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Journalism of Courage
Barack Obama has always been an independent thinker. He of course opposed the war in Iraq, and he’s built a team of national-security advisers who disproportionately took the same, then-unpopular antiwar view. But as a presidential candidate… his real break with convention may have begun with a gaffe. For the better part of a generation, top Democratic politicians have followed… the same set of unwritten rules in their approach to foreign affairs: match GOP “toughness”… avoid taking positions that could be criticised as weak. So at the YouTube debate on July 23, 2007, when Obama was asked whether he would be willing to meet “without precondition… with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea”, the right answer, conventionally speaking, was a qualified “no.” But Obama answered in the affirmative…
Few observers believed that Obama genuinely intended to break new ground with his response… The Clinton campaign dutifully pressed the attack the next day, calling Obama’s statement “irresponsible and frankly naive.” But then a funny thing happened. Obama’s team did not try to qualify (or, in political parlance, “clarify”) his remark, and no one said he misspoke… This position really was a departure for Obama. Despite his stand against the war in 2002, he had since hewed closely to the party line on foreign affairs. The only substantive thing he had to say about Iraq policy during his famous 2004 convention speech was: “When we send our young men and women into harm’s way, we have a solemn obligation not to fudge the numbers or shade the truth about why they are going; to care for their families while they’re gone; to tend to the soldiers upon their return; and to never, ever go to war without enough troops to win the war, secure the peace, and earn the respect of the world.” This merely echoed the bland competence-and-execution argument of mainstream party thinking…
Mercifully, (now) his general approach is pragmatic. More to the point, it doesn’t heed the usual political advice that says Democrats should recoil in fear from anything that could be painted as weakness… Obama’s campaign is betting on the idea that the disaster in Iraq has helped make what it calls “the politics of fear” obsolete, and that the time is ripe for something else.
Excerpted from Matthew Yglesias’s ‘The accidental foreign policy’ in The Atlantic
