October 6, 2008

Exclusive: Ten Reasons to Be Concerned about Obama’s Stance on National Security: Part One of Four

Ryan Mauro

Due to the recent economic crisis and a McCain campaign knocked off kilter, Sen. Barack Obama is becoming more and more the presidential candidate the experts predict to win the election. Such a victory would be unprecedented but not due to his race. It will be unprecedented in that never before has America embraced a candidate with such little experience and ill-defined views. Those views which he does profess represent a naïve break from reality, a poorly thought-out exercise in moral equivalence, and a repetition of policies and philosophies with long debunked credibility.

There's a reason why Sen. Obama loses the issue of foreign policy and national security to Sen. McCain by a wide margin - Americans have seen his ideas attempted throughout history and the decades it takes to fix their negative effect on American national security. Obama's policies do not represent change, but rather an exhaustively rehearsed play where when the final curtain is dropped, the survival of those who struggle for freedom in the Middle East and elsewhere is in question, and America finds its geopolitical strength undermined.

Sure, like past presidents, Obama will loudly proclaim that America disagrees with the actions of dictators to sponsor terrorism and oppress its freedom-desiring citizens, offering the typical carrots that he says will convince our irrational enemies to act rational, but diplomacy and rhetoric is not a strategy. Diplomacy is a tool to implement strategy. Diplomacy without strategy is an anti-American dictator's favorite unintended gift from the U.S., allowing him to talk the talk while not walking the walk. It is here where Obama, like President Bush, falls into the trap of countries like Iran. Despite every attempt at robust diplomacy and every combination of carrots and sticks, Iran continues to harbor terrorists, help kill U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, pursue nuclear weapons, and talk about the extinction of Israel. On this topic, Obama offers more of the same, and we've seen only negative consequences from it.

There are ten major reasons Americans should question Obama on national security, ranging from his foreign policy, to his own personal judgment.

1. A disastrous policy on Iraq.

Obama's main argument for his credibility on Iraq is that he opposed the initiation of the war. While most Americans view this war as a mistake, this is due to the high cost involved which is largely due to mismanagement of the conflict - mismanagement that Obama was unable to even recognize in July 2004, saying "There's not much difference between my position on the war or George Bush's position at this stage." While Sen. McCain was getting slammed by his Republican colleagues for voicing his undeniably accurate foresight about the conflict's mismanagement, and most importantly, how to rectify it, Obama was advocating the failed Bush position.

Furthermore, Obama opposed the "surge" which has managed to stunningly turn-around the war in Iraq - successes which he denied against all available evidence until recently, and a successful strategy he unbelievably says he'd still oppose. This presents us with a clear example of Obama's inability to admit when he's wrong, rectify his mistakes, and to put the national security of the U.S. and the world above his own narrow-mindedness, partisanship, and political campaigns. The "surge" is likely the greatest example of Obama's inability to act as a commander-in-chief and effective solver of foreign policy problems.

Two more points bear mentioning. While Obama lambasted Sen. Hillary Clinton for her vote for the Iraq War Resolution, Obama had previously stated in 2004 that he was unsure how he would have voted if he was in the Senate. In fact, Obama even stated in 2004 that his opposition to the war didn't take into account the intelligence that the Congress had access to, saying "perhaps the reason I thought [the war] was such a bad idea was that I didn't have the benefit of U.S. intelligence," something he doesn't mention when he boasts about his foresight. While Obama claims he doubted the credibility of the intelligence used in making the decision for the war, voters must know he didn't even have such access at the time.

And finally, and most importantly, Obama's Iraq policy would be a disaster for the U.S. and for the region, and it is understandable why many Iraqis live in fear of an Obama presidency. Voters must know that had the U.S. withdrawn all combat forces when Obama had wanted, the surge and subsequent near-victory in the war would not have taken place, and Iraq would have descended into a bloody abyss of genocide, Iranian imperialism, and terrorist bases that would help execute the next 9/11.

Today, Obama advocates the same withdrawal, and due to the "surge," there is some possibility that these negative repercussions of a withdrawal can be reduced, but the strong probability remains that Obama's actions will reverse the gains of the past two years, and once again allow the ambitions of Iran and the terrorists to be actualized, and the aspirations of the Iraqi people to safely live in freedom to be dashed. The negative affect of Obama's policy on the lives of the American, as well as the Iraqi, people is hard to put into words. It is tempting to end a war, but such a policy will only elongate the war as a whole, and American soldiers will again have to enter Iraq under more costly and dangerous conditions.

Watch for Part Two on Tuesday.

FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Ryan Mauro has been published onWorldNetDaily.com and Newsmax.com, WorldThreats.com, among other sites, and is the author of Death to America: the Unreported Battle of Iraq.

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