Legitimate Questions of Judgment, Experience
05 May 2008 7:45 am by Taylor Marsh
Expert guest post by Joseph C. Wilson IV
originally post in the Raleigh
News and Observer and Bloomington Times Herald
 |
SANTA FE, N.M. – In recent weeks Americans have been subjected to a litany
of outrageous statements from Sen. Barack Obama’s pastor of 20 years, Rev. Jeremiah
Wright. While Obama was finally compelled to distance himself from his radical
preacher, the relationship raises legitimate questions about Obama’s judgment
and naivete.
Obama, after all, wants to be president of the United States, and in that quest
has proposed unconditional summit meetings with some of our country’s most determined
enemies, including Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Obama’s campaign has been built upon his supposed transcendent qualities and
intuitive judgment. His foreign policy experience is limited to having lived
in Indonesia between the ages of 6 and 10, and having traveled overseas briefly
as a college student. He further claims that a speech he gave against the war
in Iraq six years ago to extremely liberal supporters in a campaign for state
senator in Illinois is sufficient proof of his superior judgment in national
security matters and qualifies him to be president and commander-in-chief of
U.S. Armed Forces at a time when we are fighting two extraordinarily difficult
wars. As with his relationship with Wright, a closer examination is warranted.
In the U.S. Senate, to which he was elected in 2004, a year after the launching
of Operation Iraqi Freedom, he has done little to act on his asserted anti-war
position, and has said repeatedly that had he been in the Senate at the time
of the vote on the authorization for the use of military force he doesn’t know
how he would have voted. As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee
on Europe, with jurisdiction over NATO, he has held not a single oversight meeting
because, as he admitted, he was too busy running for president, even though
NATO’s presence in the Afghanistan war is critical to success in that venture.
Obama repeats the incorrect and politically irresponsible mantra that Sen.
Hillary Clinton voted for the war and that therefore he is more qualified to
be president. Unlike Obama, as the last acting U.S. ambassador to Iraq during
the first Gulf War, I was deeply involved in that debate from the beginning.
President Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell made it clear publicly and
in their representations to Congress that the authorization was not to go to
war but rather to give the president the leverage he needed to go to the United
Nations to reinvigorate international will to contain and disarm Saddam Hussein,
consistent with the resolutions passed at the time of the first Gulf War.
With passage of the resolution, the president did in fact achieve a U.N. consensus,
and inspectors returned to Iraq. Hans Blix, the chief U.N. inspector, has said
repeatedly that without American leadership there would have been no new inspection
regime.
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SADDAM WAS A SERIAL VIOLATOR OF HUMAN RIGHTS, had started two wars in the region
in the previous decade, continued to threaten his neighbors, including Israel,
which he once said he would destroy with weapons of mass destruction. We may
not have fully understood how little remained of his WMD arsenal, but were we
really willing in the aftermath of 9/11 to give him a free pass, as Obama’s
rewriting of history suggests he might have done?
The approach of tough diplomacy backed by the threat of military action was
the correct one and it yielded exactly the desired results, a unanimously passed
U.N. resolution and the capitulation of Saddam when he readmitted the inspectors.
The betrayal occurred not when the president was given the tools he needed
to secure international support for inspections, but rather when Bush refused
to allow the inspectors to complete their work and decided preemptively to invade,
conquer and occupy Iraq.
That decision and power was his alone — not the Congress’ and certainly not
Hillary Clinton’s. Obama is wrong to turn Bush’s war into Clinton’s responsibility.
And Obama is dangerously na•ve in failing to understand the need in international
crises to blend tough diplomacy with the other foreign policy tools at our disposal
to achieve a strong national security posture.
Judgment and leadership in foreign policy are not intuitive. They are learned
through experience. Obama’s long and close relationship with the anti-American
hate-monger Wright, his inattention to his responsibilities in the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee and his careless approach to Iraq all suggest that he would
benefit from more experience. We should ask whether we want those lessons to
be learned in the White House.
(Joseph C. Wilson IV is a former diplomat and U.S. ambassador. He was senior
director for African Affairs in the Clinton administration. In 2003 he wrote
a New York Times opinion piece, “What I didn’t find in Africa,” challenging
the Bush administration’s use of intelligence to justify the war in Iraq.)
Reprinted with permission.
