So much time explaining why sending Obama to the Oval Office was a terrible idea, all wasted on an electorate that fell in love with buzzwords and catchphrases. This is going to be a long, expensive four years.

The American foreign policy consensus of the last sixty years — in contrast to the consensus of the hundred seventy before that — is marked by a belief that the projection of American power abroad inures to America’s benefit at home, a belief honed in recent times into the idea that a de facto benign American imperium would, without real imperialism, result in a more peaceful, orderly, and prosperous world, and the data bears this out. President Obama is actively retreating from this consensus. But he is not retreating in an orderly way, consistent with his promise to improve America’s image abroad during the campaign. He is leaving the old, decades-long consensus in bloodied ribbons, with no real substitute except for what appears to be a deliberately amoral interaction with the world.

We're just now seeing this? I'm actually more inclined to think that major media organs like the LA Times are now willing to admit what has been obvious forever to anyone with common sense, largely because of the change in the occupant of the White House.

Via NRO:

There’s just no comparison. Obama’s own running mate warned this week that Obama’s youth and inexperience will invite a crisis — indeed a crisis “generated” precisely to test him. Can you be serious about national security and vote on November 4 to invite that test?

And how will he pass it? Well, how has he fared on the only two significant foreign policy tests he has faced since he’s been in the Senate? The first was the surge. Obama failed spectacularly. He not only opposed it. He tried to denigrate it, stop it, and — finally — deny its success.

The second test was Georgia, to which Obama responded instinctively with evenhanded moral equivalence, urging restraint on both sides. McCain did not have to consult his advisers to instantly identify the aggressor.

Today’s economic crisis, like every other in our history, will in time pass. But the barbarians will still be at the gates. Whom do you want on the parapet? I’m for the guy who can tell the lion from the lamb.

The likelihood is that people won't listen, but I can hope.

If this isn't an implicit endorsement of McCain, I don't know what is:

“Mark my words,” the Democratic vice presidential nominee warned at the second of his two Seattle fundraisers Sunday. “It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy. The world is looking. We’re about to elect a brilliant 47-year-old senator president of the United States of America. Remember I said it standing here if you don’t remember anything else I said. Watch, we’re gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy.”

Ed Morrisey notes that on foreign policy, Obama is much like Kennedy, who got his ass handed to him by Khruschev at their first summit meeting:

Kennedy wound up trading strategic intel and missile installations in western Asia in exchange for Soviet withdrawal of the nuclear missiles from Cuba. The entire Kennedy administration turned out to be a foreign-policy disaster that was only overlooked because of the tragic assassination of Kennedy in Dallas in 1963.

I agree with Biden. Obama is exactly like Kennedy in this regard, and our enemies will test us by threatening our interests around the globe if we elect Obama. I’d rather avoid the problem altogether and elect a man who puts enough fear into the minds of our enemies to keep them from testing us at all.

And we're probably going to elect this guy. God help us.

Interesting:

After the bill's passage, the US went on a worldwide hunt to buy up MANPADs. Unable to get the MANPADs out of the hands of real enemies, we twisted the arms of allies to give up air defense stockpiles we deemed superfluous. One of the easiest targets? Georgia. We browbeat Georgia into giving us its MANPAD stockpile, which was their only air defense. We all know the rest of the story. Georgia was smart enough to go buy a few new MANPADs from places like Poland (against our loud protestations), but when Russia invaded last month they didn't have nearly enough to protect themselves against Russia's onslaught.

Obama shouldn't be allowed to get away with this.

Fortunately, the press is up in Alaska right now examining Trig Palin's alien paternity or some other MAJOR ISSUE of GREAT IMPORT. So we'll never hear any more about this.

One of Sarah Palin's apparent weaknesses for the ticket is her lack of experience in matters of foreign policy. I'm willing to give her some credit for being the governor of a border state (just as Jennifer Granholm would if she were eligible to run and picked as a VP for the Dem ticket) because often times border states need to deal with their neighboring provinces (such as the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River Basin Water Resources Compact) and as such, there's a bit of international experience that comes with the job. But in terms of real hard-core national defense-type foreign policy, not so much.

Having said that, I'm quite intrigued by this:

Alaska is the first line of defense in our missile interceptor defense system. The 49th Missile Defense Battalion of the Alaska National Guard is the unit that protects the entire nation from ballistic missile attacks. It’s on permanent active duty, unlike other Guard units.

As governor of Alaska, Palin is briefed on highly classified military issues, homeland security, and counterterrorism. Her exposure to classified material may rival even Biden's.

She's also the commander in chief of the Alaska State Defense Force (ASDF), a federally recognized militia incorporated into Homeland Security's counterterrorism plans.

Palin is privy to military and intelligence secrets that are vital to the entire country's defense. Given Alaska's proximity to Russia, she may have security clearances we don't even know about.

According to the Washington Post, she first met with McCain in February, but nobody ever found out. This is a woman used to keeping secrets.

She can be entrusted with our national security, because she already is.

If this is true - which, considering the source, I have little reason to doubt - it goes a long way toward easing the concern that people may have on the national security issue. I hope we hear more about this.

My secret hope is that Obama and Biden seriously underestimate Palin and she turns out to be much more than anyone expects. With this info, that seems just a tad more likely.

Michael Totten has a report from Tbilisi that fills in a lot of blanks on exactly what's going down in the region. It's long, but well worth a read in full...

Sad and disturbing, and well worth heeding:

Golda Meir once said that the Middle East would have peace when Israel’s enemies learned to love their children more than they loved death. Masab plainly tells the Israelis that not only has that time not yet come, but that the death-worship has gained steam. The same warning applies to all forms of radical Islam. There simply is no room to negotiate with people in love with death.

If W ever said this, we'd never hear the end of it:

Logan: Do you have any doubts?

Obama: Never.

Via PW

I've been of the opinion for some time that history's verdict on George W. Bush will be much different than the current political verdict. I believe that he'll be seen as a disaster (by conservatives, anyway) on the domestic end of the ledger, but as a visionary on foreign policy. It appears that as relates to foreign policy, I'm not alone:

For Bush to be recognised as a great president in the Truman mould, the Iraq war too must become half forgotten. The swift removal of the murderous Saddam Hussein was followed by years of expensive violence instead of the instant democracy that had been promised. To confuse the imam-ridden Iraqis with Danes or Norwegians under German occupation, ready to return to democracy as soon as they were liberated, was not a forgivable error: before invading a country, a US president is supposed to know if it is in the middle east or Scandinavia.

Yet the costly Iraq war must also be recognised as a sideshow in the Bush global counteroffensive against Islamist militancy, just as the far more costly Korean war was a sideshow to global cold war containment. For the Bush response to 9/11 was precisely that—a global attack against the ideology of Islamic militancy. While anti-terrorist operations have been successful here and there in a patchy way, and the fate of Afghanistan remains in doubt, the far more important ideological war has ended with a spectacular global victory for President Bush.

Of course, the analogy with Truman is far from perfect: the Soviet Union was a state, not a state of mind. But even so, once Bush's victory is recognised, the errors of Iraq will be forgiven, just as nobody now blames Truman for having sent mixed signals on whether Korea would be defended. Of course, the Bush victory has not yet been recognised, which is very odd indeed because it has all happened in full view.

Rich Lowry on Obama's unchanging Iraq plan:

At some point, Democrats decided that facts didn’t matter anymore in Iraq. And they nominated just the man to reflect the party’s new anti-factual consensus on the war, a Barack Obama who has fixedly ignored changing conditions on the ground.

It’s gotten harder as the success of the surge has become undeniable, but — despite some wobbles — Obama is sticking to his plan for a 16-month timeline for withdrawal from Iraq. He musters dishonesty, evasion and straw-grasping to try to create a patina of respectability around a scandalously unserious position.

David Brooks looks back:

Expert and elite opinion swung behind the Baker-Hamilton report, which called for handing more of the problems off to the Iraqi military and wooing Iran and Syria. Republicans on Capitol Hill were quietly contemptuous of the president while Democrats were loudly so.

Democratic leaders like Senator Harry Reid considered the war lost. Barack Obama called for a U.S. withdrawal starting in the spring of 2007, while Senator Reid offered legislation calling for a complete U.S. pullback by March 2008.

The arguments floating around the op-ed pages and seminar rooms were overwhelmingly against the idea of a surge — a mere 20,000 additional troops would not make a difference. The U.S. presence provoked violence, rather than diminishing it. The more the U.S. did, the less the Iraqis would step up to do. Iraq was in the middle of a civil war, and it was insanity to put American troops in the middle of it.

When President Bush consulted his own generals, the story was much the same. Almost every top general, including Abizaid, Schoomaker and Casey, were against the surge. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was against it, according to recent reports. Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki called for a smaller U.S. presence, not a bigger one.

In these circumstances, it’s amazing that George Bush decided on the surge. And looking back, one thing is clear: Every personal trait that led Bush to make a hash of the first years of the war led him to make a successful decision when it came to this crucial call.

Via PW

"I've never said troops should be withdrawn."

HOPE

Forget the facts. Any political or military gains in Iraq, according to Obama, are only “tactical.”

Obama does not even go to Iraq for two years (he went once for two days in 2006), nor does he receive individual briefings from General Petraeus. He has already determined that whatever the success of the U.S. and Iraqi forces in Sadr City and Basra, whatever the performance of the Iraqi army, and whatever the level of violence, we have already been defeated and must leave immediately.

In rejecting John McCain’s invitation for a joint visit to Iraq, Obama’s spokesman declared that “we don’t need any more ‘Mission Accomplished’ banners or walks through Baghdad markets to know that Iraq’s leaders have not made the political progress that was the stated purpose of the surge.” No word on why the passage of key political benchmarks doesn’t qualify as “political progress.” In short, facts don’t matter.

Al Qaeda in Iraq is pretty close to dead, according to al Qaeda in Iraq. Hence, it's the perfect time to elect the guy who wants to pull out of Iraq and reinvigorate al Qaeda in Iraq! Because if we don't have a war to protest, the lefties will all have to get rid of those cool "endless this war" bumper stickers.

What we have is jihadists virtually conceding defeat, while the leading Democratic candidate for president essentially campaigns on a way to turn that defeat into a victory by removing the obstacles to jihadi success.

To which I say, keep your chin up, al Qaeda in Iraq! After all, O! is promising hopeyness and changitude! — though for a while there, he had me convinced he was directing that message at the US electorate.

Instead, turns out he’s just pitching it toward our adversaries and the uninformed here at home — and of course, to those who feel that shows of US military strength are just part and parcel of an unsavory US international hegemony, one that needs to be thwarted so that we’ll learn our lesson about crass interventionalism (defined as interventionalism in our own national interests, rather than the kind that smacks of showy altruism); stick to ourselves, culturally speaking; and concentrate on important things, like how best to have the government regulate our thermostats, our medical care, our eating habits, etc., as well as how best to “put every American to work” in the service of the State — a small offering, if you will, to the Secular Godhead and His cult of personality.

Somewhere, Mussolini chuckles.