Choosing a President or Choosing a War?

While American voters earnestly go about selecting candidates for the presidency it might behoove them to more closely examine some of the more bellicose comments that seem to come from all of the top contenders. It's easy to start with John McCain, a warrior who never met a war he didn't like, and who genuinely believes that just about all of the conflicts the U.S. has been involved in during the last 50 years could have had happier endings with just a few more bombs. He appears ready to go to war with a long list of potential adversaries but his adrenaline is particularly directed towards Iran to the point even some conservatives get nervous as noted at In the National Interest:

"On Iran and its nuclear program, McCain has been so flippantly bellicose—singing "Bomb bomb bomb bomb Iran" to the Beach Boys tune—that some conservatives have warned that a President McCain would take America to war with Iran. McCain last Sunday said: "There's going to be other wars. . . . I'm sorry to tell you, there's going to be other wars. We will never surrender but there will be other wars." Presumably, McCain was suggesting his view that a war with Iran was inevitable. When asked by Joe Scarborough about McCain’s statement, Pat Buchanan replied: "That is straight talk. . . . You get John McCain in the White House, and I do believe we will be at war with Iran." Buchanan said, "That's one of the things that makes me very nervous about him," adding, "There's no doubt John McCain is going to be a war president. . . . His whole career is wrapped up in the military, national security. He’s in Putin’s face, he’s threatening the Iranians, we're going to be in Iraq a hundred years." But if McCain’s strategic vision is to strike Iran militarily, he has not explained how that might be achieved without further endangering the already failing U.S. mission next door in Iraq, which he also believes in continuing without a timetable.

And any attempt by a President McCain to address Iran’s nuclear program through diplomacy, particularly at the UN Security Council, would be undermined by McCain’s almost gratuitous aggressiveness toward Moscow. When the administration was trying to reach an understanding with the Kremlin on missile defense sites in Poland and the Czech Republic, McCain undermined the talks by saying "the first thing I would do is make sure that we have a missile defense system in place in Czechoslovakia and Poland, and I don't care what his [Putin’s] objections are to it." McCain has also similarly called for Russia’s expulsion from the Group of Eight. While Washington should address mounting concerns about Russian domestic issues with Moscow, McCain’s stance has been so uncompromising and confrontational that as president he would fatally undermine any effort to rally consensus at the Council on Iran and other matters."

The Democratic Party having disposed of Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel on the left, and John Edwards in the center, now finds itself with a somewhat more finely nuanced choice between Barak Obama and Hillary Clinton. While both are ostensibly against the war in Iraq it's not clear that they are particularly prepared to leave without some kind of remaining American presence and commitment. They both make the mandatory noises about strengthening the U.S. military but there doesn't appear to be much questioning of the underlying premise why such a large and increasingly economically unsupportable force is needed.

Clinton seems to be leading the way as far as actively exacerbating various problems, particularly in the Balkans, one of her husband's supposed success stories. Jeremy Scahill observes:

"Beyond the obvious hypocrisy of the US condemnations of Serbia and the sudden admission that international law exists, the Kosovo story is an important one in the context of the current election campaign in the United States. Perhaps more than any other international conflict, Yugoslavia was the defining foreign policy of President Bill Clinton's time in power. Under his rule, the nation of Yugoslavia was destroyed, dismantled and chopped into ethnically pure para-states. President Bush's immediate recognition of Kosovo as an independent nation was the icing on the cake of destruction of Yugoslavia and one which was enthusiastically embraced by Hillary Clinton. "I've supported the independence of Kosovo because I think it is imperative that in the heart of Europe we continue to promote independence and democracy," Clinton said at the recent Democratic debate in Austin, Texas. A few days before the attack on the US embassy in Belgrade, Clinton released a Molotov cocktail statement praising the declaration of independence. In it, she referred to Kosovo by the Albanian "Kosova" and said independence "will allow the people of Kosova to finally live in their own democratic state. It will allow Kosova and Serbia to finally put a difficult chapter in their history behind them and to move forward." She added, "I want to underscore the need to avoid any violence or provocations in the days and weeks ahead." As seasoned observers of Serbian politics know, there were few things the US could have done to add fuel to the rage in Serbia over the declaration of independence -- "provocations" if you will -- than to have a political leader named Clinton issue a statement praising independence and using the Albanian name for Kosovo."

Additionally she managed to get into a rather bush-league verbal altercation with Vladimir Putin which produced this comment in The Moscow Times:

"Warning against personalizing diplomacy, Clinton was playing off U.S. President George W. Bush's famous remark about looking into Putin's eyes and getting a sense of his soul. Her exact words were: "He was a KGB agent. By definition he doesn't have a soul." That kind of smart-aleck, college-girl remark may have played well in a small-town gathering of voters, but it doesn't play well on the international stage. Confirming national stereotypes is always comforting because it frees people from the rigors of thought. Her remark inadvertently also confirmed two Russian stereotypes about Americans -- the clueless (Bush) and the snooty (Clinton).

The Russian leadership, of course, also makes plenty of derogatory remarks about the United States that are, like Clinton's, designed for domestic consumption only. But there are real differences. Putin almost never mentions the United States directly and certainly would never say anything openly hostile about Bush personally. Putin's veiled assertions can, however, be more pervasively poisonous than outright denunciations, and some of the differences can be written off as cultural.

One thing does, however, seem certain. Whatever actual configuration Russian politics assumes after the March 2 presidential election, Putin is going to be a force to be reckoned with for a good while to come. That's no secret and should have been clear to Clinton. So where was her vaunted experience when that remark was made?

It wasn't something Barack Obama would have said. He's got too much soul."

Obama for his part has been the most circumspect in this department but even he feels the need to wield the American Big Military Stick as witnessed by his comments on Pakistan which if anything has become even more volatile and anti-American, as noted at ww4report:

" So, while (legitimately) calling out Clinton over her support of the illegal unilateral aggression in Iraq, Obama calls instead for illegal unilateral aggression in Pakistan. OK, this could be Zbigniew Brzezinski talking (not that that lets Obama off the hook), and there is just enough wiggle room for ambiguity here. But it's pretty clear what he means in light of his speech last summer at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in DC, in which he said (Chicago Tribune, Aug. 2, 2007):

I understand that President Musharraf has his own challenges. But let me make this clear. There are terrorists holed up in those mountains who murdered 3,000 Americans. They are plotting to strike again... If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf will not act, we will.

The timing of Obama's comments is also ominous. The New York Times reported Feb. 22 that last month the Bush administration reached a "quiet understanding" with the Musharraf regime that "allowed an increase in the number and scope of patrols and strikes by armed Predator surveillance aircraft launched from a secret base in Pakistan—a far more aggressive strategy to attack Al Qaeda and the Taliban than had existed before. But since opposition parties emerged victorious from the parliamentary election early this week, American officials are worried that the new, more permissive arrangement could be choked off in its infancy."

If a US break with Musharraf and/or a real democratic opening in Pakistan merely pave the way for unilateral US or NATO aggression, we could be going very quickly from the frying pan to the fire. It would be a bitter irony if it happens under a new president so many are now supporting because of his ostensible anti-war creds..."

So it appears that the U.S. is in for a change but it is disheartening to see the front runners continuing in the time honored bi-partisan traditions of American militarism and hegemony. Given the economic outlook coupled with peak oil energy and climate change this Americentric approach is as about as viable as Russian communism and as likely to join it in the history books.