No Doves in this Election

Conor Friedersdorf, who has spent the past 3 1/2 years hammering Obama for his bellicose foreign policy, has a good article this week on why foreign policy has become a losing issue for Republicans. Republicans are unable to get any benefit from Obama's mistakes, says Friedersdorf, because they are making the wrong critique. Instead of attacking him for waging an unconstitutional war in Libya, using drone strikes with abandon, wasting billions and hundreds of lives in Afghanistan, and so on, they insist that he is not bellicose enough. They are desperate to accuse him of being somehow anti-American, even though this makes no sense to voters outside the conservative movement.

Friedersdorf is so incensed by Obama's needless belligerence, and his continued insistence on his right to detain terrorist suspects without charge, that he refuses "on principle" to vote for the President.

Which brings me to my stand on the matter. Like Friedersdorf I think the Afghan surge was stupid, the Libyan intervention an obvious violation of the war powers act, and our treatment of terrorist suspects an outrage. But I will vote for Obama, because I think Mitt Romney would be much worse, and because I think that given the state of America Obama is about the best any anti-war, pro-civil liberties voter can hope for.

Americans will not elect a pacifist president. True, they eventually turned against the Afghan and Iraq Wars, but only after many years of futility. They will not support a president they suspect is not tough enough to smash our enemies when they need smashing. Nor will they support a president they think values the lives of possible terrorists above the safety of Americans. As Friedersdorf himself admits, Obama is clobbering Romney on all the foreign policy questions, getting the endorsement of every non-Republicans in the country. That's because his drone strikes, his assassination of bin Laden, and his continued aggression against potential terrorists are very popular. If he was not doing these things, the Republicans could make a case against him that really might hurt him.

In a democracy, the will of the people matters. On foreign policy it seems to matter less than on some other issues, because of the strength of our military and foreign policy bureaucracies. But change of the magnitude Friedersdorf wants will only come when the voters insist on it, and I see no sign that this will happen any time soon.

In the mean time, I think that refusing to vote "on principle" is a disgusting cop-out. There is a choice to be made, whether you like the options or not, and by refusing to choose you are effectively endorsing the worst offender.