have been brilliant; later, and we must have made some grave error. There isn't any reasoning behind this, it's just when people get tired.
By antithaca, at
Mon Feb 04, 11:31:00 PM:
as some would say: HEH.
well done TH.
By , at
Mon Feb 04, 11:48:00 PM:
What alternative policy? There is only one and the same policy: trash Bush! If Bush didn't take Saddam out, he'd be blamed just as furiously.
By , at
Tue Feb 05, 12:05:00 AM:
Not disarming has it's costs. North Korea is now free to sell nukes to the highest bidder. Nukes for sale, nukes for sale!
Clinton failed to do anything after the CIA said Pakistan was years away from nukes in 1996-7, and then bam! they test their first nuke in 1998.
From that point on, Osama had a nuclear umbrella he could shelter under, and nuclear weapons potentially available to him should he subvert Pakistan sufficiently.
Leaving Saddam alone, able to develop nukes, would mean eventually we'd face a Saddam launching a war with Kuwait or Saudi and using nukes against Aircraft Carriers. Close counts in nukes, horseshoes, and hand grenades. Or maybe he'd just hand a spare off to Osama to stir up trouble. Then offer a "deal" involving the US leaving him Kuwait and/or Saudi to plug the Osama-nuke pipeline.
Saddam was not a normal guy. Think a psychopathic Pablo Escobar. No "deal" could ever be stuck with him.
Nuclear proliferation is the single greatest security threat to the US because it allows non-state terror groups to kill US cities with impunity. Or Western cities. NATO is already scared out of their minds, and talking about nuking preemptively proliferators so the next time the Pope says something or there is a cartoon, Copenhagen or Rome don't go up in a flash.
By , at
Tue Feb 05, 12:36:00 AM:
I dont care for BARACK OBAMA he is too liberal for me
By , at
Tue Feb 05, 12:42:00 AM:
The United States can not be the world's cop, invading every country we think might get the bomb. Suggestions that we "have no choice" and must prevent proliferation at all costs will further diminish our moral authority abroad. Where do we draw the line for such conduct? Who is next on the hit parade? What was the well-thought out end game for he Iraq venture? We blew it at every level with Iraq, and now that we are stuck in the mess over there we try to justify our predicament by recharacterizing what our original goals were. Who would vote in favor of the war if the intelligence wasn't slanted, and if we had an acccurate assessment of what to expect after our blitzkreig victory over the military that was keeping the iraqi factions from killing each other?
By jj mollo, at
Tue Feb 05, 01:09:00 AM:
I'd forgotten why I liked Andrew Sullivan so much. What a sensible analysis. Unfortunately, it all got screwed up by the bureaucracy. Sullivan got so frustrated that he popped some sort of blood vessel. McCain, though, never lost sight of that basic reasoning no matter how frustrated he got. He did everything but pound his shoe on the table to get us refocused.
By , at
Tue Feb 05, 01:36:00 PM:
I used to read Sullivan regularly too, so I was really disappointed when he made a sudden turn on the Iraq liberation. Apparently, Sullivan wasn't ready to witness the horrors that come with a real war. He was one of the most active agitators for removing Saddam, but immediately lost his mind and nerve when the guns started talking. Basically all his outrage about the horrors of the real war is an admission that he had no idea what he was talking about when he was advocating it. He still doesn't know what he is talking about and refuses to learn. By all established metrics Iraq war is the most restrained and humane act of warfare in history, but Sullivan keeps screaming like it's the worst. Sullivan had no idea what he was talking about when he was urging the war and he still has no idea now that he is denouncing it. Pathetic Superfactorial.
By , at
Tue Feb 05, 04:26:00 PM:
"Iraq's disarmament needed to be permanent because the aggressive containment of Iraq could not be sustained indefinitely."
Why not? How would that containment be so much more unsustainable then being in Iraq for 100 years?
JC
