Descend into the Maelstrom

Regardless of your
political affiliations, the philosophical sentiments you hold closest
to your heart regarding Man’s relationship to the State, or your moral
sensibilities, if you care about politics it’s an invigorating time to
be here in America.  Due to the stark contrasts between the Democratic
and Republican presidential nominees, the toss-up nature of the
polling, and the two very different roads America could potentially
travel on next year, 2008 is shaping up to be the most exciting
national race in generations.  By most indications there is a long way
to go before a victor emerges.  In fact, Obama continues the charade of
not accepting primary race congratulations yet because his campaign
understands that every last voter may matter in November, even of the
jilted Hillary Clinton ilk who must be wooed back.

The uncertainty of the race only partly accounts for this
excitement.  True, the so-called pundits have been loath to make
predictions on who will win the big general election: Barack Obama or
John McCain.  That is largely because of the new variables injected
into the race for the first time, including race itself.  Democratic
voters have produced a half-black man as a viable candidate in the
general election.  Additionally, here are two candidates exactly 25
years apart in age, making this an epic generational battle featuring
the war hero vs. the first post-baby boom nominee.  We are unable to
handicap a contest that is so drastically out of the ordinary.

More importantly than the horse race, we are arriving at a defining
moment in America’s history, a battle for its very soul unlike any we
have seen before.  Nothing exemplifies this better than the foreign
policy fireworks from both ends of the campaign trail.  As the titans
rush toward a clash, we are simultaneously hurtling toward a reckoning
of the grand question that instills great fear in the citizenry: what
is America’s role in the complex new world supposed to be?  Without a
sitting president or vice-president in contention, there is no prospect
of continuing the policies of the last 8 years.  The man representing
the President’s party, John McCain, is distancing himself from those 8
years out of political necessity, on top of having bona fide
disagreements with the White House.  Change is therefore inevitable,
and the question becomes what shape it will take.  Which is good,
because the national mood is pretty dour at the moment, with the
economy slumping, a war dragging on, and the planet slow-roasting.  The
American electorate, woefully unprepared to judge what is going on
abroad due to a lack of knowledge about the outside world, will cast
its votes on the strength of the highly intelligent and well-informed
candidates’ arguments.

Meanwhile, the world is far more complicated and smaller for
Americans than it used to be.  The oceans protecting us feel like ponds
now.  For much of the last 70 years, American presidential candidates
operated with a consensus on the foreign policy landscape.  Both major
parties spat out candidates who agreed on important matters, with few
exceptions.  Between 1936 and 1988, most major candidates, and for that
matter the electorate, did not quibble excessively on things.  Hitler
bad.  Nazism bad.  Soviets bad.  Communism bad.  Puppies good.  If you
disagreed, you were out of the mainstream.  There were differences on
how to contain our threats, but even the most contentious disagreement
of that era, fought in the mosquito-bitten jungles of Vietnam, was
bipartisan in nature: a Democrat started the war, and a Republican
propagated it before ending it after people of all stripes flooded
Washington with anti-war sentiment.  Vietnam could not be defined by a
neat Democrat/Republican rift.  Nor, for that matter, could the
dramatic civil rights movement of that same period.  The difference
today is that we have consensus agreement on the emergence of a new
threat, but the two parties can’t even agree on how to define it, let
alone how to defeat it.

Since the 1992 election, America has been unsure about its role in
the world.  In 1996, 2000, and 2004 the foreign policy positions of the
candidates could not be sharply distinguished.  There has been no Cold
War, no Evil Empire to make our strategy simple and coherent.  Although
George Bush Sr. won a glorious military victory in Iraq in 1991 and
garnered an 89% approval rating, he lost in 1992 because the economy
was seen as more important in Americans’ eyes than a masterful foreign
policy.  Today Americans fear not fascism, communism, or even rogue
dictators like Saddam.  Our attention is on the frightening specter of
terrorism, the hydra with tentacles in 50 countries, including
card-carrying members possibly living and breathing amongst us in our
American cities, using the Internet to recruit, train, organize and
fundraise- taking advantage of the very communications weapon invented
in the 1970’s and 1980’s by the U.S. army, against us within just a few
decades.  From what I have read, the thread that connects these
terrorists together is: nothing at all.  Not education or a lack
thereof, not religious beliefs, not poverty, and not family
background.  It’s not helpful to categorically define these people as
psychiatrically deranged; how does that separate them from the millions
of people worldwide with mental problems, who may pursue a regular old
life of petty crime, or a benign existence rocking back and forth in a
dark basement to Britney Spears songs?

The fragility, and irony, of international relations today lies in
the fact that today’s buddies could quickly become tomorrow’s enemies.
Saddam Hussein’s army and Osama Bin Laden’s mujahideen fighters were
funded and supplied by American taxpayer dollars as recently as the
1980’s, because they were our pawns on the Cold War chessboard.  It was
easy to justify and understand what we were doing in the context of the
Cold War: we needed them and they needed us.  Both political parties
accepted the deals we used to make with the Devil in those days if it
helped bring down the USSR.  Now the cheeky, ragtag bandits of the
Middle East are using some of the same guerrilla tactics against their
former masters that we used to liberate ourselves from the British in
the 1700’s.  Today the American and British soldiers die on the desert
sands side-by-side to be sent home in body bags.  Indeed Iraqis
themselves jerked off the British colonial yoke once before, in the
1920’s, and are only too gleeful to do so again.

At long last, we have two candidates with drastically different
positions on all of this.  And their talking points are shaped from
deeply-held beliefs, not milquetoast positions molded over polling data
and micro-trends in the suburbs of Florida and Ohio.  McCain and Obama
formed their cores over a lifetime of public service and real
experiences in foreign countries.  McCain was tortured in the dungeons
of Hanoi during the Vietnam War, and Obama cried on his father’s grave
in a Kenyan village, weeping for the parent that he hardly knew.
McCain descended from a long line of military brass stationed abroad,
and Obama was partially raised by a pistol-toting Indonesian stepfather
with a pet crocodile who taught him boxing to protect himself while
frolicking with local Indonesian boys in the woods.

Although both candidates obviously favor the eradication of
terrorism as a threat, the contrast on how the would-be Commanders in
Chief intend to achieve this elusive goal could not be clearer,
especially on the streets of Iraq.  McCain seeks to stay in Iraq until
we have achieved some sort of “victory” before bringing the troops
home.  Obama would try to bring most of the troops home by 2010,
claiming that in the final analysis, a stable Iraq is not in America’s
hands but in the hands of Iraqis themselves.  Neither is a good policy
choice, because the Iraq quagmire has placed us in an untenable
position: we are damned if we stay in the quicksand, and we are damned
if we leave.

Perpetuating America’s presence ad infinitum, loosely linked to
Bush’s current policy except for the fact that McCain would throw more
troops into the mix, carries the risk of encouraging terrorist
recruitment, funding, and even advancing the state of the art, as
terrorists perfect weapons and tactics against our boys trying to
patrol the neighborhoods of Baghdad and other cities.  These could
later be used in New York.  The likely outcome of a longer presence is
more of the same problems we are seeing today: sectarian bloodshed
bordering on low-level civil war, violent intra-sect struggles for
power, many more American lives lost or maimed, and an army that is
increasingly broken and unable to respond to other threats in the
world.  The conflicts in Iraq are many centuries old, and we are being
caught in the crossfire.  Ultimately we are headed toward a draft if we
stay in Iraq much longer as the military slogs to fill its ranks with
incrementally less-qualified volunteers.  There’s also a larger
likelihood that foreigners will continue striving for an attack on the
American homeland while our troops struggle to achieve a vague mandate
to play referee abroad.

Leaving Iraq, on the other hand, could result in the gory torture or
death of many Iraqis who supported us, and a genocidal fury between
Sunnis and Shias that would put America to shame as a helpless loser in
this war.  Iraq could become a terrorist safe haven (more so than it is
now), a place where the finest jihadists from around the world go to
graduate from hands-on terror school, analagous to our own Harvard or
Stanford.  For this reason leaving Iraq is far more risky than leaving
Vietnam was. The Shia majority leadership might quietly become an
Iranian vassal state, spawning a new two-headed monster with plenty of
oil, the potential for nuclear weaponry, additional non-state brigades
in the diverse shapes of Al-Qaeda, Hamas, and Hezbollah, and a desire
to wipe Israel off the map.  Not exactly the kind of withdrawal with
dignity America would like to see in the Middle East, whether led by
Democrats or Republicans.  Then again, all of this could happen even if
we stayed.

We might end up damned if we stay, damned if we leave, damned if
either man is president; or we may see a glorious reversal of fortunes
under the right nuanced formula delicately combining the arts of
diplomacy and war, under the right leadership.  But how to deal with
other rogue states such as Cuba, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, and North
Korea?  The two candidates have drastically different plans on engaging
these states as well.  Obama would like to increase the force in
Afghanistan, which directly contradicts the left-wing label that
Republicans are trying to pin on him.  He would attack Al-Qaeda
wherever they are to be found, if the host country is unwilling or
unable to do so, even if they are an ally like Pakistan.  And he would
negotiate with hostile leaders, however unsavory they might be.  He
would decrease travel restrictions with Cuba.  Obama seeks to let
foreign leaders and citizens know exactly where America stands, to open
up a dialogue and hopefully some sense of agreement moving forward from
the universally reviled Bush era.  Obama is willing to back up failed
diplomacy with force.  Indeed, he says that military options “will
always be on the table” during his presidency.  Those who worry oppose
Obama have already labeled him as an “appeaser” who is unwilling to
defend America from the scary people, and would rather have tea with
them.

McCain’s worldview, and approach to others around us, is radically
different.  His warrior mentality clearly extends to most potential
international problems: he wants to scare other countries by flexing
American muscle, so they will bend to our demands.  Iran, you’d better
not try to develop nuclear weapons, because if you do, we’ll bomb you.
In McCain’s opinion, there is no foreign threat that cannot be
vanquished by the U.S. sword.  This policy was certainly well-suited to
the Cold War and bringing down the Soviet Union, the comfortable
rubrics in place for most of McCain’s 71 years, but we now live in a
multi-polar world where threats in the near future could come from
non-state actors on our own soil, as well as rising powers such as
China and India.  We can’t simply bomb everybody.  On the other hand,
projecting military power might be effective if foreigners began to see
America’s brandishing of it as principled and moral, as McCain claims
to want.

Since the Obama-McCain campaign has only just begun, the pair has
not been able to debate directly on foreign policy yet.  Right now we
are seeing a back-and-forth more shaped by early definition politics,
with each one calling the other’s ideas “naive,” which is not really
helpful, and is not true in either case.  Needless to say, both brands
of foreign policy carry their advantages and disadvantages, and it
should be interesting to see in which direction the campaigns will
choose to go on these subjects.  America’s future role in the world is
in the balance as never before, hanging on how Americans respond to the
arguments from both sides.  There will be a lot more coverage of all of
this in the next 6 months, along with questions on the environment,
energy policy, the economy, and healthcare.  Needless to say, all of
these issues have an effect on, and are affected by, foreign policy.
This debate is not only exciting for America, it is inherently good for
us.