Dear Mr. Radford:
While I appreciate your kind words on our mission, I must take issue with a number of you characterizations and criticisms of my article.First,I believe that you will be sadly mistaken about “the inevitable verdict of history”of the Bush foreign policy. Certainly future generations of Iraqi and Afghan women will enjoy lives of previously unimaginable freedom in nations founded on freedom, democracy, equality, and the rule of law.That is a decidedly better legacy then Carter’s surrendering the Panama Canal and allowing a group of rag-tag Iranian frat-boys to hold 66 Americans hostage for 444 days with impunity, or President Clinton’s decision to bomb Iraq for four days in December 1998 after signing H.R. 4655 with the goal of instituting “regime change”in Iraq.
However, it is clear that the substance of your letter was not directed at refuting the irrefutable successes of the Bush Administration that will unquestionably be recorded in history, but rather to attempt to criticize my “decidedly cowardly”article that you allege smeared Community Organizer/Law Lecturer/Junior Senator Barack Obama. While you are free to believe, “Nowhere does Obama mention ‘bombing’ anyone, but merely advocates a more flexible and surgical military response to eliminate terrorists in safe havens plotting to kill us,” the facts of the matter seem to indicate otherwise.In fact,even Senator Obama’s once opponents and now vocal supporters saw through this.After Senator Obama made those reckless comments, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton said that Obama’s comments constituted “a very big mistake” that could “destabilize the Musharraf regime, which is fighting for its life against the Islamist extremists who are in bed with al-Qaeda and Taliban.” Senator Dodd added that “the only person that separates us from a jihadist government in Pakistan with nuclear weapons is President Musharraf. And therefore I thought it was irresponsible to engage in that kind of a suggestion.That’s dangerous. Words mean something in campaigns.”
Unfortunately, it would be impossible to decide the matter conclusively because of Obama’s shape-shifting position changes. I would call him a flip-flopper but that would do great insult to a perfectly respectable form of footwear. Obama has not only changed his position on issues ranging from public campaign financing, the War on Iraq, the War on Terror, the Russia-Georgia Conflict, offshore drilling, taxes, and Reverend Wright, he has regularly held diametrically opposed positions simultaneously.
As for my citation of the perspectives of Tariq Ali, a man who has dedicated his life to a study of the region in question, his personal politics aren’t at issue. I wouldn’t check the political credentials of a seismologist before I considered his or her advice about the danger of an earthquake. (I am not a liberal.) Welcome to the heterodoxy of intellectual conservatism.
