Here are the four differences
reported in today’s New York Times.
We’ll take them one at a time:
“…he would have
already told Iran that he would not allow it to get close to building a bomb,
setting a “red line” in a far different place from President Obama’s.” Note that they don’t say
where. The red line of course means the
circumstances under which we would go to war with Iraq. Until Romney says at
what point he would draw this red line for combat, we have to assume that at
best he’s being a little more aggressive, but basically following the Obama
line of negotiation and economic sanctions.
“He would tell the Egyptians that if they wanted $1 billion in
debt forgiveness — as promised by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton
this month — they would have to put far more effort into protecting American
interests in the country, starting with the United States Embassy.” The Egyptian government has already beefed up security and
tussled with protesters. Linking a show
of support for a fragile democratic government to doing something it has
already done strikes me as little more than bluster.
“And he would provide far more aid to elements of the Syrian
opposition, including… ‘facilitating’
the provision of lethal arms from other Arab states. But, like President Obama,
he would stop short of arming them directly.” This ostensibly aggressive statement turns out to be nothing
different as well, because only the naïve don’t recognize that any aid to
the Syrian opposition facilitates the provision of lethal arms, because
everything reduces to money and if you have to pay less for x, y and z, you’ll
have more for weapons and ammo. If the advisors mean that they would provide
more money and “advisors,” they’re merely grandstanding because they have no
idea what the Obama Administration has really done to help the Syrian
insurgents.
“And the United States would have been far more involved in the
formation of a new Libya, the advisers insisted, though they conceded it was
not clear that could have stopped the attack that killed the American
ambassador there and three other American officers.” Again, they don’t say how much more they would have done and they can’t
say how involved the U.S. was, because they really don’t know.
Romney has surrounded himself with neo-con
advisors and wherever there’s a microphone or an Internet connection the
neo-cons expatiate on the differences between their policy and mainstream U.S.
foreign policy under the Democrats. Despite their protestation, it’s
practically the same policy, except the neo-cons think we’re in a holy war with
Islam and are a bit more trigger-happy when it comes to extraordinary measures
and sending in troops.
But no Democrat Administration has called for
disarmament or even the unilateral dismantling of our nuclear capability. All
base foreign policy on the economic interest of U.S. multinational corporations
and the need to secure a supply of oil. While stepping back from the extremes of
waterboarding and other torture, the Obama Administration has shown itself
willing to circumvent U.S. and international law and due process. We still have thousands of contractors in Iraq
and we still rely on these mercenaries to wage war. The many successes in the war against
terrorism scored by the Obama Administration have come through violence.
After 9/11, a Democratic president would have
responded as bellicosely as Bush II to the threat of terrorism and troops would
have gone somewhere, probably Afghanistan and Pakistan. That they went to Iraq
was a bad executive decision. We will never know why the Bush II Administration
decided to invade Iraq because the reasons they gave the world turned out to be
lies. Based on history, there is every
reason to believe that both a Democratic and Republic regime would be prone to
another enormously tragic and expensive error in judgment.
My conclusion: the strategy will be nearly the
same under Romney, but what about the execution?
We know that Romney wants to install as key
policy makers many of the men who advised the Bush II Administration. The
argument I would make here is the same one Bill Clinton made on domestic
affairs: They screwed it up before, so why should we give them another chance?
And then there’s the two leaders—Obama versus
Romney on foreign affairs. The nation rates Obama way ahead and so do I. As I
detailed in blog entries of September 13 and August 1, Romney has shown himself to be surprisingly unsuited as a
diplomat. He doesn’t pick up on standard etiquette cues that everyone else
seems to get and he tends to speak before he has enough facts. He also suffers
frequently from “foot-in-mouth” disease, which is never good when dealing with
foreign governments whose heads have their own little red buttons connected to
missile silos. On a talk show earlier this week, Republican royalty Peggy
Noonan compared Mitt’s style to Dick Nixon’s, and she didn’t mean it as a
compliment.
By contrast, Obama has taken most of our troops
and contractors out of Iraq, found Osama bin Laden and other terrorists, organized
most of the world against Iran obtaining nuclear weapons, regained the respect
in the world that we lost under Bush II and remained friendly trading partners
with China. I am confident that McCain would have tried to complete most of
this agenda because it’s all part of long-term U.S. foreign policy. But Obama
did it, and I trust him more than I trust Romney to keep doing it, even as I
condemn much of what constitutes our long-term policy such as focusing so much
on the needs of multinationals and not immediately dismantling all our nuclear
bombs.
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