Former Senator Bob Kerrey is urging Obama (for whom he campaigned and invested much hope for Muslim World bridge-building and a smooth Iraq-war wind-down) to buck up — and live up to his word. He offers some praise for the president. (This is the price one pays perhaps for getting the attention of those in the White House who might influence the president.) But he then delivers a rhetorical jujitsu: Can’t he be more like George W. Bush? He writes of Bush’s courage in pursuing the surge in Iraq in the face of Republican losses and a media firestorm:

Failure in Iraq loomed, as public opinion for the effort to help the democratically elected government survive had faded thanks to a series of tactical blunders and inaccurate assessments of what would be needed to accomplish the mission. Then, against all reasonable predictions, President Bush chose to increase rather than decrease our military commitment. The “surge,” as it became known, worked. Victory was snatched from the jaws of defeat. From what I have seen, President Obama has the same ability to step outside the swirl of public opinion and make the right decision.

What is at stake, Kerrey argues, is whether Obama can cut through the cant about another Vietnam (the war hero explains: “This war is not Vietnam. The Taliban are not popular and have very little support other than what they secure through terror”) and keep his word. He argues: “When it comes to foreign policy, almost nothing matters more than your friends and your enemies knowing you will keep your word and follow through on your commitments. This is the real test of presidential leadership.”

But on that score, Kerrey may be more than a little late. If any single element has characterized Obama’s foreign policy, it has been his unwillingness to stick by American commitments, to keep our word. An agreement between the U.S. and Israel on settlements? Oh that was then; not sure it applies now. Poland and the Czech Republic were promised missile-defense sites, a sign of the alliance between the U.S. and the democracies that emerged from the ash heap of the Soviet Union. Well, never mind. We have to ingratiate ourselves with the Russians. So keeping our word seems not all that important to the president.

Now maybe Obama doesn’t consider the promises of his predecessors to be binding on him. After all, he remarked after sitting through a Daniel Ortega rant that he didn’t want to be held responsible for the Bay of Pigs, which occurred when he was 3 years old. In other words, he may not see himself as the successor to previous presidents’ obligations. He stands above and apart from mere parochial Americanism. He is in essence a free agent, without the burden of deals, understandings, and obligations undertaken by those who came before him, and most particularly George W. Bush.

But Afghanistan is different. He was the one who defined it as a critical war. He was the one who set the strategy to defeat the Taliban. He was the one who hired Gen. Stanley McChrystal to come up with an alternative to the losing counterterrorism strategy. So it’s not merely a case here of stepping apart from his predecessors’ promises, but from his own. If he can’t manage to do even that, friends and allies soon will see America as unreliable and untrustworthy. It will be the dawning not of an age of multilateral nirvana, but of every-country-for-itselfism. The result will be a more dangerous and less predictable world. And it won’t be at all what the Nobel Committee had in mind.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, October 10th, 2009 at 12:00 PM and is filed under Contentions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.