US foreign policy cannot begin and end with Iraq, warns Obama
Speaking purely as a European, I have to say that every so often Barack Obama says something which totally reassures me that I am right to think that he is the guy who should become the next President of the United States.
Yesterday he did it again when he stated "we have paid the price for a foreign policy that lectures without listening".
I have said it here many times that one of the reasons we Europeans loved Clinton was that he pretended to listen. He still put American interests first, but he never made us feel as if he was riding roughshod over his allies.
Bush has done so almost as a matter of course. The British government may still have remained loyal to an American administration which treated them in such a way, but the British people did not; labelling Blair "Bush's poodle" for the treatment which he took at the hands of a man which many of us regarded as one of America's worst ever presidents.
Obama appears to be offering a return to genuine mutlilateralism, and he certainly appears to have a sense of perspective regarding what is important and what is not.
John McCain, like George Bush, appears to see the war in Iraq as more important than defeating al Qaeda, and has certainly bought into the lie that the US is fighting al Qaeda in Iraq when, in truth, al Qaeda only represent about 6% of the forces they are facing there."By any measure, our single-minded and open-ended focus on Iraq is not a sound strategy for keeping America safe."
"What's missing in our debate about Iraq, what has been missing since before the war began, is a discussion of the strategic consequences of Iraq and its dominance of our foreign policy."
Mr Obama said there was overwhelming evidence that Washington's focus on Iraq, where it has five times more troops than in Afghanistan, has caused it to become distracted from "the central front in the war on terror".
"It is unacceptable that, almost seven years after nearly 3,000 Americans were killed on our soil, the terrorists who attacked us are still at large," he said. "Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri are recording messages to their followers and plotting more terror."
The truth is much starker. Bush has been unable to admit that Iraq was a strategic blunder, and so has been forced to argue that this campaign - which he actually thought would be a much shorter and easier adventure than it has proved - is central to the war on terror. It was never that important. Removing Saddam to secure American oil interests in the Middle East was always a deeply held neo-con dream, but it had bugger all to do with 9-11 or the war on terror. But Bush convinced himself that if he could pincer Iran between a democratic Afghanistan and a democratic Iraq then he could transform the Middle East.
Scott McClellan, in his book "What Happened", lays much of the blame for this at the feet of Condoleezza Rice; saying that she never fully explained to Bush the danger of the mission that he was embarking upon.
And John McCain, for reasons best known to himself, has decided to campaign as if victory in Iraq remained a possibility, without ever explaining what "victory" in Iraq would even look like.
Obama appears to rise above such delusions and is setting out an American foreign policy which will do much to restore order.
"As president, I will pursue a tough, smart and principled national security strategy - one that recognises that we have interests not just in Baghdad, but in Kandahar and Karachi, in Tokyo and London, in Beijing and Berlin," Obama told an audience at the Ronald Reagan building in the heart of Washington DC.Ending the war in Iraq, talking again with Europe as partners, recognising the need to negotiate with Iran and understanding the stain on all of our consciences which is the plight of Africa; four very good reasons to see Obama as a break from Bush's vision of American unilateralism.Just as he did earlier this year when speaking on race and patriotism, Obama spoke at length and in more detail than before. He has already built up a large team of foreign policy advisers. Obama, who is to visit Europe as well as Iraq and Afghanistan, said he wanted to work with European countries, an implicit criticism of the alienation of Germany and France in the early years of the Bush administration.
"It's time for America and Europe to renew our common commitment to face down the threats of the 21st century just as we did the challenges of the 20th," he said. The Marshall plan provided massive US investment to rebuild postwar Europe.
Obama envisaged Europe and other allies helping more in Afghanistan as well as in rebuilding Iraq. He praised Britain, France and Germany for their diplomatic efforts with Iran and said it was time for the US - which initially refused to participate - to play a full part in talks.
As part of his Marshall plan, he saw weak and vulnerable countries being strengthened and he promised to double US foreign assistance, to $50bn (£25bn) by 2012, with most of it going to Africa.
Bush set out to prove that America needed no-one, threatening the UN to give him what he wanted or he was simply going to do it anyway. The UN, and we have France and Germany mainly to thank for this, refused to bend to such crude bullying. So Bush invaded Iraq, outwith of international law, and entered the quagmire which has undermined his entire time in office.
The short sharp war - which was supposed to pay for itself through Iraq's oil - has turned into a longer engagement than America's participation in WWII.
And, rather than proving that America has no need for her allies, and that she can go it alone whenever she pleases; Bush has, ironically, proven the opposite.
America is stuck in Iraq and the few allies she had going into this disaster have been peeling away as fast as they can disengage themselves.
Obama promises a break from this unilateral arrogance, and it won't come a moment too soon.
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