The National Interest

Perhaps the best compliment to Senator Barack Obama and the relative integrity of his record is the distortion of his statements by his political opponents. From President Bush to former President Bill Clinton, Obama’s detractors have either mischaracterized or put considerable spin on his positions on key areas, such as Iraq, Pakistan and Iran. This could well be because Obama is at a substantive advantage vis-à-vis his Democratic and Republican challengers, given his publicly stated foresight on the Iraq War. And while Obama’s positions on important foreign-policy issues have not always been static (even to some degree on the Iraq War), Obama has demonstrated a willingness to acknowledge his prior position. Obama has therefore not resorted to that dark art of politics, alchemizing one’s prior positions in order to avoid acknowledging misjudgments or contradictions.

Obama may also unroll a fair number of platitudes during his speeches, but he can also be long on details—informing voters on his stances on wide-ranging issues with foreign-policy implications, from the use of torture, to the procedural elements of presidential decision making, to nuclear disarmament, to U.S. policy toward Pakistan. Still, one element of his Iraq proposal is bare in details. And on Iran, there is a notable disconnect between the senator’s rhetoric and his actions.

On Iraq

Obama has summed up the difference between his position on the Iraq War and that of Senator Hillary Clinton in simple terms. While he publicly argued against the war in 2002, Clinton that same year cast a vote in the Senate to give President George Bush the authority to wage it.

The Hill’s Sam Youngman reported last March that Bill Clinton said, during a conference call with hundreds of Hillary Clinton supporters, that "to characterize Hillary and Obama’s positions on the war as polar opposites is ludicrous." During the call, which the Hill listened to after being provided with the call-in information, Clinton added, "This dichotomy that’s been set up to allow him to become the raging hero of the anti-war crowd on the Internet is just factually inaccurate."

Similarly, earlier this month, Bill Clinton said publicly while campaigning in New Hampshire for his wife, regarding Obama’s positions on the Iraq War: "Give me a break. This whole thing is the biggest fairy tale I've ever seen." He added, "to characterize Hillary and Obama’s positions on the war as polar opposites is ludicrous."

Apparently, it is a fairy tale that a number of prominent former Clintonites appear to believe in. Greg Craig, Tony Lake, Susan Rice, Richard Danzig and David Wilhelm all served with or advised either Bill or Hillary Clinton and are now either publicly supporting or advising Obama. But is there any veracity to Bill Clinton’s claims? If the Clintons can minimize the dichotomy on Iraq, it is mainly because Hillary Clinton has staked so many different positions on the war, not because she has held steadfast to a single one.

In a well-documented article for the New Republic, Michael Crowley shows convincingly that Obama did not require a tremendous amount of courage to stake an antiwar position while preparing for a bid for an open U.S. Senate seat in Illinois. Indeed, while Obama argued forcefully against the war in 2002 when invited to an antiwar rally, he could not be fairly characterized as an antiwar activist. Still, a politician with any stirring of presidential aspirations knows that clear-cut opposition to a war could come at considerable political cost later in a general presidential election. And if Obama did not summon significant political valor on the war, he clearly proved his foresight.

Obama’s confidence in his own judgment on the Iraq War was not unshakeable, though. As Crowley notes in his article, Obama did question whether his position would be borne out. In his 2006 memoir, The Audacity of Hope, Obama said that when he saw George Bush deliver his "Mission Accomplished" speech from the deck of an aircraft carrier, "I began to suspect that I might have been wrong." Perhaps more notably, he said in October 2006: "I'm always careful to say that I was not in the Senate, so perhaps the reason I thought [the war] was such a bad idea was that I didn't have the benefit of U.S. intelligence."

Still, as Crowley also points out: "In many other cases, Obama stood firmly by his initial war opposition. Even in mid–April 2003, just days after a Saddam Hussein statue was famously toppled in Baghdad—and at a time when a New York Times poll found that 79 percent of Americans approved of Bush's handling of the war—Obama, speaking to a Chicago paper, warned that Bush ‘is riding high on the whole Iraq situation for the moment, but . . . [t]he jury is still out.’ "

Perhaps the main dichotomy between Obama’s and Hillary Clinton’s Iraq positions may be that while Clinton has obfuscated to some degree on her 2002 vote, Obama has not equivocated on what position he took in 2002, even though he may at times have doubted whether or not he had made the correct call on the war. And though Obama has vacillated at certain times on Iraq, there does appear to be ample dichotomy in the breadth of the positions that he and Clinton have taken on the war.

During a December 15, 2003, speech before the Council on Foreign Relations, Hillary Clinton took so many positions that her statements seem to beg some logical questions. In that upbeat speech delivered shortly after Saddam Hussein had been captured, Clinton said a "great debt of gratitude" was owed to Bush and others given Saddam’s capture, but also said she had had disputes with the way the president used the authority to wage the war. Despite those disputes, she also said she believed she made "the right vote". In addition, she contended that she knew from the start that the military mission in Iraq would be successful:

Turning to Iraq, yesterday was a good day. I was thrilled that Saddam Hussein had finally been captured. Like many of you, I was glued to the television and the radio as I went about my daily business. We owe a great debt of gratitude to our troops, to the president, to our intelligence services, to all who had a hand in apprehending Saddam. Now he will be brought to justice, and we hope that the prospects for peace and stability in Iraq will improve.

She added:

I was one who supported giving President Bush the authority, if necessary, to use force against Saddam Hussein. I believe that that was the right vote. I have had many disputes and disagreements with the administration over how that authority has been used, but I stand by the vote to provide the authority because I think it was a necessary step in order to maximize the outcome that did occur in the Security Council with the unanimous vote to send in inspectors. And I also knew that our military forces would be successful. But what we did not appreciate fully and what the administration was unprepared for was what would happen the day after.

Despite Clinton’s verbiage on the Iraq matter, she has failed to answer a central question: does she believe lawmakers should empower a president to launch a war if they ultimately do not want the president to use such authority, as she has argued? If Clinton, given the hindsight of the Iraq War, would answer no to that question, then logically she must regret giving the president the authority to use force in Iraq.

All the same, Obama can be fairly challenged for the lack of specifics he has given on an important element of his plan to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq. On this particular point, there is indeed a lack of dichotomy between the two candidates, since Clinton has made a very similar proposal, also providing few specifics. Obama said the following on October 2, 2007 at DePaul University:

I will begin to remove our troops from Iraq immediately. I will remove one or two brigades a month, and get all of our combat troops out of Iraq within 16 months. The only troops I will keep in Iraq will perform the limited missions of protecting our diplomats and carrying out targeted strikes on al Qaeda. And I will launch the diplomatic and humanitarian initiatives that are so badly needed. Let there be no doubt: I will end this war.

Obama has not indicated where the troops he would keep in Iraq would be based, how many there would be, or just where they would be authorized to strike. In addition, Obama’s proposal seems facile, as it fails to convey the tremendous challenges that such a troop force would face in successfully mounting such "targeted strikes" on al-Qaeda.

On Pakistan and Iran

During his interview Sunday with President Bush, Fox News’ Chris Wallace asked: "Do you think there's a rush to judgment about Barack Obama? Do you think voters know enough about him?" Bush said: "I certainly don't know what he believes in. The only foreign-policy thing I remember he said was he's going to attack Pakistan and embrace Ahmadinejad, which—I think I commented that in a press conference when I was asked about it."

Bush’s descriptions of Obama’s positions were sweeping mischaracterizations. What Obama specifically said on August 1, 2007 regarding Pakistan was:

I understand that President Musharraf has his own challenges. But let me make this clear. There are terrorists holed up in those mountains who murdered 3,000 Americans. They are plotting to strike again. It was a terrible mistake to fail to act when we had a chance to take out an al-Qaeda leadership meeting in 2005. If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won't act, we will.

Indeed, as Media Matters showed Monday in a critique of Wallace’s interview, the president has taken positions similar to that of Obama, and on other occasions has contradicted those positions. Perhaps more importantly, though, the Bush administration appeared to have taken the kind of action Obama said he would take when on January 13, 2006, it reportedly deployed, apparently without the consent of the Pakistani government, drone aircraft to bomb a madrassa in the frontier region of Pakistan, based on intelligence that al-Qaeda’s number-two leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, was hiding there. The strike was apparently unsuccessful in killing any al-Qaeda members of note.

Bush was also not rigorously accurate in his depiction of Obama’s position on Iran. During the July 23, 2007, Democratic presidential debate in South Carolina, a participant asked the candidates if they would be willing to meet with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea, without preconditions. Obama replied:

I would. And the reason is this, that the notion that somehow not talking to countries is punishment to them—which has been the guiding diplomatic principle of this administration—is ridiculous. Now, Ronald Reagan and Democratic presidents like JFK constantly spoke to Soviet Union at a time when Ronald Reagan called them an evil empire. And the reason is because they understood that we may not trust them and they may pose an extraordinary danger to this country, but we had the obligation to find areas where we can potentially move forward. And I think that it is a disgrace that we have not spoken to them. We've been talking about Iraq—one of the first things that I would do in terms of moving a diplomatic effort in the region forward is to send a signal that we need to talk to Iran and Syria because they're going to have responsibilities if Iraq collapses. They have been acting irresponsibly up until this point. But if we tell them that we are not going to be a permanent occupying force, we are in a position to say that they are going to have to carry some weight, in terms of stabilizing the region.

That statement does not reflect, as Bush maintained, a desire to embrace Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Still, Obama can be fairly criticized on a key aspect of his Iran position. Obama has maintained that Hillary Clinton’s vote in favor of the Kyl-Lieberman Amendment, which designates the Iranian Revolutionary Guard as a foreign terrorist organization, could potentially provide Bush with a political pretext to take America to war with Iran. Obama said he would have voted against the amendment, but he was absent from the vote. If Obama felt that passage of the amendment could potentially serve as something as dramatic as a pretext for war, he certainly should have made himself available to vote against it.

Obama’s record is not free of vacillation or disconnect, but in broad strokes it seems to reflect logical cohesiveness and a tendency to stake politically risky positions in forthright terms—such as his stated willingness to meet with the Iranian leader. It is perhaps for this reason that his opponents prefer to recast his past positions, rather than reckon fairly with his record and proposals.

Ximena Ortiz is a senior editor at The National Interest.