A New Isolationism? by Conrad Black on National Review Online

A New Isolationism? by Conrad Black on National Review Online: "The Obama administration’s shilly-shallying in Afghanistan is a textbook case of how not to conduct a war, and how not to lead an alliance.

In the 2006 and 2008 campaigns, the Democrats demanded the withdrawal of troops from Iraq, and accused the Bush administration of conducting an unnecessary war in that country while ignoring the original campaign in Afghanistan, where the 9/11 terrorist attacks were planned.

As recently as two months ago, President Obama called Afghanistan a “war of necessity,” while Iraq had been a “war of choice.” This was a plausible argument, but Iraq died as an election issue when it became clear that victory might be at hand. And so now, the focus of debate has moved to the “necessary” war in Afghanistan, which American voters had supposed to be a settled issue.

One of the many problems that have arisen with the breakdown, since Vietnam, of bipartisan agreement in setting U.S. foreign policy is the tendency to lurch, every four or eight years, between the Republican view that the pre-emptive use of force is justified to forestall aggression and advance democratic values, and the Democratic view that foreign military action requires multilateral approval and must respond to a prior casus belli. Yet these latter conditions have been met in Afghanistan, which raises the question of whether today’s Democrats are at heart full-blown pacifists, or at least isolationists."