I Don’t Hate America!

Barack Obama has the judgment and experience to lead this country. Just look at who got the single most important foreign policy decision since the end of the Cold War right, and who got it wrong. Who had the conviction to buck Washington’s conventional thinking, and who will make the right judgments for America going forward.
Barack Obama opposed the Iraq war from the start – at a time when going to war was politically popular. He was convinced that it would distract us from Afghanistan, fan the flames of extremism around the world, and enflame sectarian tensions in Iraq. So he went to a rally and argued against “a rash war” and “an occupation of undetermined length, with undetermined costs, and undetermined consequences.”

The American people were failed by President Bush, but also by conventional thinking in Washington the joined the rush to war, particularly by a Congress that voted to give the President the open-ended authority to wage war. Let’s be clear: nobody thought Congress was debating whether or not to give the President the authority to conduct diplomacy - the debate was about whether to go to war. Without that vote, there would be no war.

Barack Obama isn’t running for President to conform to Washington’s conventional thinking – he’s running to challenge it. He’s not running to turn back the clock – he’s running to turn the page.

There is a window of opportunity in this election, and if we don’t seize it, we might not get another chance. We’re not going to face down unconventional threats with the same old conventional thinking that got us into Iraq. We’re not going to bring this country together with the same old conventional politics of trying to beat the other side. Barack Obama is the only candidate who has the right judgment and experience to unite our country and restore our standing in the world.

Barack Obama will turn the page to a new era of American diplomacy. The Bush-Cheney diplomacy of not talking to other countries doesn’t make us look tough – it makes us look arrogant. To protect America, we need a President who is willing to talk to all nations, friend and foe. And that is exactly what Barack Obama will do.

Barack Obama will turn the page to a new American leadership in the world. The UN has embraced the Millennium Development Goals, which aim to cut extreme poverty in half by 2015. When Barack Obama is President, that will be America’s goal. While the Bush Administration tried to keep the UN from trumpeting these goals, Obama will double foreign assistance to $50 billion to lead the world to achieve them.

We need to turn the page on a nuclear policy that is still focused on deterring the Soviet Union. Barack Obama will set the goal of a world without nuclear weapons. He’ll work with Russia to dramatically reduce the stockpiles of nuclear weapons, and to seek a global ban on the production of fissile material. He’ll set a goal to expand the U.S.-Russian ban on intermediate-range missiles so that it is a global agreement. And he’ll lead a global effort to secure all loose nuclear materials during his first term in office.
As President, Barack Obama will lead a new era of openness and accountability. He’ll give an annual “State of the World” address to the American people laying out our national security policy. He’ll create a new National Declassification Center to turn the page on unnecessary secrecy. He’ll make the Director of National Intelligence an official with a fixed term, because we don’t need any more officials who just tell the President what they want to hear. And he’ll establish a standing and bipartisan Consultative Group of congressional leaders on national security, because he believes that foreign policy should not be a partisan issue – it should be an American issue.

Doing all of this won’t be easy. But throughout our history, America has made the right choice over the easy choice, the ambitious choice over the cautious choice. And if we make the right choice in this election, we’ll not just turn the page on the same Washington conventional thinking that got us into this war – we’ll turn the page to a new beginning, and unite this country to meet urgent challenges.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 2nd, 2007 at 11:24 am and is filed under Congress, Iraq, Obama, Ian G., Bush, 2008. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.