A Chequer-Board of Nights and Days

One of the more prevalent memes concerning Barack Obama revolves around the argument that despite his political leanings, he is actually something of a Burkean candidate, one given to a sense of temperance and caution that oftentimes is not found in his fellow Democrats. Specifically, the argument is that because Obama was a law lecturer for so long at the University of Chicago and was therefore surrounded by conservative and libertarian law professors--including a number from the famed law and economics set who propounded visions and arguments concerning the free market that one does not usually find in the platform of the Democratic party--Obama learned to sharpen and hone his arguments for his own ideology and he also might have gained an appreciation and a healthy respect for the arguments of conservatives and libertarians.

Andrew Sullivan--comme d'habitude at his blog--gives voice to this meme by citing Obama's phone call to University of Chicago law professor (and soon-to-be Harvard law professor) Cass Sunstein concerning the Bush Administration's warrantless surveillance of international phone calls between Americans and suspected terrorists overseas. Through Sunstein's account of the phone call, we learn that

. . . Before taking a public position, Obama wanted to talk the problem through. In the space of about 20 minutes, he and I investigated the legal details. He asked me to explore all sorts of issues: the President's power as commander-in-chief, the Constitution's protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the Authorization for Use of Military Force and more.

Obama wanted to consider the best possible defense of what Bush had done. To every argument I made, he listened carefully and offered a specific counter-argument. After the issue had been exhausted, Obama said that he thought the program was illegal, but now had a better understanding of both sides. He thanked me for my time.

This was a pretty amazing conversation, not only because of Obama's mastery of the legal details, but also because many prominent Democratic leaders had already blasted the Bush initiative as blatantly illegal.

To this claim of a wave of neo-perestroika sweeping the American political landscape, Jonah Goldberg provides some much-needed perspective:

Huzzah for such openmindedness! He listens carefully to what another liberal says conservatives say about an issue (covering all of the legal angles in a mere 20 minutes!) and then comes around to the same position as conventional liberals.

Again, he may be open to listening to others, but that is different from saying he finds anything but liberal arguments persuasive. There's nothing wrong with liberals being persuaded by liberal arguments, just as there's nothing wrong with conservatives being persuaded by conservative ones. But I fail to see why we should confuse charming conversational skills with conservatism.

Indeed. But never let it be said that campaigns for Hope fail to touch the cynical hearts of curmudgeons like me. Whatever Senator Obama's actual political leanings--and he surely has a right to those leanings as I do to the leanings I hold dear--he can certainly show the kind of Burkean, [University of] Chicagoan open-mindedness and respect for facts that differ with his ideology that people like Sunstein and Sullivan praise him for.

And he can show those qualities when it comes to the issue of Iraq.

Robert Kaplan has some information regarding Iraq that the supposedly Burkean, Chicagoan Senator from Illinois should pay careful attention to and which should--in a world where the image of the Burkean, Chicagoan Obama actually corresponds with reality--cause Obama to fundamentally change and alter his Iraq policy. A sample of Kaplan's apt and important findings:

Like Sen. Barack Obama, Defense Secretary Robert Gates strongly doubted the wisdom of invading Iraq. Gates was a member of the Iraq Study Group, which, except for a throw-away sentence about a temporary surge of forces in Baghdad, was inclined to withdraw our forces from combat operations back in 2006. Therefore, when Gates became defense secretary, many assumed he would push for a retreat from our commitment to the Baghdad government. But he did the opposite. He aggressively prosecuted the war, fired his combatant commander for Central Command (who was less enthusiastic than Gates about winning in Iraq) and Air Force chief (who wasn't getting UAVs to the battlefield fast enough). Gates, who initially opposed the war, is fighting it with more gusto than his predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld, who supported the invasion.

This is not uncommon. Army Gen. David Petraeus and Amb. Ryan Crocker were likely not avid supporters of the invasion either, but both are now working not just to get America out of Iraq with our honor intact, but to win there. Sen. John McCain, who was cool to both the insertion of forces in Bosnia and the war in Kosovo in the 1990s, was vigorously in favor of winning those conflicts once troops were committed on the ground.

There is a lesson here for Barack Obama.

Obama was against the Iraq War and can forever claim credit for foreseeing its difficulties. Still, he may soon be in the same position as Gates, Petraeus, and Crocker -- that is, with bureaucratic responsibility for getting the best possible result out of our 2003 invasion. And Obama will not be alone: Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski have been saying repeatedly how disastrous the war has turned out to be. Obama, Albright, and Brzezinski are still acting as if the war was lost long ago, even as Gates, Petraeus, and Crocker have gradually, painstakingly turned it into a war that will be the Democrats' to lose.

The Democrats may well be right that the invasion was a strategic mistake that cost us greatly both in the Middle East and in the rest of the world. But their dire predictions from two years ago don't look very good in hindsight. And so they need to start thinking constructively about Iraq, not destructively. To wit, as former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage -- another opponent of the war -- has said, the United States will be known and remembered as much by how it got out of Iraq as by how it got in. Armitage is thinking constructively in a way that Obama and company need to.

Read Kaplan's piece and you will find that he is quite respectful indeed of Obama's antiwar position. He just believes that the intellectual integrity of Obama's position is undermined by the facts on the ground and that those facts should engender a change in Obama's stance on Iraq. Secretary Gates--who is no one's idea of an ideology-blinded neocon--showed the capacity to change and to test his initial doubts concerning Iraq against the implementation of the surge and the counterinsurgency strategy that General Petraeus had such a crucial hand in designing. Surely, the Burkean, temperate, measured, intellectually open, Chicagoan Obama can do the same, or at the very least consider seriously doing the same, no?

The impetus for changing Obama's position on Iraq is furthered by this Economist article on the state of affairs in Iraq and how dramatically life there has improved. To be sure, as Brother Soren has wisely noted, we are not out of the woods yet. But there is no denying the improvement:

AFTER all the blood and blunders, people are right to be sceptical when good news is announced from Iraq. Yet it is now plain that over the past several months, while Americans have been distracted by their presidential primaries, many things in Iraq have at long last started to go right.

This improvement goes beyond the fall in killing that followed General David Petraeus's "surge". Iraq's government has gained in stature and confidence. Thanks to soaring oil prices it is flush with money. It is standing up to Iraq's assorted militias and asserting its independence from both America and Iran. The overlapping wars--Sunni against American, Sunni against Shia and Shia against Shia--that harrowed Iraq after the invasion of 2003 have abated. The country no longer looks in imminent danger of flying apart or falling into everlasting anarchy. In September 2007 this newspaper supported the surge not because we had faith in Iraq but only in the desperate hope that the surge might stop what was already a bloodbath from becoming even worse (see article). The situation now is different: Iraq is still a mess, but something approaching a normal future for its people is beginning to look achievable.

As General Petraeus himself admits, and our briefing this week argues, the change is fragile, and reversible (see article). But it is real. Only a few months ago, Iraq was in the grip not only of a fierce anti-American insurgency but also of a dense tangle of sectarian wars, which America seemed powerless to stop. Those who thought it was just making matters worse by staying on could point to the bloody facts on the ground as evidence. But now it is time to look again. Each of those overlapping conflicts has lately begun to peter out.

You should read the rest, of course. The Economist does not offer undiluted praise. Not by a long shot. But it does offer, at the very end of its piece, the following: "If America's next president gets Iraq wrong because he has boxed himself in during the campaign, all the recent gains may be squandered and Iraq will slide swiftly back into misery and despair. That would be to fail twice over."

It's advice offered for both candidates, but presumably, the Burkean, temperate, measured, intellectually open, Chicagoan Obama is primed to take it. That is, of course, if Senator Obama is indeed Burkean, temperate, measured, intellectually open and genuinely influenced by his time at the University of Chicago to accept and understand that the other side of the partisan and ideological divide (relative to his own) might have some ideas and some specific policy stances that are better than Obama's own.

I guess we will find out whether Sullivan and Sunstein are right about Obama's supposed Burkean, temperate, measured, intellectually open and Chicagoan tendencies. If his Iraq policy shows intellectually agility and an ability to adapt to and recognize the conditions currently on the ground, I will be genuinely impressed and will doff my hat to Senator Obama.

But if not, then I will nominate the likes of Robert Gates for honorary membership in the University of Chicago's intellectual family and as an heir to Burke.

Oh, and not to put too fine a point on this issue, but when one reads posts like this one, one cannot help but believe that the commentary and coverage of America's involvement in Iraq is being seriously gamed. Perhaps the Burkean, temperate, measured, intellectually open and Chicagoan Senator Obama will be kind enough to make a tough-but-needed speech to the public and address his strongest supporters by saying that whatever their positions on the war, it was high time that they paid as much attention to Iraq while matters are going well as they did when matters were going less well.

That would be the intellectually open-minded thing to do. That would be what a Burkean would do. That would be what someone whose mind and mindset genuinely ran the philosophical gauntlet at the University of Chicago would do.

Let's see if Barack Obama does it.