What’s it with all this hullabaloo on foreign policy? And while we are still at, whose side are you on? As a liberal who’s looking for a drastic change in our foreign policy from what we’ve had post-9/11, I side with Barack Obama. I don’t need to disclose my strong support for Barack to any of you since I have been both open and vocal about it on this site. However, this debate highlighted the reason I am supporting Barack over Hillary and to a lesser extent John Edwards – Barack is unabashedly liberal and draws others to the Democratic Party with his politics of change that is highlighted with his liberal position on the Iraq war. Barack sees no shame in being a liberal and embraces it with his positions and his rhetoric. He does not try to go to the right of anyone like Hillary or change his rhetoric to please a General election electorate.
The YouTube question and the quarrel that ensued led us to a debate about U.S. foreign policy post-9/11. Will there be change or will there be a continuation of punishing our enemies by not engaging them through diplomacy? George W. Bush and his Vice President and lead foreign policy adviser never fully embraced the William J. Clinton form of diplomacy when they entered into office in 2001. They deemed his negotiations with Palestine a failure and refused to speak with Chairman Arafat when they took office. By not negotiating with the Palestinian leader the I/P conflict escalated all because of their position of not rewarding Arafat with a meeting.
In post 9/11 the Bush/Cheney doctrine and neo-conservative political philosophy of not rewarding rogue leaders with meetings without pre-conditions were joined by several Democrats who signed a letter along with partisan Republicans in 2002 urging the Vice President to not meet with Arafat until the Palestinian leader does more to curb the violence in the Middle East. Hillary Clinton and Joe Lieberman were among them. Also among them was Senate Majority leader Tom Daschle who was facing a tough election that he eventually lost. The only member of this group of Democratic U.S. Senators who signed this letter and did not vote for the Iraq War Resolution (IWR) was Florida’s Bob Graham who read the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) report that lead him to vote no. Hillary Clinton did not read the NIE report.
As president Hillary Clinton will not continue her husband’s foreign policy because international relations have changed post-9/11 and a neo-conservative foreign policy philosophy has been embraced by "Very Serious People" in Washington. We must assess her foreign policy by her actions post-9/11, in which most members of the Clinton Administration foreign policy team backed Bush/Cheney on the Iraq war and urged the Bush/Cheney administration in not meeting world leaders without pre-conditions. (See above signed letter as example.)
I will end with two postings one by Matthew Yglesias who compares failed Democratic calculations of the past to the new Democratic approach.
As some people have pointed out, it's a little bit unclear what, exactly, the policy disagreement here amounts to. The political disagreement, though, is pretty clear. Clinton is making the same kind of calculation that led people to think Democrats needed to authorize the war in 2002, or keep quiet about the NSA surveillance program in 2005, or posture as "tough" on Iran in 2006, etc., etc., etc. Those kind of political calculations, however, have implications for governing. First John Edwards by taking on the "war on terror" construct, and now Obama by challenging the Very Serious People on the subject of meetings are starting to edge toward a new Democratic approach -- one that involves actually challenging the post-9/11 miasma into which the national conversation about foreign policy has landed -- while Clinton is still fully inside the defensive crouch.
And a post by Brian Beutler who puts the foreign policy brouhaha that erupted after the YouTube debate in a left vs right context.
I think the escalating rhetorical battle the two senators is perhaps the only helpful instance of campaign jousting I've ever seen. At the same time, I only think I'll believe that as long as Barack Obama wins, or at least puts up a good show. Because what we are seeing is, in as close to an unfiltered way as possible, a standoff between a status quo foreign policy and a much more constructive (though I hesitate to say new) direction.
Certainly what you're hearing from Clinton and Obama is a healthier debate than what you're hearing from journalists. Clinton's basic position is that Obama has, by announcing his intent to engage enemy leaders, proven that he's too naive to set the country's foreign policy. Obama, on the other hand, contends that Clinton's foreign policy ideas are too similar to George Bush's for comfort. As far as I'm concerned, I think Obama's argument is basically correct and Hillary's argument is totally nuts, but in any case both arguments are pretty close facsimiles to what the two candidates actually believe about foreign policy.