Barack Obama appears to be crazy enough to start World War III.
By
Alistair Young
on August 03, 2007
From a major address on national security on August 1, at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars:
"As President, I would make the hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. military aid to Pakistan conditional, and I would make our conditions clear: Pakistan must make substantial progress in closing down the training camps, evicting foreign fighters, and preventing the Taliban from using Pakistan as a staging area for attacks in Afghanistan."
"I understand that President Musharraf has his own challenges. But let me make this clear. There are terrorists holed up in those mountains who murdered 3,000 Americans. They are plotting to strike again. It was a terrible mistake to fail to act when we had a chance to take out an al Qaeda leadership meeting in 2005. If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won’t act, we will."
( http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/post_group/ObamaHQ/CpHR )
Invade Pakistan. Invade Pakistan, our ally. Invade Pakistan, the country with a somewhat unstable government that's barely hanging in there. Invade Pakistan, that's close enough to China that US troops on the ground will make the Big C decidedly nervous, not to say, pissed off. Invade Pakistan, which is likely to have its government replaced by an Talibanesque Islamic theocracy if its government falls. Invade Pakistan, that has Nuclear Fucking Weapons, which is bad enough in itself, and even worse if they end up in the hands of a fanatical successor government.
This isn't dumb foreign policy. This goes way beyond dumb foreign policy. Dumb foreign policy is when a minor Indian prince has the Mongol emissaries executed for not taking their shoes off quickly enough in his presence. This is totally fucking deranged foreign policy.
Discussion (14)
Naive, maybe.... crazy? Nah, he would get good advisors and they would stop him.... I don't see Obama doing the Bush-like thing and firing the advisors who disagree....
His current advisors didn't stop him from saying it and creating a diplomatic incident, and yet we're supposed to trust that he'll have better ones when it comes to actually doing the job?
More to the point, he didn't realise himself that starting a land war in Asia against a nuclear power with a theocratic successor government waiting in the wings was a cosmic-class bad idea?
I'll pass on taking the chance, thanks.
All the candidates are crazy enough to start a world war. I think that Obama is less likely to start a war than some of the other runners, though.
@Tad Duncan: Still, he's the only candidate so far that's outlined a simple five-step program for starting one.
I think it's a very poor state of affairs when a dictator like Musharraf is considered an ally.
@nic: We don't have a lot of choices in that part of the world. Musharraf's simply better than all the pragmatically possible not-Musharrafs.
I have to draw a distinction here between "invade to overthrow the regime" and "invade as in tromp all over Pakistan's territorial sovereignty by conducting raids into its northwestern mountains over Musharraf's objections". The stump speech has some vagueness, but the message it sends is very much the latter, not the former.
The simultaneously Rumsfeldian and Clintonian calls for the military to become "more stealth, agile, and lethal" and "Mobile Deployment Teams that bring together personnel from the State Department, the Pentagon, and USAID", though, make me wonder about Obama's plans for interacting with the armed forces. Between Clinton, Bush II, and the current quagmire, I don't know how much more civil-military friction we need right now.
And Pakistan, especially Pakistani militants, aren't going to conflate the two? Even accidentally, never mind as an excuse to overthrow the Musharraf government in the name of protecting people from the Great Satan?
On the latter, though: Yeah. Word to that.
You've got a point there - it wouldn't be too surprising to see militants and the moderate opposition using it as an excuse for a "color revolution". Hmm surely with U.S. help, if the general declined our generous "we're coming, so either spin it to say you let us in or we let Bhutto bust you to commander in chief of border patrol" offer.
I don't see Musharraf going apocalyptic over it, though. Using the nukes would guarantee a U.S.-led regime change. China's surely not going to do any dangerous military escalation over special forces hitting some caves. Disruptive to Pakistani politics, certainly, but doom, nah. The Islamists don't seem to have enough traction, compared to the army and most of the rest of the country.
Musharraf wouldn't, but chaos in Pakistan would offer any number of chances for the Islamists to grab a nuke - and the Pakistani intelligence service seems to lean uncomfortably towards them, or house factions to do so. And I don't think I'm as confident as you are in the weakness of the Islamists, especially bearing in mind how much support they might pick up if we actually invaded.
I don't think it would be inevitable doom, but I do think the possibility's high enough that we're talking juggling-babies-over-fire-pit levels of inadvisibility, here.
As for China, I think their escalation would come afterwards - they may not care about a few special forces, but they don't want a large American force on their border much, and one of the few things they want less is chaos and/or Islamic militants (with whom they have their own internal problems), especially if they might have access to nukes.
He gave that speech, probably at the behest of his advisors because he has a perception of being naive about the war and foreign policy.
He will lose out to Hillary, and on the Republican side we may stuck with Fred Thompson.
There's my 2008 prediction for what will happen if we don't get Ron Paul elected.
Besides, Democrats have always been pro-war traditionally, it's the Republicans (not the neo-cons) who have usually followed democrat started wars.
So don't expect much different fear-mongering from a Dem whitehouse that you're getting from these Neocons.
@David Watson: Well, now he's gone from being naive about foreign policy to being actively useless at foreign policy. His advisers sure blew his foot off with that one.
I hope they all blow their foots off.