Hawks and Doves

Have you noticed that headlines about speeches John McCain gives on foreign policy tend to always include a reference to his metaphorical hammer? Yet when you read his speech he is advocating the continuation of the United States’ most ineffective policies.

So John McCain thinks the sanctions policy is working? Until he recently stepped down, Fidel Castro had held power longer than any other non-figurehead head of state. Hell, he’s even older than John McCain by a whole ten years!

McCain finds this 2003 statement by Barack Obama to be particularly troubling:

I believe that normalization of relations with Cuba would help the oppressed and poverty-stricken Cuban people while setting the stage for a more democratic government once Castro inevitably leaves the scene.

Instead McCain says that his administration:

will press the Cuban regime to release all political prisoners unconditionally, to legalize all political parties, labor unions, and free media, and to schedule internationally monitored elections. The embargo must stay in place until these basic elements of democratic society are met.

The embargo has been in place for nearly fifty years, yet the same oppressive regime stays in place. With Fidel having stepped down and with Raul being five years older than John McCain it might actually be a very good time to start engaging Cuba, especially if that engagement is welcomed by Cuba’s larger civil society.

Instead he chooses to pursue the Bush administration’s policies which were to revoke the licenses of human rights groups and NGOs from visiting Cuba (an important part of public diplomacy) and increasing penetration of U.S. multinational corporations (a move that is often seen as suspect by Latin American civil society). According to the May 2008 edition of Harper’s Magazine:

Although few Americans know it, George Bush has opened vast new fronts of commercial trade with Cuba, ramping up food and agricultural deals from nothing to $600 million a year. U.S. cargo ships loaded with the bounty of Archer Daniels Midland, Con-Agra, Tyson, and other agribusiness gianys now arrive in Cuba up to twice a week. . . These goods mostly go to the dollar stores, where the Cuban government skims an enormous profit, but some drift into the ordinary street rations.

So here would be an interesting follow-up question to John McCain . . . should the United States continue to pursue George Bush’s policies and export agriculture goods to Cuba, in which most of the profits are going to prop up Raul Castro’s regime? Just wondering.

This, in a nutshell, is why John McCain does not have the judgment to be President of the United States.

Republican John McCain accused Democrat Barack Obama of inexperience and reckless judgment for saying Iran does not pose the same serious threat to the United States as the Soviet Union did in its day.

If John McCain really believes that Iran and other assorted rogue states represent the same threat to U.S. interests as the Soviet Union then he is an obtuse, ignorant, naive clown.  God help us all if he is ever put in a position where he would be making key foreign policy decisions.  I think he, himself, put it best: “Such a statement betrays the depth of Senator [McCain’s] inexperience and reckless judgment. These are very serious deficiencies for an American president to possess.”

Gary Hart:

If John McCain seriously believes we are at war with al Qaeda in Iraq, that alone is such a serious error in judgment as to rank him with George W. Bush at his worst and therefore disqualify him from any chance to govern this country.

I thought this story was very interesting.  It is fascinating to see how new technologies get integrated into social movements and protest.

Whenever I am feeling like I can’t take much more of teh stupid I head over to Juan Cole’s place. Today’s post made me feel warm all over. Political discourse in this country is so screwed up. It is no wonder that most Americans have little idea about the political actors and problems in Iraq when our specialists are restricted to writing on blogs while an endless cadre of American Enterprise Institute cretins, ideologues and propaganders have unrestricted and unchallenged access to the cable and network news.

I had an interesting conversation with a friend last night whose brother is a doctor in the military and has served one tour in Iraq. Over 4,000 soldiers have died in Iraq, and we were talking about those who are not killed, but rather injured, and how these casualties have been all but disappeared from the public discourse on costs. We also talked about how much battlefield medicine has improved. There are a lot of soldiers who are living who in earlier wars probably would have died from their wounds. I’m also chairing a Masters thesis of a student who is examining how the use of private military firms are decreasing the political costs of war. All this leads to an interesting question . . . does the decreasing costs of war associated with improved battlefield medicine and the use of private security forces make war more likely?

In a game theory class I took with Tom Schelling in graduate school, he made the comment that if war became so mechanized that it was simply robots fighting robots with humans controlling the action safely from afar, war would become much more likely. This was also the underlying moral theme of the first few books in Orson Scott Card’s Ender series. When Ender just thought he was playing a video simulation everything was fine and it was not until he learned that he was actually fighting a real battle that he was confronted with the moral consequences of killing.

Wow.

Another follow up on the McCain post . . .

I think it is really critical that McCain’s understanding and views on foreign policy be examined by every voter. There is a lot at stake in this election and the simple heuristic devices that voters typically use when thinking about foreign policy issues could lead to disastrous consequences. The Republican party has spent years building their brand name around the idea that they “will protect us from the commies, terrorists, and foreigners.” It has been one of the more effective campaigns in modern politics in that people who have no immediate interests in foreign policy issues often differ to the idea that Republicans are strong on foreign policy. It is what allowed George W. Bush to easily convince the voters that he was a foreign policy president, despite never having shown any interest in international politics prior to entering office and continuing to be disinterested in any serious study. McCain certainly has more background but more and more evidence is emerging that he is either a) not understanding some of the most basic facts of the current conflict in the Middle East or b) he is deliberately mislabeling political factions because he knows voters themselves don’t know the distinctions either.

This New York Times article at least points that out, besides Kenneth Pollack’s assertion that calling every armed faction in Iraq al-Qaeda is a “perfectly reasonable catch-all phrase.” But is it reasonable? It is clearly wrong. The question to be asked is: would someone who saw the various political factions in Iraq as simply a big blob of al-Qaeda be more or less adept at formulating a successful Middle East policy. I think it is perfectly reasonable to presume they would be less adept.

But voters aren’t going to be able to see these distinctions because whenever I turn on the news I am hearing about who is bitter and who is wearing flag pins, and god knows what else. It is also incredibly disheartening to see someone like Pollock brush off the duty that scholars have to public education. Do Americans know little about the world? Sadly, yes. But it doesn’t help when people who are in a position to teach dismiss them so easily. It is this elitism amongst foreign policy experts that, I believe, has been one of the largest contributors to this erosion of global understanding.

One of the more interesting myths of this election is that John McCain is strong on foreign policy issues.  This is generally stated as a universally known fact.  My students will often claim that when  a universally known fact is stated in a paper it does not need a citation. (Silly students.)  It appears, however, that journalists and the media are using my student’s rules when reporting on Senator McCain.  But what experience does John McCain have in foreign policy?  Does this experience demonstrate that he would use good judgment if he were to gain executive power?  Does he show the acumen to study and understand the world in such a way that he would be able to adapt and change?

This article in the New York Times begins to answer some of those questions.  Although it starts with the same assertion that John McCain has “decades of experience in foreign policy and national security,” it goes on to challenge some of this conventional wisdom.  It notes that his key advisers–the ones who write his speeches and the ones who he is actually listening to–largely come from the same crop of neo-conservative thinkers that have advised President Bush.  This includes Randy Scheunemann,  Robert Kagan, Max Boot, and John Bolton.

In the article Laurence Eagleburger is quoted as saying “there is no question that a lot of my far right friends have now decided that since you can’t beat him, let’s persuade him to slide over as best we can on these critical issues.”  However, based on McCain’s campaign rhetoric and foreign policy pronouncements, I think there is little question who he is listening to.  This paragraph, however, seems to capture the essence of the problem:

He has been sympathetic to neoconservative views on some other issues, like taking a hard line with Russia and a proposal to establish a new international body made up solely of democracies as a counterweight to the United Nations. In other aspects of foreign and national security policy, he tilts toward the pragmatist camp, as in his promise to work more closely with allies.

Taking a hard line with Russia and creating a counter-organization that would effectively end the United Nations are pretty specific proposals that would have major implications on the future of global politics.  Promising to work more closely with allies is a throw away line that actually doesn’t have any significance.  George W. Bush says that he would work more closely with allies as well.

The fact that McCain might not be as versed on foreign policy as the general perception assumes is even touched on:

One of the chief concerns of the pragmatists is that Mr. McCain is susceptible to influence from the neoconservatives because he is not as fully formed on foreign policy as his campaign advisers say he is, and that while he speaks authoritatively, he operates too much off the cuff and has not done the deeper homework required of a presidential candidate.

His remarks over the past few days, in which he seems to not understand the nature of the political factions in Iraq, attest to this.

But if Murdoch gets any of his hands on Yahoo, I’m moving it to another host.