Eli Lake: Obama isn't Jimmy Carter--he's Ronald Reagan
[Eli Lake is a senior reporter on national security issues for The New York Sun.]
... Before unpacking the Obama view of the war on terrorism, let's dismiss the comparisons to Jimmy Carter. A bit of a refresher course in the horrors of the late 1970s: Jimmy Carter pledged to enshrine human rights as a central value in U.S. foreign policy. That was an admirable goal, but Carter didn't just inject human rights into U.S. foreign policy; he allowed it to rule policy, no matter the implications for the fight against communism. During the Carter era, the United States cooled its relations with vital client states like the Shah's government in Iran and the Somoza regime in Nicaragua, even as they fought for their lives. The locus classicus of this critique was, of course, Jeane Kirkpatrick's Commentary essay, "Dictatorships and Double Standards," where she excoriated the Carter administration for its studied neutrality as pro-American autocrats fell to Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries. She concluded that Carter's foreign policy was incapable of distinguishing between real democratic activists and would-be totalitarians who cloaked their ambitions in the rhetoric of democratic self-determination. "Liberal idealism need not be identical with masochism, and need not be incompatible with the defense of freedom and the national interest," she wrote.
Does her critique apply to Barack Obama, too? That's what John McCain has, in essence, alleged. But to understand why this charge won't stick--and to understand the intellectual DNA of the Obama approach to counterterrorism--you need to review the careers of Richard Clarke and Rand Beers.
Both Clarke and Beers are lifelong national security bureaucrats who left the Bush administration in protest of the Iraq war. Both have offered private advice to Obama and might well hold top posts in his war cabinet. Clarke helped draft the campaign's counterterrorism strategy, and Beers contributed ideas for his August 1, 2007 counterterrorism speech. Both also have the trust of the party's antiwar base and have, in many ways, articulated the Democratic Party's most substantive critique of Bush's war on terrorism.
From some of their criticism of the Bush administration, you might think them soft-power squishes. But, during their careers, they have never expressed much hesitation about working with proxy armies with less than admirable human rights records. During the Clinton administration, Beers served as the assistant secretary of state for international narcotics and law enforcement affairs, a bureau known as "drugs and thugs." In that post, he helped conceive Plan Colombia, which has, over the last eight years, funneled about $5.5 billion to the country's military. Much of that has been spent combating the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), which has funded its Marxist- Leninist rebellion by presiding over a vast drug empire.
In many ways, the program was a great success. Today, the FARC is nearly defeated, and the civil war in that country is over. But Plan Colombia worked in part because Beers was prepared to assist a national army that worked closely with pro-government death squads--and, for that reason, Plan Colombia provoked the ire of Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy and the left wing of the Democratic Party. Beers takes criticism of this brand of alliance seriously but considers it surmountable. He told me that such alliances require that the United States conditions its assistance: "We are prepared to work with you, but you are going to have to change your stripes. You are going to have to operate in a fashion where that kind of behavior stops." Indeed, in the Colombian instance, there's strong evidence that Beers's plan also helped curb the worst excesses of America's military partners....
Read entire article at New Republic
... Before unpacking the Obama view of the war on terrorism, let's dismiss the comparisons to Jimmy Carter. A bit of a refresher course in the horrors of the late 1970s: Jimmy Carter pledged to enshrine human rights as a central value in U.S. foreign policy. That was an admirable goal, but Carter didn't just inject human rights into U.S. foreign policy; he allowed it to rule policy, no matter the implications for the fight against communism. During the Carter era, the United States cooled its relations with vital client states like the Shah's government in Iran and the Somoza regime in Nicaragua, even as they fought for their lives. The locus classicus of this critique was, of course, Jeane Kirkpatrick's Commentary essay, "Dictatorships and Double Standards," where she excoriated the Carter administration for its studied neutrality as pro-American autocrats fell to Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries. She concluded that Carter's foreign policy was incapable of distinguishing between real democratic activists and would-be totalitarians who cloaked their ambitions in the rhetoric of democratic self-determination. "Liberal idealism need not be identical with masochism, and need not be incompatible with the defense of freedom and the national interest," she wrote.
Does her critique apply to Barack Obama, too? That's what John McCain has, in essence, alleged. But to understand why this charge won't stick--and to understand the intellectual DNA of the Obama approach to counterterrorism--you need to review the careers of Richard Clarke and Rand Beers.
Both Clarke and Beers are lifelong national security bureaucrats who left the Bush administration in protest of the Iraq war. Both have offered private advice to Obama and might well hold top posts in his war cabinet. Clarke helped draft the campaign's counterterrorism strategy, and Beers contributed ideas for his August 1, 2007 counterterrorism speech. Both also have the trust of the party's antiwar base and have, in many ways, articulated the Democratic Party's most substantive critique of Bush's war on terrorism.
From some of their criticism of the Bush administration, you might think them soft-power squishes. But, during their careers, they have never expressed much hesitation about working with proxy armies with less than admirable human rights records. During the Clinton administration, Beers served as the assistant secretary of state for international narcotics and law enforcement affairs, a bureau known as "drugs and thugs." In that post, he helped conceive Plan Colombia, which has, over the last eight years, funneled about $5.5 billion to the country's military. Much of that has been spent combating the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), which has funded its Marxist- Leninist rebellion by presiding over a vast drug empire.
In many ways, the program was a great success. Today, the FARC is nearly defeated, and the civil war in that country is over. But Plan Colombia worked in part because Beers was prepared to assist a national army that worked closely with pro-government death squads--and, for that reason, Plan Colombia provoked the ire of Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy and the left wing of the Democratic Party. Beers takes criticism of this brand of alliance seriously but considers it surmountable. He told me that such alliances require that the United States conditions its assistance: "We are prepared to work with you, but you are going to have to change your stripes. You are going to have to operate in a fashion where that kind of behavior stops." Indeed, in the Colombian instance, there's strong evidence that Beers's plan also helped curb the worst excesses of America's military partners....