I watched the Republican and Democratic debates on ABC last night. Today, I'd like to give my thoughts on the foreign policy aspects of those debates. Both of them also had a lot of discussion about health care and how to bring costs down, and that is an important issue for me. But I'll save my post on that for another day, probably sometime this week.
I'll start with the Democrats, since I watched them first (I taped the Republicans and watched them later). I don't like Hillary, but she at least comes across like she knows and understands international affairs. Obama, Edwards, and Richardson are intelligent and articulate, but they appear as novices next to Hillary. Obama was saying that the U.S. should attack Al Qaeda in Pakistan, and he name-dropped "Lee Hamilton" and "Richard Lugar" to support his argument. Edwards and Richardson were portraying Musharraf as a dangerous dictator, and Richardson went so far as to say that we should tell Musharraf to step down.
Hillary actually sounded like a voice of reason, or at least as someone who has thought things through. She said that, before sending missiles to Pakistan, we should first tell Pakistan that they are coming from us, not India (which Pakistan fears). Then, (like Ann Coulter) she pointed out that Musharraf is Pakistan's elected President, so we should encourage him to have parliamentary elections, not step down. According to Hillary, "If you remove Musharraf and have elections, that's going to be very difficult for the United States to be able to control what comes next." For Hillary, Musharraf is at least open to our influence, so we should work with him rather than simply telling him to step down.
Compared to the other Democratic candidates, she also seemed to have a deeper grasp of the nuances of pulling our troops out of Iraq. The others, by contrast, simply said that we should bring our troops home, and they disputed about who would do that more quickly. Unfortunately, none of the Democratic candidates (including Hillary) appeared to offer proposals about what to do about Iraq itself, since Iraq's problems and significance will not go away once we leave. Rather, the Democrats merely affirmed that the Bush policy has not worked and that we should return our troops to America. So should we leave Iraq to the Islamofascists?
To his credit, John Edwards at least offered a reason for troop withdrawal: he said that the Sunnis started to step forward once the Democrats won and they (the Sunnis) realized we wouldn't be there forever. We welcome Sunni support, but not everyone in Iraq likes the Sunnis, so their activity alone will not necessarily bring stability to the nation. I checked Hillary's site to see if she wants to do anything else about Iraq, and her proposals were mostly to use the UN, as if that paper tiger can accomplish anything. So Hillary appeared to be sophisticated in some areas, but not on the issue of Iraq.
What concerned me (and I'm sure others) was that Charlie Gibson was talking as if America will be attacked by a nuclear weapon. I'm not sure if that level of certitude existed even during the Cold War. And, to my disappointment, not one of the Democratic candidates said a word about missile defense. And the technology seems to exist, otherwise why was Putin of Russia so resistant to Europe having a missile defense system? Would he object to something imaginary? And do the Democrats reject the concept simply for the reason that it came from the Republican Party?
But, more interestingly, read what Hillary also said in last night's debate: "If we can demonstrate that the people responsible for planning the nuclear attack on our country may not themselves be in a government or associated with a state, but have a haven within one, then every state in the world must know we will retaliate against those states." What? So there are sponsors and havens for terror? And we should retaliate against them if we are attacked? Then why do the Democrats continually insist that Bush should have gone only after Al Qaeda? Iraq and Al Qaeda had worked together on projects, and Al Qaeda was in Hussein's Iraq for some period of time. So why was Bush wrong to go after Iraq after 9/11? Even Hillary voted for that war, probably because she held the same sorts of sentiments that she expressed last night. And extreme leftists should believe that she's changed?
Ron Paul and the Republican candidates got me thinking about foreign policy as well. Ron Paul was reiterating his usual spiel about how we are hated because of our historical intervention in the Middle East. Mitt responded that radical jihadists are not only against us, but moderate Muslims as well. Ron Paul wasn't really holding his own last night, for he ultimately stooped to portraying Rudy as a bigot against Muslims. Perhaps he should have said that the radical Muslims dislike the moderates because of their ties with the West, which has intervened in the Middle East.
Instead, Ron Paul acknowledged that there are Muslims who are violent, but he didn't specify how we should deal with them. He just acted as if they are an insignificant minority. I'm not overly satisfied with what Huckabee was saying either, for he stated that the Islamofascists want to establish a global caliphate. Is there any actual documentation for this? I remember a debate between Sean Hannity and Pat Buchanan, and Buchanan stated that America actually had a good relationship with Muslims in the 1800's. So is Muslim hatred for the West an intrinsic part of Islam? Or do many Muslims hate us for of our interference in their region, not because our culture is different from theirs?