If Obama wins this election, there is a turning point that I will highlight as being THE turning point in the race and that turning point came on September 15, 2008. This is the day that John McCain uttered the now infamous “the fundamentals of our economy are strong” line on the campaign trail while the campaign was collapsing around him. If Obama takes the oath of office, this is the turning point in my book.

McCain had smartly stole Obama’s thunder after Obama’s convention by choosing Sarah Palin as his VP and then having his Republican convention, thus deflating Barack Obama’s post-convention bounce and doubling his own post-convention bounce on the back of Palin’s nomination. It was an impressive political coup but the economy brought this to a screeching halt. Obama posted a 47.8% to 44.3% lead according to pollster.com, which is quite the switch considering Obama was running consistently behind McCain before this economic issue.

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Before I was a hawk, I was a liberal.  Part of my transformation to “neocon” was due to the fact that the Democratic Party was hi-jacked by the MoveOn.org crowd.  Liberals, in their intense dislike of Bush, gave in to a faith in illogical hatred–motivated by an any-means-necessary hatred of Bush, which Charles Krauthammer termed Bush Derangement Syndrome–so much so, even, that they have all but written off the very real threat of Islamo-fascism and terrorism.

But it goes deeper than that.  During the Clinton era, Democrats and Liberals were not so quick to decry war in whatever form it took.  The Balkans did not raise such an intense fuss that the entire Party was usurped by peace-nicks.  The first Gulf War went off without much protest, and certainly without the virulence and vitriol we see today.

The funny thing to me is that I was against this second invasion of Iraq, along with many other liberals, but once we had invaded, once we had invested ourselves in this fight–and the Iraqi people–my dissent ended–not my criticism of tactics or the rushed invasion, but my dissent over the war itself.  I recalled the preemptive move out of Iraq in the early 90’s.  The Iraqi people that had risen up to help us were then beaten back down by Saddam Hussein, utterly abandoned by America.

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Can Obama win the reddest of Red States, Utah? In this land of conservative Mormon voters, it seems quite unlikely. Still, it looks like the candidate is sending volunteers to woo these unlikely voters…

This on top of the fact that even some Democrats feel that they’re too conservative for Mr. Obama. (more…)

By Ryan P. Christiano

In an address before The House of Commons, on the 1^st of March 1848, Lord Palmerston declared: “We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal, and those interests it is our duty to follow”. Which theory or theories of International Relations motivated the Iraq War, and more narrowly, inspired President Bush? The President’s State of The Union Address; four short months after the attacks of September 11^th, declared that a new ‘Axis of Evil’ exists in the world after 9/11. In the 2003 State of The Union Address, the President declared that America and her allies were the only things that stand between a world of peace, and a world of chaos and constant alarm; and that Iraq now threatened the world with chaos and constant alarm.

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Yesterday on MSNBC’s Morning Joe former JFK speechwriter Ted Sorensen joined former LBJ speechwriter Doris Kearns Goodwin for a discussion of the similarities between Barack Obama and John F. Kennedy. For those less mindful of their history one could only sense that any such comparisons the two made favorably of Obama with Kennedy would redound to the former’s benefit. Such should not be the case.

During Kennedy’s run for president against Dwight Eisenhower’s vice president Richard Nixon in order for the young Massachusetts senator to prove his bona fides on foreign policy as a Cold Warrior he resorted to playing what might rightfully be called the first lie about WMDs in US history. That was, of course, the so-called “missile gap” between the United States and Soviet Union in which Kennedy accused the Eisenhower administration of allowing the United States to fall behind the Soviets. Kennedy knew this accusation was untrue but he also knew that Nixon, as an administration member, could not use the intelligence gathered by the CIA through U-2 overflights to prove that Kennedy was lying about this crucial issue.

Now yesterday Sorensen and Goodwin went to great lengths to talk about how Kennedy’s muscular and shrewd diplomacy paid dividends during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 in convincing Soviet premier Nikita Khruschev to remove Soviet missiles from Cuba and allowing Khruschev to save face at the same time by having the U.S. remove obsolete US missiles from Turkey. All of that is true as far as it goes. What goes unsaid, of course, is that the existence of the Cuban Missile Crisis in the first place owes its existence to Kennedy’s reckless fecklessness in the abortive Bay of Pigs Operation against Castro a short time before wherein the young president inherited a flawed plan hatched by the CIA and Cuban exiles to topple Castro. Kennedy signed off on this mission but after it began got cold feet and refused to commit US airpower to support it and the mission failed. To this very day Democrats have not recovered from damage done to the party’s reputation over that incident with Cuban-Americans. And it was Kennedy’s poor performance in that episode that was to embolden Khruschev to begin shipping missiles to Cuba precipitating the latter crisis as the Soviet dictator, based on Kennedy’s past performance, was convinced he could get away with it.

Upon entering the White House, Jack Kennedy was trying to prove his mettle as a tough guy and it backfired on him and nearly resulted in the closest that the USSR and the U.S. ever came to war during that “thirteen days in October” 1962 when the world held its breath. In some of his more strident comments such as “if Pakistan can’t or won’t act in the Frontier Tribal Areas we will unilaterally if necessary” Barack Obama echoes some of the same reckless statements. The example of another young president should dampen the enthusiasm some of Sen. Obama’s supporters might feel for comparisons of their man with an earlier U.S. Senator trying to become president of the United States.

~read more from Bill Harrison.…

The latest dust up between eventual general election opponents Barack Obama and John McCain came today in which John McCain characterized remarks made by Obama. I will recount them here to set the stage for my analysis:

Obama said on Sunday in Pendleton, Oregon:

“Iran, Cuba, Venezuela — these countries are tiny compared to the Soviet Union. They don’t pose a serious threat to us the way the Soviet Union posed a threat to us. And yet we were willing to talk to the Soviet Union at the time when they were saying, `We’re going to wipe you off the planet.’”

John McCain characterized what Obama said like this on Monday in Chicago:

“Such a statement betrays the depth of Senator Obama’s inexperience and reckless judgment. These are very serious deficiencies for an American president to possess,”

McCain further said of Iran regarding its threat to America vis-a-vis Obama’s comparison to the Soviet Union:

McCain listed the dangers he sees from Iran: It provides deadly explosive devices used to kill U.S. soldiers in Iraq, sponsors terrorists in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East and is committed to Israel’s destruction.

John McCain’s attempt to show Barack Obama as a naife because Obama does not see Iran and the Soviet Union as equal threats falls on its face from the start. Iran is not a world superpower. Iran does not have a military that is within the same tier as the United States military. Iran does not have missile silos with nuclear ICBMs targeting American cities simply awaiting the word to level them. In short, Iran is not an opponent capable of making war with the United States symmetrically and this is the distinction that John McCain fails to make.

On balance, most of the conflicts of the 21st century will not resemble those of the 20th century. They will differ just as the set piece battles and Napoleonic tactics of the 19th century advanced into the apex of 20th century war theory: maneuver warfare as opposed to static battle lines. That apex is reflected by the United States military today in its armor that carries great firepower while being able to move fast enough to outflank an opponent and a paratrooper force that is the envy of all nations, able to deploy anywhere in the world in a few dozen hours. The great majority of conflicts in this century will be of the asymmetrical kind. Barack Obama understands this and John McCain, it seems, does not.

It is apropos that this message be delivered in a place like Newsvine because the Internet is the primary driving force behind the change in how wars are fought just as the internal combustion engine was the primary driving force in changing how wars were fought in the 20th century. Enemies like Iran learned late last century after observing the United States fight wars that decentralization was its best option when confronting America. It was not a large army that drove the American Marines out of Beirut, it was a single suicidal member of Hezbollah.

Iran is likely our most troublesome enemy in the short term, but it is not because they resemble the Soviet Union in the least. It is because they have cultivated amorphous armies and terrorist cells across the world that it can call on to act or that are preset to act if Iran is attacked. The Iraq War only extended Iran’s reach, putting a Shiite government into power in Iraq which has allowed several powerful Shiite militias to spring into existence, two of which are al-Sadr’s group and the Badr militia. Destroying Iran is not an exercise which would be difficult if America were so disposed, dealing with the aftermath of the terrorist minefield that Iran laid to protect itself would be. Therefore, more is to be gained through diplomacy than through a standoff because diplomacy is a much craftier answer to asymmetrical warfare than brute force and it appears that McCain favors brute force while Obama favors diplomacy and, failing that, brute force.

Also fundamentally misunderstood by McCain and better understood by Obama is the threat that China presents in the long term. I believe this is a result of the generational gap between the two candidates. China is, without a doubt, the greatest asymmetrical threat that the United States will face this century. It has proved this over and over again through its satellite destroyer test that demonstrated its capability to wipe out the system that the United States military relies on (the Global Positioning System) to guide its bombs, its soldiers and its warships.

It proved that it could jam a powerful commercial computer network when Chinese hackers attacked CNN’s network because it did not like the coverage CNN gave regarding the Free Tibet protesters and the Olympic flame. China has official (black hat) hackers and unofficial (gray hat) hackers that both take direction from the Chinese government that could mobilize China’s computing power and sheer population volume to bombard and possibly take down essential defense networks that are used to relay orders to American military units. China is also the leader when it comes to espionage (corporate and military) against the United States government and American companies. This network was put on display recently when China chose to (unwisely in my opinion) use their embassies and registered college student organizations for Chinese students to organize pro-China rallies to counter the Free Tibet protesters in San Francisco.

These student organizations have been an engine for both corporate and military espionage as the students make contact with the Chinese government through the organizations and then, after graduation, go on to be employed by American defense contractors or other companies that have valuable technological developments that the Chinese government wants to obtain and disseminate to the People’s Liberation Army (which is then incorporated into Chinese arms manufacturing) or to one of China’s many industries who seek to compete on the global market with American companies in terms of quality. This is, admittedly, a cloud that is on the horizon but it is a cloud that is gathering and, in approximately 20 years, will settle over our country and will need to be weathered.

Whether it be on Iran’s asymmetrical terrorist warfare or China’s asymmetrical computer warfare and corporate & military espionage, I firmly believe that Barack Obama’s mindset and advisers far outclass John McCain’s mindset and advisers. To maintain our advantage over our direct enemies and current competitors that could turn into direct enemies in the future, we have to have a forward-looking view. McCain, to use a term from military history, wants to fight the last war. Obama’s newness is to our advantage because it gives him a view that is conducive to innovation and spurs him to envision the next war and be prepared to fight it.

While the League of Nations Mandate recognized the issue of statehood for the Jewish people in 1919, as did its successor, the United Nations in 1947, many people around the globe, laymen and scholars alike, continue to misunderstand Israel’s case in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Even today, they wonder why the State of Israel occupies the West Bank and Gaza, refuses to give the Palestinians their land and won’t agree to the right of return of Palestinian refugees to their homes in Israel.

While Israeli governments have always been willing to make drastic concessions for peace, many key issues are only vaguely explained. For too long, the Hasbara Department (Public Relations Department) at the Israeli Foreign Ministry has existed physically but remained incompetent in functionality, unable to clearly present Israel’s case to the world. The government must reinvent the department and direct more funds towards it so that it can effectively put forth Israel’s arguments in a professional, organized manner.

A re-established Hasbara Department needs to be staffed with well-informed individuals who can eloquently articulate Israel’s case to the world. This government body needs to be able to concentrate solely on the Hasbara problem (or lack of), and work hard to refute Arab arguments against Israel.

While the world believes that Israel is an expansionist country, in truth our leaders have instead chosen diplomatic isolationism and silence. Because of this, Israel suffers from a global misunderstanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

A case in point is the 2002 Jenin debacle. While the foreign press worked diligently to try and prove that Israel committed war crimes, which it clearly did not, Israel dawdled and dallied hoping for the truth to reveal itself on its own. This is not how Israel is going to win the global PR war being waged against it.

Today’s wars are not only fought on the battlefield but also take place in front of the cameras, in the press and media and on the internet. A strong and competent hasbara department would have the ability to fight for Israel on all these fronts in a coordinated effort with the IDF Spokespersons Unit and the Prime Minister’s Office.

Israel must be on the offensive, pointing, for instance, to the numerous failed agreements that Arab leaders have purposely ignored over the years. Since the Peel commission of 1937 proposed two states, Arab and Jewish side by side, Arab leaders have consistently prevented the establishment of a separate Palestinian state on various occasions, forcing the Palestinian people to live in squalid refugee camps and Israelis to live in constant terror.

Israel needs to explain to the world that historically, Jewish national aspirations existed long before any Arab even thought of claiming British Palestine as their own. In addition, the 1917 Balfour Declaration did not give Israel the right to a state in Israel, but instead recognized a pre-existing right the Jewish people have to a national state in their ancestral homeland.

Israel needs to launch a campaign initiative aimed at the international community and explain step-by-step what Israel’s policies are and why. For instance, people need to understand that Israel has a right to secure boundaries and has a right to demand this as part of any peace negotiations. Israel has a very sturdy argument in proving that a return to the 1967 borders (1949 ceasefire armistice lines) is not conducive to peace and would spell certain disaster for the future of Israel and its citizens.

Furthermore, the international community must recognize that Israel is especially interested in making peace with its neighbors as has already been successfully achieved with Egypt in 1979 and Jordan in 1994. In addition, Israel maintains the right to demand that the Palestinians abide by UN Resolution 242 which recognizes Israel’s “right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force.” Obviously this is a far cry from the security threats Israel is faced with today, including Kassam rocket attacks and constant terrorist activity.

If Israel is going to allow a Palestinian State to come into existence next door, it must be born out of strength and not from weakness. The Palestinian people must first meet their commitments as outlined in the first stage of the Road Map. This means to fight terror, recognize Israel and agree to enter into a just and lasting peace through mutual agreements and understandings. Israel simply cannot – and should not – negotiate while under fire and without Arab recognition of Israel’s basic security needs.

The Foreign Ministry needs to form a reliable group of individuals who will successfully present Israel’s case to the world and repel the false anti-Israel propaganda the Arab world works to promulgate. As we have seen from last year’s Second Lebanon War, there is currently no single competent body to handle Israel’s global message. If we do not succeed in establishing such a body, the same failures of last year’s pitiful hasbara efforts will be repeated next time when we need it most.