Obama's Foreign Policy Experience

After twenty wins in coast-to-coast state primaries and caucuses, record-breaking turnout in most contests, and a level of national enthusiasm that threatens to alter the political map of the United States, Barack Obama is still asked in interviews, almost without exception, how can a candidate with such "little foreign-policy experience" be viable or electable in a presidential race. Other candidates receive different treatment. That affirmation, for example, never made it to any question posed to the former front-runner for the Republican nomination, Rudolph Giuliani. Before the collapse of his campaign, Americans could be forgiven for thinking that Rudy was favored by national-security conservatives, who imagined that only America's mayor could beat radical Islam worldwide. And yet Joe Biden, who called Giuliani "the most uninformed person on foreign policy now running for president" was correct, if only a bit unfair. He forgot Mike Huckabee, but then again, no one bothered to say anything at all, good or bad, about Mike Huckabee those days. Huckabee and Giuliani never got the "little foreign-policy experience" bit from interviewers or debate moderators. Obama has to deal with that assumption as a given.

Of course, he handily rejects that notion by reminding his audience that no one had more experience than Cheney or Rumsfeld, or that judgment can be more important than experience. Others point to the Kenyan or Indonesian chapters of his life story. And very few elected officials had the foresight and the courage to speak out against the invasion of Iraq, which would become the biggest strategic blunder of US foreign policy in the last decades. Less noticed is the fact that, before he began plugging his second best-selling book, before he was rumored as a presidential candidate and only C-Span junkies paid attention, Obama spent most of his time in the Senate talking about issues related to foreign policy, and doing so with the command and nuance that one associates with more seasoned legislators. Whether on the Senate's Committees on Foreign Relations, Homeland Security, or Veterans' Affairs, at Darfur rallies, or in conversations about the embargo on Cuba, Obama was at his best when he spoke about foreign policy.

The Clinton campaign accused Obama of being naive and inexperienced on foreign policy when he stated that the United States should strike against selected targets in the tribal areas of Pakistan, provided actionable intelligence and Musharraf's inability to take action himself. Yet Clinton did not protest when a CIA airstrike in Pakistan killed one of Al-Qaeda's top operatives earlier this month, or back in 2005 when a CIA drone took a similar action against another leader of the network, also within Pakistani territory. She did not protest when Ethiopia bombed the Islamists out of Mogadishu a year ago, with help from the United States, or when Turkey repeatedly violated Iraq's northern border to stamp out PKK targets in its Kurdish region. Last September, Israel bombed Syria, unprovoked, in another cross-border attack that did not draw Hillary Clinton's opposition or condemnation. Fortunately, some people have begun to catch up and turn the argument on its head. After another flawed attempt at justifying her vote to authorize the Iraq invasion, Wolf Blitzer, in a rare display of inspiration, asked Senator Clinton: "Are you telling us that you were too naive in believing that George Bush would do the right thing?" She laughed, nervously, and replied without countering: "Nice try, Wolf, nice try." Indeed.