It’s Monday, and that can only mean one thing: highlighting the errors of fact and judgment in Bill Kristol’s latest New York Times column. Today, Kristol argues — get this — that the surge policy in Iraq was a great idea, and he prefers John McCain to Barack Obama because of it.
Discussing the surge of troops and the new counterinsurgency strategy of early 2007, McCain pointed out, “Senator Obama opposed the new strategy. … Yet in the last year we have seen the success of that plan as violence has fallen to a four-year low. … None of this progress would have happened had we not changed course over a year ago. And all of this progress would be lost if Senator Obama had his way. ”
Early 2007 was as close as we’re going to get to a commander in chief moment for Senators McCain and Obama. They had to make a judgment in a difficult real-world situation — not on the healed planet of Obama’s dreams. With the Iraq war going badly, McCain took the lead in calling for a change in military strategy and a surge of troops. Obama, by contrast, went along with his party in urging withdrawal. Now, 18 months later, McCain seems pretty clearly to have been right.
Can McCain get voters to compare his judgment with Obama’s in a moment when the two of them were confronted with a weighty choice?
First, it’s become fashionable in conservative circles to not only argue that the surge has been a sterling success, but to state this as if it were an obvious, incontrovertible fact. As Obama has explained, the surge has contributed to a reduction in violence, but the policy was tailored to reach a different goal, which the surge did not complete: “The goal of the surge was to create space for Iraq’s political leaders to reach an agreement to end Iraq’s civil war. At great cost, our troops have helped reduce violence in some areas of Iraq, but even those reductions do not get us below the unsustainable levels of violence of mid-2006. Moreover, Iraq’s political leaders have made no progress in resolving the political differences at the heart of their civil war.”
Second, Kristol sees January 2007 as a classic “commander-in-chief moment,” because policy makers were confronted with “a weighty choice.” You know what else might qualify as a “commander-in-chief moment”? The fall of 2002, when policy makers were confronted with a choice about whether the war in Iraq was worth launching.
As I recall, McCain failed this “commander-in-chief moment” rather dramatically, while Obama was right. It’s odd that Kristol skips right past this without mentioning it.
Indeed, if we’re playing by Kristol’s rules, what we’re left with is a couple of “commander-in-chief moments.” On the first, in 2002, Obama was right and McCain was wrong. On the second, in 2007, Obama argued that the surge wouldn’t produce the political results Iraq needs, and McCain argued the opposite. As with the first term, Obama was right and McCain was wrong.
So what is Kristol talking about? Does he really want to talk about McCain’s “judgment” on matters of national security and foreign policy?
And as long as we’re talking about Kristol’s column, he added:
In his evocation of healing powers and dominion over the waters, Obama summons up echoes of the Gospels and Genesis. His comment a week earlier at Wesleyan, that “our individual salvation depends on collective salvation,” I might add, would seem at odds with much of Christian teaching. But I’ll let Obama take that up with his minister.
The pathetically cheap shot at Obama’s spiritual life notwithstanding, I think Kristol’s confused about what’s included with “Christian teaching.”
As Mark Kleiman explained, “I don’t know how to say this, but … Extra ecclesiam nulla salus? (That isn’t just a Catholic doctrine; all the Reformers held it. That’s why ecclesiology was such a hot topic; if the Church was essential to salvation, then it mattered a lot what the Church was and how it was to be run.) If you’re going to spend all your time sucking up to rich goyim, maybe you ought to learn something about their religion.”