Principled Conservative Backs Barack Obama

The Republican party has hijacked traditional conservatism, Andrew Bacevich says.

"From an orthodox conservative point of view it became apparent to me that of the three candidates--Hilary Clinton, John McCain, and Barack Obama--Obama was clearly the best. And not because he is a conservative--he is not, he is clearly a liberal--but because I believe he is the one candidate who will end the Iraq War and I see that as the overriding issue.

Electing Obama is not going to put people in his inner circle that reflect my views. But he is going to end the war, which will drive a stake through the heart of these preposterous ideas that came out of the cold war: that we live in a unipolar moment; that we are the world's indispensable nation; that US global military supremacy is the crucial instrument to advance our interests. An Obama presidency would discredit a set of ideas that I view as malignant, and killing those malignant ideas will lead to a debate over foreign policy that could yield a new set of principles that would be better for conventional conservatives and other people as well.

(...)

It is my sense that his mind is not made up about foreign policy despite the way he recites certain clichés. He says he will end the war more emphatically than Senator Clinton, who voted for the war and maintains a fairly belligerent tone. She says she'll end the war, but in a framework that still suggests a more belligerent posture than we get from Obama.

My hope is that once in office Obama would undergo a very rapid education and that he might reach conclusions about our role in the world that would differ from the conclusions that McCain and Clinton have already drawn and will likely remain committed to. And once the doctrine of preventative war is renounced, you can begin to think more narrowly of the role of force in American foreign policy and to advance significantly different points of view."

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080512/vila



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