Neither Clinton nor McCain will abandon the Iraqi people. Both will dis-engage only when the Iraqis can fully step in, and only when Al Qaida in Iraq has been marginalized. Unfortunately Clinton is pandering to the part of her base that could care less about the Iraqi people and think that our policy should be to abandon them and expose them to an ensuing power vacuum that would result in potentially catastrophic loss of live, a period of complete anarchy and then a return to dictatorship. All this would be fine with them as long as we left… Clinton is not stupid. She will “betray” this part of her base once in office and will do the right thing, although she will present herself, incorrectly, as being in the position of cleaning up her predecessor’s “mess” in order to save political face. But, she will not hastily abandon the Iraqi people. She understands the broader dynamics and the stakes involved.
Obama, I believe, sincerely thinks that the best policy would be to surrender and withraw as soon as possible. He lacks an understanding of the broader dynamics of the problem and threat of Islamic Extremism, and he grossly under-estimates its threat to the wellbeing of the U.S. and the West. He seems to think that if we just took out Osama, the problem would go away. In the public eye, Obama is like the opposite of George Bush. Bush is more savvy and intelligent than he comes across through his speech. People underestimate him and his intelligence because he is not a great speaker. Obama, on the other hand, will almost certainly be highly over-estimated by his followers. His charisma overshadows his lack of experience and naive points of view. His followers believe he is the answer to everything, and unfortunately, many of them secretly applaud the anti-American undertones of his behavior and his associations. His followers see him as a new and refreshing face. Those of us who see through him see a man who brings nothing but criticism of his country from one side of his mouth and meaningless soaring emotional rhetoric of generic “change” from the other with no real substance.
McCain is the only straightforward candidate who has shown his willingness to put his political future at risk by taking, at times, unpopular positions that he knew were the right positions. His boldness in confronting, not just the left, but the right as well, with solutions that are actually solutions rather than political pandering, is refreshing. His handling of the NY Times’ poor attempt at a smear campaign was spot on and something that GW could learn from. McCain, in my view, is the only true leader of the three candidates.
