More Warfare on Horizon with New President

After the entire grand national psychodrama of the 2008 presidential election is history, the man who moves into the White House will face a range of key issues that have gotten short media shrift throughout the nearly interminable campaign. Those issues will reshape the political battle lines in ways that the election coverage has scarcely illuminated.

Early sounds of important policy conflicts to come — not only Democrats versus Republicans but also between Democrats and Democrats — can already be heard in recent news stories, though the rat-tat-tat of campaign coverage has all but drowned them out.

"The well-advertised differences between John McCain and Barack Obama on the war in Iraq may obscure a consequential similarity between their hawkish views on the use of American military force in other places," The Washington Post reported in a story that appeared on the fourth page of the newspaper's A section. "Just two questions in the three debates between the two nominees touched on the subject, and neither has spoken at length on it during a fall campaign dominated by economic issues. Yet both have revealed a willingness to commit U.S. forces overseas for both strategic and humanitarian purposes. Both agree on a course of action in Afghanistan that could lead to a long-term commitment of American soldiers without a clear statement of how long they might remain or what conditions would lead to their withdrawal."

The news article, by longtime Post foreign-affairs reporter and editor Robert G. Kaiser, pointed out that "both candidates favor expanding the armed forces, Obama by 92,000 and McCain by as many as 150,000." And the espoused outlooks of each candidate include strong inclinations to order new military interventions: "Both speak of situations when the United States might have to commit its troops for 'moral' reasons, whether or not a vital American interest was at risk."

Of course, phrases like "a vital American interest" are ambiguous at best.

Future deployment of U.S. troops to yet-unnamed countries is speculative. But the agenda for increasing the Pentagon's troop strength in Afghanistan is very clearly on the table for the next president.

"On Afghanistan, both candidates have ended up with similar positions: send more troops, train a bigger Afghan army, intensify diplomacy, develop a more effective nation-building strategy, and stay until the situation has stabilized," the Post noted. Tellingly, the news report's concluding sentence may have been the most significant: "Neither candidate has spoken explicitly about how American and NATO forces would get out of Afghanistan."

While it would be incorrect to conflate the world views or military-related proclivities of Obama and McCain, the shared assumptions could turn out to be more important — and more hazardous — than the clear differences about the Iraq war and some other key concerns.

As you'd assume from the fact that I was an Obama delegate to the Democratic National Convention, overall I prefer Obama's positions on foreign policy. But all of us — definitely including the Washington press corps — should be ready, willing and eager to scrutinize the foreign-policy decisions of an Obama administration.

For the most part, to the extent there has been a bipartisan consensus on foreign policy in Washington, it has been an arrogant approach, often provoking enormous resentment elsewhere in the world. And the U.S. news media, overall, have praised such bipartisanship rather than fomenting tough scrutiny and vigorous debate.

Each of the last several presidents has dragged our country into war, from Panama to Iraq to Yugoslavia to Afghanistan, and to Iraq again. Unfortunately, journalistic scrutiny of the rationales for those wars has been too little and too late. In some cases, appreciable skepticism from the U.S. press never happened at all.

Journalists, and the rest of us, should resolve to engage in meaningful scrutiny during the next presidency — sooner rather than later.

Norman Solomon is author of "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death." The book has been adapted into a documentary film of the same name. For information, go to: www.WarMadeEasyTheMovie.org.

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