The Agony of Choice
Every presidential election is disappointing in its own way, but 2008 is like being forced to decide which foot to blow off. From the Republicans, we get a foreign policy that promises to compound all the troubles we’ve brought on ourselves in the Middle East and Central Asia over the last eight years. From the Democrats, we get the promise of a lot more entitlement spending, a prospect any politically conscious American under 35 should be livid about.
John McCain has served the United States with honor, and none can deny he’s gone above and beyond the call of duty. It takes men like him to defend the country.
It takes men of a different sort to run it. McCain simply doesn’t show any interest in strategic thinking. Consider the war in Iraq, whose only clear beneficiary is Iran, which watched us accomplish in three weeks what it couldn’t do in eight years. In Iraq, we turned two smaller problems (Iran and Iraq) into one larger one.
And to add irony to insult and injury, the Iraq war forced us — the guys who said governments would turn over the terrorists they were harboring or share in their fate — into the astonishingly awkward position of harboring the PKK, a terrorist insurgency that attacked Turkey, one of our own allies.
Whatever else might be said of Saddam Hussein, Iraq in 2003 was not the Rhineland in 1936, nor the Sinai in 1967. Deposing Saddam unleashed every tribal and national conflict he used to keep a lid on, resulting in civil war. As the sadly absent and much mourned Lt. Gen. Bill Odom used to ask of all this, knowing full well how provocative he was being, “where’s Saddam when we need him?”
Whatever McCain thinks of the troop surge, the fact that “only” a handful of American soldiers are dying in Iraq these days doesn’t make the war a wise strategic decision.
But it doesn’t end there. The left, of course, is content to blame the entire fiasco on George W. Bush and call it a day. Many liberals still think on some level that the war in Iraq was a failure of execution rather than a failure of thinking in the first place. Which is also an abdication of responsibility, seeing as most congressional Democrats voted for it, and Bush’s democracy promotion agenda is basically only their policy platform on steroids.
The real lesson of the Bush years is that the world is full of unpleasant regimes, and there are limitations to what U.S. military power can accomplish, and limitations to where it should be applied. Whatever Obama’s respective positions, that is not a recognition Democrats have traditionally taken to heart. But if one had to choose between the recklessness of Bush and the fecklessness of Clinton…
And yet, then there’s the prospect of several years of unabridged Democratic power. What new joys of taxation lie in store? Will we take Mitt Romney’s mistakes national and enact a universal healthcare plan that will inevitably cost too much, deliver too little and oh, by the way, you can’t refuse to pay into?
Yes, it’s inspiring that we have a black candidate, and a female vice presidential candidate — it’s about time, in both cases — but politics is about interests, not only identities. It’s not just who the candidates are that matters, it’s what they’ll do. Why am I supposed to be happy knowing my next president will either want to start a fire all the way from Karachi to Tangier, or shake me upside down and beat me until I explode like a cash piñata?