Barack Obama is offering the most sweeping liberal foreign-policy critique we've heard from a serious presidential contender in decades. Democrats should not have to act like Republicans to pass some test on national security. It's time to end the mind-set and politics of fear: Spencer Ackerman
Finally an electable Presidential candidate, Barack Obama, is saying the words that the vast majority of Americans want to hear as well as the vast majority of Europeans who have watched in horror ~ as America became the rogue nation of the world.
You must see Obama as a movement ~ a movement towards ending the Bush politics of fear and replacing it with the Obama politics of hope.
Obama is speaking to our deepest urge or propensity to unite versus separate and that comes through loud and clear in this recent six minute speech in Indianapolis ~ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FsqDTVmlKk
Spencer Ackerman spells it out further in the March 24th issue of the American Prospect.
Excerpt: " Obama is offering the most sweeping liberal foreign-policy critique we've heard from a serious presidential contender in decades." Obama promises not just new policies, but "to end the mind-set that got us into war in the first place." Examining his advisers to get a sense of what this might mean, Ackerman observed that all of them "opposed the Iraq War at a time when doing so was derided by their colleagues, by journalists, and by the foreign-policy establishment .. The end of the Iraq War mind-set, it turns out, may be the beginning of America's reacquaintance with its best traditions."
Allen L Roland http://blogs.salon.com/0002255/2008/05/05.html
THE OBAMA DOCTRINE
By Spencer Ackerman
Barack Obama is offering the most sweeping liberal foreign-policy critique we've heard from a serious presidential contender in decades.But will voters buy it?
American Prospect
March 24, 2008
http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=the_obama_doctrine
or
http://www.alternet.org/audits/80623 (retitled "Obama's Sweeping Foreign Policy Critique" and posted on Mar. 28 with the subtitle "Democrats should not have to act like Republicans to pass some test on national security. It's time to end the politics of fear")
When Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama met in California for the Jan. 31 debate, their back-and-forth resembled their many previous encounters, with the Democratic presidential hopefuls scrambling for the small policy yardage between them. And then Obama said something about the Iraq War that wasn't incremental at all. "I don't want to just end the war," he said, "but I want to end the mind-set that got us into war in the first place."
Until this point in the primaries, Clinton and Obama had sounded very similar on this issue. Despite their differences in the past (Obama opposed the war, while Clinton voted for it), both were calling for major troop withdrawals, with some residual force left behind to hedge against catastrophe. But Obama's concise declaration of intent at the debate upended this assumption. Clinton stumbled to find a counterargument, eventually saying her vote in October 2002 "was not authority for a pre-emptive war." Then she questioned Obama's ability to lead, saying that the Democratic nominee must have "the necessary credentials and gravitas for commander in chief."
If Clinton's response on Iraq sounds familiar, that's because it's structurally identical to the defensive crouch John Kerry assumed in 2004: Voting against the war wasn't a mistake; the mistakes were all George W. Bush's, and bringing the war to a responsible conclusion requires a wise man or woman with military credibility.
In that debate, Obama offered an alternative path. Ending the war is only the first step. After we're out of Iraq, a corrosive mind-set will still be infecting the foreign-policy establishment and the body politic.
That rot must be eliminated.
Obama is offering the most sweeping liberal foreign-policy critique we've heard from a serious presidential contender in decades. It cuts to the heart of traditional Democratic timidity. "It's time to reject the counsel that says the American people would rather have someone who is strong and wrong than someone who is weak and right," Obama said in a January speech. "It's time to say that we are the party that is going to be strong and right." (The Democrat who counseled that Americans wanted someone strong and wrong, not weak and right? That was Bill Clinton in 2002.)
But to understand what Obama is proposing, it's important to ask: What, exactly, is the mind-set that led to the war? What will it mean to end it? And what will take its place?
To answer these questions, I spoke at length with Obama's foreign-policy brain trust, the advisers who will craft and implement a new global strategy if he wins the nomination and the general election.
They envision a doctrine that first ends the politics of fear and then moves beyond a hollow, sloganeering "democracy promotion" agenda in favor of "dignity promotion," to fix the conditions of misery that breed anti-Americanism and prevent liberty, justice, and prosperity from taking root. An inextricable part of that doctrine is a relentless and thorough destruction of al-Qaeda.
Is this hawkish? Is this dovish? It's both and neither ~ an overhaul not just of our foreign policy but of how we think about foreign policy. And it might just be the future of American global leadership.
Click on http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=the_obama_doctrine for remainder of article
Allen L Roland http://blogs.salon.com/0002255/2008/05/05.html
