Opinion: Obama memo stirs the brewing fight

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The Barack Obama foreign affairs flap continues today with the release of a memo from a foreign affairs advisor to his campaign who concludes--you won’t be surprised--that his fresh approach to diplomacy and foreign affairs is just what the United States needs and is not naive or irresponsible, as his competitors for the Democratic presidential nomination have charged.

In the memo from Samantha Power to ‘Interested Parties,’ she says: ‘It was Washington’s conventional wisdom that led us into the worst strategic blunder in the history of US foreign policy... Those who opposed the war were often labeled weak, inexperienced and even naive.’

In an amazing coincidence, those are precisely the same charges leveled at Obama by other Democratic candidates, especially Hillary Clinton since she saw an opening in a recent debate. Obama said then that he would indeed meet with notorious dictators in the first year of his presidency without preconditions. You could almost hear the gasp from Obama HQ in Chicago.

Clinton immediately pounced, seeking to underline the experience that polls show is one of her perceived strong points. She said she would not promise such a thing because international summits take careful preparations and she would not let the president’s office be used for propaganda purposes.

Within minutes Obama aides, fearful that the comment played to their man’s foreign affairs inexperience (he spent some years living abroad as a child and sits on the Foreign Relations Committee), were suggesting that, of course, Obama meant he’d talk only after careful preparations.

Clinton continued the attack the next day and Obama sought to redirect the argument toward the unpopular Iraq war, which he originally opposed and Clinton supported. In a foreign...

policy speech this week, Obama threatened unilateral military action against Al Qaeda sanctuaries in remote areas of Pakistan and then told an Associated Press reporter that he would not use nuclear weapons on terrorist targets in Afghanistan or Pakistan.

Clinton again pounced: ‘I do not believe any president should make any blanket statements in respect to the use or non-use of nuclear weapons.’

The Power memo goes on to repeat a number of instances when Obama has taken positions opposed to conventional wisdom, trying to build on his campaign theme of a fresh approach, a new page. ‘On each point in the last few weeks, Barack Obama has called for a break from a broken way of doing things,’ she writes. ‘On each point, he has brought fresh strategic thinking and common sense that break with the very conventional wisdom that has led us into Iraq.’

American foreign policy, she continues, ‘has been broken by people who supported the Iraq war, opposed talking to our adversaries, failed to finish the job with Al Qaeda and alienated the world with our belligerence. Yet conventional wisdom holds that people whose experience includes taking these positions are held up as examples of what America needs in times of trouble.’

She concludes: ‘Barack Obama’s judgment is right. It is conventional wisdom that has to change.’

And now for something completely unconventional:

Colorado Republican Rep. Tom Tancredo, who started his hopeless campaign for the GOP nomination by opposing immigration reform, has now expanded it to foreign affairs. Warning that another major terrorist attack would cause an international economic collapse, Tancredo is suggesting the U.S. should threaten in advance retaliatory attacks on Muslim holy sites.

‘If it is up to me,’ Tancredo told an Iowa group, ‘we are going to explain that an attack on this homeland of that nature would be followed by an attack on the holy sites in Mecca and Medina. That is the only thing I can think of that might deter somebody from doing what they would otherwise do.’

--Andrew Malcolm