Iraq and the Candidates

Jon Chait has an interesting article arguing that we shouldn't take the candidates rhetoric about forward-looking Iraq policy all that seriously -- both have incentives to try to outline crystal clear positions but, in reality, both would need to respond to some extent to events on the ground.

That's all very true, but at the same time I think we're in danger of seeing a tendency toward the smart set actually underestimating the extent of disagreement between Obama and McCain. Part of this is much is being made of the fact that some public statements by some Obama advisors seem to indicate that they are less enthusiastic about speedy withdrawal from Iraq than the candidate's stated vision seems to imply. A big deal gets made out of this because it's a newsworthy admission against interest type of thing. A less big deal gets made out of the fact that there are actually a lot of other people associated with the Obama camp who completely agree with Obama's rhetoric on Iraq. Something like "Obama Advisor Agrees With Obama Position" makes for a terrible article so you get less coverage of the fact that Obama really might just listen to Brian Katulis and Larry Korb and leave Iraq.

More broadly, though, Jon's article has been given the unfortunate subhead "Ignore what candidates say about foreign policy" even though that's not what the argument of the column says. But of course "foreign policy" is not equivalent to "ideas about appropriate force levels in Iraq in October of 2009." Foreign policy includes our relationships with Russia, China, India, Japan and the European allies. It includes our approach to Syria and North Korea. It certainly includes our approach to, say, Iran and it's clear enough that McCain and Obama have different ideas about Iran. But the course of U.S.-Iranian relations will have a big impact on America's Iraq policy. The causal line here isn't totally predictable -- Obama's Iraq policy will depend, in part, on the outcome of his efforts at diplomacy with Iran, but we can't know what that outcome will be. On the one hand, that supports Jon's point that there's a lot of uncertainty here. But at the same time, there are meaningful differences -- Obama might work out a good accommodation with Iran but McCain almost certainly won't, whereas McCain might blunder into a larger war with Iran while Obama almost certainly won't.

U.S. Air Force photo by Tech. Sgt. Jeffrey Allen