And Al Qaeda endorses...
....John McCain, according to the NY Times' Nicholas Kristof, here. Kristof explains why that could be so:
An American president who keeps troops in Iraq indefinitely, fulminates about Islamic terrorism, inclines toward military solutions and antagonizes other nations is an excellent recruiting tool. In contrast, an African-American president with a Muslim grandfather and a penchant for building bridges rather than blowing them up would give Al Qaeda recruiters fits.During the cold war, the American ideological fear of communism led us to mistake every muddle-headed leftist for a Soviet pawn. Our myopia helped lead to catastrophe in Vietnam.
In the same way today, an exaggerated fear of "Islamofascism" elides a complex reality and leads us to overreact and damage our own interests.
Yet this supple form of reasoning will always seem like dangerous malarkey to most people, due to cognitive biases that are detailed here in this famous Foreign Policy article on "Why Hawks Win."
So the dilemma of a democracy is this: You can usually win an election by being tougher-than-thou, and you will usually lose by talking about finding ways to get along with real and perceived rivals. How can you govern sensibly, how can you avoid being bankrupted over the long haul (see bin Laden's statement here), when hawks will accuse you of treason if you attempt to govern sensibly?
Rob,
Looks like bin Laden is out on the recruiting trail (with no scholarship limits). He needs a threat (and John McCain is certainly more of a hawk than Barack Obama) and an ambitious goal (bankrupting America is definitely ambitious) to effectively recurit future terrorists (especially four and five stars).
But I want to address your question: "How can you govern sensibly, how can you avoid being bankrupted over the long haul...when hawks will accuse you of treason if you attempt to govern sensibly?"
I'm going to answer this very simply, though you're not going to like it. Vote Republican.
Because Republicans are generally more hawkish than Democrats, in a situation when diplomacy makes the most sense, Republicans can pull it off because it comes off as a legitimate extension of politics by other means. When Democrats do the same, it comes off as appeasement (appeasement being an end in itself and not a means to an end). Look at Nixon. He signed a strategic arms limitation treaty with the Soviet Union and, more significantly, established a rapprochement with China. I submit to you, Rob, that a liberal Democrat, or any Democrat, could not have reached out to China without being branded as soft on communism. In other words, it would have been political suicide and therefore not a policy option.
Vote for McCain. Please.
You make a good point, John. Yes, it took Nixon to go to China when a McGovern couldn't have.
But you're assuming that McCain would follow through diplomatically, just as you're assuming Obama would be a wimp (even though McCain and conservatives have condemned Obama as, uh, "too hawkish" on Pakistan).
Rob,
No, I'm merely saying that McCain can consider the full range of foreign policy options with equal credibility whereas Obama can't.
Here's the conundrum. Each has their tendencies -- one toward hawkishness and one toward irenism.
Do we really know which one will consider the full range of options that exist outside his natural tendency? Of course not.
But if that makes you more naturally biased toward McCain's approach, the Foreign Policy article nicely details those cognitive biases that cause that bias; and it notes that most people share your bias.
So the issue arises as to whether it's a helpful bias. I would say it isn't.