Obama’s Hollow ‘Judgment’ and Empty Record
02 March 2008 5:33 pm by Taylor Marsh
Obama’s Hollow ‘Judgment’ and Empty Record
Expert guest post by Joseph C. Wilson
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Barack Obama argues that he deserves the Democratic nomination and Hillary
Clinton doesn’t because he possesses superior “judgment,” as he calls
it, on the key issues we face as a nation. As definitive proof he offers one
speech he made in 2002 during a reelection campaign for an Illinois senate seat
in the most liberal district in the state, so liberal that no other position
would have been viable. When he made that speech, Obama was not privy to the
briefings by, among others, Secretary of State Colin Powell, in support of the
Authorization of Use of Military Force as a diplomatic tool to push the international
community to impose intrusive inspections on Saddam Hussein.
Would Obama have acted differently had he been in Washington or had he had
the benefit of the arguments and the intelligence that the administration was
offering to the Congress debating that resolution? During the 2002-2003 timeframe,
he was a minor local official uninvolved in the national debate on the war so
we can only judge from his own statements prior to the 2008 campaign. Obama
repeated these points in a whole host of interviews prior to announcing his
candidacy. On July 27, 2004, he told the Chicago Tribune on Iraq: “There’s
not much of a difference between my position and George Bush’s position at this
stage.” In his book, The Audacity of Hope, published in 2006, he wrote,
“…on the merits I didn’t consider the case against war to be cut-and-
dried.” And, in 2006, he clearly said, “I’m always careful to say
that I was not in the Senate, so perhaps the reason I thought it was such a
bad idea was that I didn’t have the benefit of US intelligence. And for those
who did, it might have led to a different set of choices.”
I was involved in that debate in every step of the effort to prevent this senseless
war and I profoundly resent Obama’s distortion of George Bush’s folly into Hillary
Clinton’s responsibility. I was in the middle of the debate in Washington. Obama
wasn’t there. I remember what was said and done. In fact, the administration
lied in order to secure support for its war of choice, including cooking the
intelligence and misleading Congress about the intent of the authorization.
Senator Clinton’s position, stated in her floor speech, was in favor of allowing
the United Nations weapons inspectors to complete their mission and to build
a broad international coalition. Bush rejected her path. It was his war of choice.
There is no credible reason to conclude that Obama would have acted any differently
in voting for the authorization had he been in the Senate at that time. Indeed,
he has said as much. The supposed intuitive judgment he exercised in his 2002
speech was nothing more than the pander of a local election campaign, just as
his current assertions of superior judgment and scurrilous attacks on Hillary
Clinton are a pander to those who now retroactively think the war was a mistake
without bothering to acknowledge Senator Clinton’s actual position at the time
and instead fantasizing that she was nothing but a Bush clone. Obama willfully
encourages and plays off this falsehood.
What should we make of Obama’s other judgments in foreign affairs? Take Afghanistan,
for example. It has been evident for some time that our efforts there are going
badly and that cooperation and support from our NATO allies would be helpful.
As chairman of the subcommittee on Senate Foreign Relations responsible for
NATO and Europe, Obama could have used his lofty position actually to engage
the issue and pressure the administration to take some action to improve our
chance of success in that conflict against the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Of course,
that would have involved holding hearings, questioning administration witnesses,
and taking a position and offering alternatives. That is what we expect that
from senators in a democracy. It is called oversight.
But, instead, Obama, by his own admission, offers the excuse that he has been
too busy running for president to do anything substantive, such as direct his
staff to organize a single hearing. “Well, first of all,” Obama was
forced to confess in the Democratic debate in Ohio on February 26, “I became
chairman of this committee at the beginning of this campaign, at the beginning
of 2007. So it is true that we haven’t had oversight hearings on Afghanistan.”
To date, his subcommittee has held no policy hearings at all — none. At the
same time that Obama claimed he was too busy campaigning to do anything substantive,
racking up one of the worst attendance records in the Senate, Senator Clinton
chaired extensive hearings of the Subcommittee on Superfund and Environmental
Health and attended many others as a member of the Armed Service Committee.
As a consequence of Obama’s dereliction of duty on the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee, a feckless administration has had absolutely no oversight as it careens
from disaster to disaster in Afghanistan, including the central governments
loss of control over 70 percent of the country and yet another bumper crop of
opium to fuel the efforts of the Taliban and their terrorist allies. Of course,
if you don’t hold hearings, conduct oversight, make recommendations or sponsor
legislation, then you have no record to explain or defend and you are free to
take whatever position is convenient when attacking those who actually did address
issues. Meanwhile, on the campaign trail, Obama holds forth on Afghanistan,
chiding the administration and our allies as though he’s a profile in courage
and not someone who has abandoned his post in establishing accountability.
On Iran and the question of designating the Iranian Revolutionary Guard as
a terrorist organization, the junior senator from Illinois was not quite so
clever at avoiding taking a position. He first co-sponsored the “Counter-Proliferation
Act of 2007,” which contained explicit language identifying the Iranian
Revolutionary Guards as a terrorist organization. He subsequently claimed to
oppose the Kyl-Lieberman sense of the Senate resolution proposing the same thing.
Obama’s accountability problem here is that he didn’t show up for the vote on
that resolution — a vote that would have put him on record. Then he declined
to sign on to a letter put forward by Senator Clinton making explicit that the
resolution could not be used as authority to take military action. All we have
is Obama’s rhetoric juxtaposed with his co-sponsorship of a piece of legislation
that proposed what he says he opposed.
Obama’s gyrations on Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran are not the actions of one
imbued with superior intuitive judgment, but rather the machinations of a political
opportunist looking to avoid having his fingerprints on any issue that might
be controversial, and require real judgment, while preserving his freedom to
bludgeon his adversary for actually taking positions as elected office demands.
It is hard to discern whether Senator Obama is a man of principle, but it is
clear that he is not a man of substance. And that judgment, based on his hollow
record, is inescapable.
