I have provided the “specifics” of this charge time and time again. Read his speech to the Global Affairs Council from last year, or his AIPAC speech, or listen to any of his remarks from the debates on Iran or Kosovo. Look at how he brags about his support for the bombing of Lebanon.

Also, we on the antiwar right were critiquing “humanitarian” interventions back in the ’90s as well. We called it interventionism then, and we’ll keep calling it that.

Bush was and is a duplicitous neophyte, and in 2000 he could not tell an interviewer one world leader’s name. He is a moron. Obama, for all his faults, is not.

In your zeal to laundry list all the potential problems with a President Obama, you’ve have finally jumped the shark.

But the modern democrat hasnt in the past shed a tear for all the Serbs who were bombed in a ‘humanitarian’ fashion.

Anyway, I think the best weapons for advancing US values abroad are economic, not military. How about a 10% tariff on imported goods from nations who fail a human rights test? Plus a separate tariff on goods from nations whose environmental laws are too lax, or not enforced? Such a neo-Hamiltonian approach would fill the Federal coffers, while stimulating domestic manufacturing. The “free” traders wouldn’t like those ideas, but calling what the WTO promotes “free trade” is an abuse of the English language.

Obama may very well get us into some humanitarian mess, but when we start taking casualties that is when the plan to withdraw begins.

As someone who doesn’t think that “lobbing cruise missiles from a million miles away” is any more just, or any less damaging to American credibility, than an approach that ends us up with “dead American soldiers”, I don’t see why the approach you describe here should be regarded as a good thing. There’s a lot more that’s wrong with the Iraq war than the number of Americans who have died in it, and if those death the only thing that’s been driving the “modern democrat” to push for withdrawal, then theirs is a shallow anti-interventionism indeed. I’m not saying that McCain anything but much, much worse in this respect – he is, but in my eyes this is a reason to vote third party (or not vote at all), not to support a candidate whose rhetoric is very much in the same interventionist tradition as our current President, and whose sole anti-war bona fide is his inconsistent and opportunistic opposition to the war in Iraq.

This is what some people don’t understand about Romney and why Kmiec probably supported him but now supports Obama. Romney had an analytical mind, Much of what he said was said to get elected. That’s how he operated in Massachusetts (called “His Expediency” by the opposition here). Even though Romney said certain things about Iraq, there existed in his mind some equation where X cost exceeded Y benefit, and we would leave.

In McCain’s mind success and continued occupation is the only thing there. And success is unfalsifiable. There does not exist a situation that is not evidence of success. He did this on Fox News just today. What happened in Basra is evidence that the surge worked. This unfalsifiability of success is the continued position of the Bush administration. When violence was high that was good sign. When violence was low that’s a good sign. Everything is a good sign!

You claim that he has accepted the interventionist consensus, even though you admit his endlessly-repeated promise to “change the mindset that led to the war in Iraq” is in fact a direct challenge to that consensus.

It would only be a “direct challenge” to interventionism if it actually meant anything other than “get us out of Iraq so that we can go meddle elsewhere”.

- 126 (61%) of 208 Democratic Representatives voted against the resolution.
- 6 of 223 Republican Representatives voted against the resolution.
- 21 (42%) of 50 Democratic Senators voted against the resolution.
- 1 of 49 Republican Senators voted against the resolution.
There was essentially no Republican opposition. We can perhaps point the finger at the Dems for having an interventionist foreign policy, but in the instance of the Iraq War the Republicans own this particular interventionist debacle. And the Republican Party and Conservative movement have fought any and all opposition to the war tooth and nail every day of these past 5 years. It’s a no brainer why an anti-war con would want a Democrat in office at this point, because the Republicans simply are not a valid option.

It’s an unconvincing argument (except in the general sense that presdients almost always end up contradicting their promises in office). More specifics, please.

Ineffectual, like the bombing of the pharmaceutical factory in Sudan.Internationalist in form, that is, with the blessing of the UN, or NATO, or the OAU, as in Kosovo.Justified in humanitarian terms such as the prevention of genocide.

>It is hard to imagine that in eight years, or even four, Obama would avoid sending troops to Zimbabwe, the Congo, Liberia or some such God-forsaken place.

Moreover, the suspicions of Israel’s supporters may well push him to be more aggressive in the Middle East than he would otherwise care to be:

“My middle name may Hussein, but I’m sending a carrier squadron to sit off Lebanon and stealth fighters to Israel, so Dershowitz, relax already.”

I could be wrong, and I hope I am. The guy seems to be something new. The conservative in me, though, suggests that novelty is often to be feared.

The only hope I have in an Obama presidency is that he may be restrained by a Democratic congress and the liberal base that elected him.

But this is exactly what will not happen. Those same people didn’t even manage consistently to oppose Bush; why should we think they will work to restrain someone whom they regard as one of their own, and who is widely viewed as the savior of their party and their movement? I suspect that you will discover exactly what you fear …

This is why it continues to shock me that informed liberal partisans who strenuously oppose this imperilalist mind set, support Obama without any caveats.

The only hope I have in an Obama presidency is that he may be restrained by a Democratic congress and the liberal base that elected him. While he still hews to the imperialist mindset the progressive movement does not (or I believe). Now, of course, I may discover that progressives in particular and liberals in general are just fine with imperialism when its done to achieve their objectives.

In any case, I have found it extremely ironic that Obama’s candidacy is the one that inspires in me the most pessimism and fully converted me to misanthropy.

By the way, I’m not sure if you’ve read Bacevich’s piece on military policy in the March 28 Commonweal, but I think it deserves more attention than I’ve seen it get so far. It’s at the end, when he lays out a trio of specific objectives for a post-Bush Doctrine foreign policy (reclaim the just-war tradition and commit ourselves to the wrongness of preemptive war, adopt a policy of containment rather than working to rid the world of evil, and acknowledge that all of us, and not just our President, are accountable for the actions of our military), that he seems to me to expose the chief weakness in his case for Obama: namely, that it’s highly unlikely that he, and the Congressional majority that will support him, will be committed to anything like these goals.