Earlier today I saw the presentation of the new Democratic Party platform for 2008 at the New America Foundation where reporter Steve Coll of the New Yorker (who doubles as President and CEO of the NAF) argued that Barack Obama's foreign policy platform has positively affected our military and intelligence bureaucracies in three important ways:
- Obama's strategic argument about Iraq being a distraction from our larger national security goals, a view which Coll says has "currency in military and intelligence circles " and isn't seen as merely a "political" argument.
- Has opened up real discussion about problems in Afghanistan, which Coll described as previously being "suppressed".
- Coll also gave Obama's vision credit for the Lugar-Biden bill currently being debated in the Senate, which shifts aid to Pakistan away from exclusively military purposes and more towards helping to sustain and stabilize Pakistani democracy. Obama foreign policy adviser Susan Rice was also present, and she was critical of the U.S. relying too much on Pervez Musharraf, who depending on who you believe, may be on his way out.
Coll described Obama's effect as "anticipatory," meaning that military and intelligence folks are preemptively reacting to the possibility of an Obama presidency. There wasn't any discussion of how Obama's position that he would act decisively on intelligence involving high value terrorist targets in Pakistan, but I think it will be difficult to argue that Obama can both act to "strengthen" Pakistani democracy while maintaining the right to act militarily within their borders, although I suppose one could argue that success on the former goal reduces the likelihood of the latter being necessary.
Coll didn't elaborate on how he thought military and intelligence bureaucracies might be affected by McCain's views, although McCain has been far less detailed on this front, successfully substituting an instinctive belligerence for foreign policy "expertise" in the press.
-- A. Serwer
