I’m a firm believer that you watch what a candidate says in the primaries to find out what they really believe, and what they say in the general election is how far they will go to tell you what you want to hear.
He’s always wanted out of Iraq and now he has domestic political cover to do it. He will cite budget and economic pressures and reduced attacks there to speed up the Iraq withdrawal, with or without a plan to counter Iranian meddling in Iraq. The Iranians can bide their time until we leave to resume undermining the Iraqi government and ethnic tensions there. I doubt there will we will have more than a token presence there a year from now.
Some troops may be shifted to Afghanistan for PR purposes, but with little impact on the situation there. All the Pakistan talk is probably just an attempt to sound macho, he won’t do much more than Bush there…too volatile.
Despite his professed support for Israel, he has exhibited far more sympathy for the Palestinian cause in his previous career, which will be exploited by Hezbollah and Hamas with more rocket and suicide attacks. Until Israel elects a new government it will be hamstrung in its efforts to respond to external threats from Iran who will gladly underwrite a new round of limited warfare to gauge how far Obama will go to support Israel while it continues its nuclear program. When push comes to shove, Obama will shove Israel aside in the name of “peace (in our time?)”
Putin may attempt another limited aggression, but can’t sustain much militarily as long as energy prices remain down. If prices skyrocket again, Georgia will be made into a puppet state, with the Baltics and Ukraine on notice that they will be too unless they play ball with Moscow. Obama will ask the U.N. to do something. They won’t.
I suspect Al-Qaeda will re-emerge with an attack against a soft target somewhere overseas. Enough to get people’s attention and see if Obama will respond with more force than Clinton did. If he doesn’t, then we are really vulnerable to another major domestic attack, and that will end the fiction once and for all that Obama is serious about national security.
