Barack Obama, Looking Tougher

The New York Times prohibits its columnists from penning formal endorsements of presidential candidates, but yesterday, after surveying the foreign policy views of "liberal" Barack Obama, the conservative David Brooks tiptoed right up to the line. 

The underlying reason for this sort of seismic crossover shift is that many are beginning to recall that the fundamentals of foreign policy haven't always been an instrument purely of one's political and ideological outlook. After eight abnormally long and grievously brutal years of George W. Bush's ideology-cum-policy party -- so long it seems more like a geologic epoch than a mere two presidential terms -- the worm is turning, back to basics.

Even many conservatives -- including some who dabbled of late in the "neo" brand -- can no longer deny it or fight it. And that's what struck me about Brooks' column, in which his final seven words were devoted to an admiring description of Obama's foreign-policy views as "part Harry Hopkins and part James Baker."  

Not bad, considering that Hopkins was FDR's indispensable man in holding the Allied coalition together during the Second World War, and that Baker approached the world in much the same multilateral fashion -- or at least his Gulf War didn't cost 4,000 American lives, $3 trillion and virtually every ounce of global respect.

And how would these men -- the one, given the chance; the other, given the freedom -- react to the second Bush administration's Weltanschauung of unilateral aggression and non-diplomatic engagement? The same way, of course, that Obama is reacting: with lively denunciations of its "failure," its mindless "bluster" and loads of "hypocrisy, fear peddling [and] fear mongering."

The target and subsequent victim of which Obama refuses to be. He won't be Swiftboated into a belated, rearguard defensive action. As he said yesterday, "If George Bush and John McCain want to have a debate about protecting the United States of America, that is a debate I am happy to have any time, any place."

In fact, he isn't waiting; he is taking the debate to them. And he's doing it in an especially clever way.

Stemming from his interview with Obama, there was this singular, unelaborated passage in Brooks' column yesterday: "Obama said he found that the military brass thinks the way he does: 'The generals are light-years ahead of the civilians,'" those "civilians," of course, being the Bushies. "They are trying to get the job done rather than look tough.'"

As I said, Brooks didn't elaborate on that, and perhaps only because Obama didn't either. But it seems to me there is much to be properly and far more publicly exploited along these lines.

Obama's comment put me in mind of a book, Strobe Talbott's The Great Experiment: The Story of Ancient Empires, Modern States, and the Quest for a Global Nation. Talbott is now president of the Brookings Institution and, from 1994 to 2001, was a deputy secretary of state. What Bush II has done since, well, let's just say it troubles Talbott. But there was one page (364) in his book that gives the reader more than just an inkling of how profoundly troubled the American military is as well.

About a year after the Iraq invasion, as Talbott relates it, he was giving a short and rather nervous talk on contemporary foreign policy to a group of Army generals. He did not, as he wrote, want to seem "excessively critical of an enterprise in which they and their troops were risking their lives." So he "downplayed [his] opposition."

Nevertheless he soon sensed his address "was not going over very well." Why? Because, as he further observed, he "had it exactly backward." The generals had wanted no shying away from criticism of administration policy. "Almost to a man, the generals felt I was too forgiving of what they regarded as two colossal blunders by their civilian superiors: going in 'light' ... and dismantling the ruling Ba'ath party ... and other sources of power."

But there was even more. Contrary to what so many ultrapatriotic pols claim is true-blue America's aversion to namby-pamby, U.N. multilateralism, the generals were all for it. "The whole bugbear about the U.N. and black helicopters and our supposedly having an allergy to blue helmets is utter nonsense," said one. "It's right-wing radio crap."

Furthermore, they were less than enthusiastic about their military mission on principle. "We have spent pretty much all our careers putting Vietnam behind us and hoping that we never got into that kind of quagmire again. Well, here we are: right back there in the soup."

In short, the military brass really does think the way Harry Hopkins and James Baker did, and it'll tell you so, confidentially. Which means it also thinks much more like Barack Obama -- "light-years ahead" of the flag-waving clowns who cling to the perceived political virtue of looking "tough."