With his call for spending money at home “instead” of abroad, Obama establishes a false choice, creating a dichotomy where none exists. Never mind what we owe a country whose government we overthrew, devoting funds to the rebuilding of a physically traumatized Iraq is not mutually exclusive from increasing domestic social spending, as Obama has proposed. Nor is there any indication that Iraq reconstruction aid is in any way responsible for America’s current economic hardships. More troubling is Obama’s lack of appreciation for the threat that failed states pose to international security. If the United States does not ensure a stable, moderately-friendly regime in Iraq before it leaves, then the deferral of our responsibility could eventually come back to haunt us, a la Afghanistan under the Taliban.
Obama apparently forgets that the party whose mantle he will carry into November was the party of Harry Truman, the president who initiated the Marshall Plan. That program rebuilt Europe after it was destroyed in the Second World War, costing the United States $13 billion to fund many of the same sorts of projects we’re financing in Iraq today. Back then there were people, as there are now, who said that the United States shouldn’t be spending so much money on foreigners, rebuilding a war-ravaged society and making life livable for them. They were called “isolationists” or “America Firsters.” Theirs is an ugly political tradition, hardly unique to America, today embodied by the likes of Pat Buchanan. Something tells me that Barack Obama would never want to be associated with this political faction, and for the right reasons. Why he sounds so similar to the Old Right on such a fundamental issue is something that ought to trouble his liberal internationalist supporters.
After 5 years of frustration in Iraq, it’s understandable that Americans would prove weary of overseas commitments. And given these widespread feelings, it’s equally understandable that Barack Obama would appeal to them. But the electoral benefit derived from these remarks does not excuse them, nor does it buttress the case, endlessly repeated, that the presumed Democratic presidential nominee will restore the world’s faith in America.
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