NATIONAL SECURITY

Judgement and the Commander in Chief

Seemingly out of nowhere comes a certain Barry Durham - half African, half white, with a libertine mother who’d married a polygamist from Kenya, and he is running for president of the United States against John McCain. And although Barry’s handlers admit that he has little experience they maintain that his judgement will compensate. We want to believe that; as commander-in-chief Obama will husband a central responsibility to all of us, that which eclipses all other responsibilities - national security. And so in spite of his dealings with a convicted felon, his near life-long allegiance (until such an allegiance became a political liability) to a pastor preaching victimization, his campaign’s employment of a Mr. Johnson (recently fired) who had sweetheart loans from Countrywide Financial, the very same firm Obama criticized for its role in the mortgage meltdown, his cuddly relationship with terrorist bomber William Ayers, his obsequious posturing to various lobbies of the left, his incestuous romp with trial lawyers, and, gaffe after repeated gaffe - "tornadoes killed 10,000 people in Kansas / "I’ve been in 57 states, one left to go"- we reserve hope, suspecting that we must be missing something.

So we decided to look at the current conflict at hand. Specifically, how would Obama have handled the Iraqi situation in 2006 when that situation was approaching meltdown? Is this not the perfect petri dish, the perfect test? Obama then sat on the Foreign Relations Committee, McCain on the Armed Services Committee. McCain recommended the "surge" noting that initially this strategy would increase American casualties and hardships but then would bring violence under control. Obama presented his solution in the "Iraq War De-Escalation Act of 2007 (S. 433) which he introduced in the Senate and which forbade the surge and demanded that most troops be out of Iraq, spring of 2008. Obama predicted the surge would fail, telling Larry King that he "did not see anything in the president’s strategy that would make a significant dent in the sectarian violence."

Bush ordered the surge - 5 Army brigades and 2 Marine battalions. The US forces partnered with Iraqi troops precisely as McCain had suggested. Sectarian violence as of this writing has stopped almost completely. Al Qaeda in Iraq was dealt what CIA director Hayden now assesses as a "a near strategic defeat." If indeed Obama’s bill had passed, Al Qaeda in Iraq would have continued to gain strength, the fragile Iraqi Security Forces would have collapsed and militias would have flourished; the US would have departed under fire accepting a humiliating defeat that any fool knows would have reverberated globally.

How in the world can we have a better test than this? The military strategist Fred Kagan, respected by both sides of the aisle, noted recently that, "When American strategy in a critical theater was up for grabs, McCain proposed a highly unpopular and risky path, which he accurately predicted could lead to success. Obama proposed a popular and politically safe route that would have lead to an unnecessary and debilitating American defeat at the hands of al Qaeda."

Certainly we can understand why Islamic medievalists support the Obama campaign. It is a stretch however to understand how literate Americans can come to do the same.

Robert Craven