Obama’s Foreign Policy

Sen. Obama has so far been the only candidate to offer a serious presidential playbook for fighting our enemies abroad. The only trouble, as the excellent Reuel Marc Gerecht points out, is that his playbook is rife with contradictions:

Obama [is] recommending "A Shared Security Partnership Program to forge an international intelligence and law enforcement infrastructure to take down terrorist networks from the remote islands of Indonesia, to the sprawling cities of Africa." But guess what lies in between Indonesia and Africa: Middle Eastern security and intelligence services, which reflexively torture and to which the Central Intelligence Agency is now wed. Middle Eastern countries historically have taken down terrorist networks by inflicting large amounts of pain. Is Obama going to fortify our relationships with these services? Obama wants to cut off military aid to Pakistan if Musharraf doesn't become more aggressive in his fight against Islamic extremism. Will he cut off intelligence cooperation too? How about with Saudi Arabia, which Obama rightly cites as the font of Islamic extremism? If Obama cuts off funding to Muslim Middle Eastern countries that torture and fuel extremism, he'll have no one left for his partnership.

Call me silly but I doubt that, if he is elected, we're going to see House of Obama, House of Saud on the shelves in 2011. And for those who reflexively torture the definition of neoconservatism, it may be worth adding that Gerecht wrote the Weekly Standard's "Against Rendition" editorial a while ago, and that outsourcing sadism was a policy first implemented by Bill Clinton in those halcyon days of silicon chips and blowjobs.

If Obama were as shrewd as his wife seems to be, he'd ask his chief Democratic rival what she thinks of rendition and the executive ethics of the man who started it.