Experience 101
What is Obama's real experience?

Recent Gallup polls claim that 70% of those polled believed John McCain had the experience to lead the nation, while 65% said that leadership applied to Hillary Clinton and only 48% claimed that of Barack Obama ... but interestingly enough, only 22% felt it was the most important trait they sought in a leader.

Abraham Lincoln became President with what, one term as a state legislator, before presiding over the bitter Civil War?

Military fears 'unknown quantity'

Members of Washington's military and defense establishment are expressing trepidation about Sen. Barack Obama, as the Illinois senator comes closer to winning the Democratic presidential nomination and leads in national polls to become commander in chief.

But his backers, including a former Air Force chief of staff, say the rookie senator believes in a strong military, and with it, a larger Army and Marine Corps.

"Any military person who concludes he's a left-wing, hair-on-fire, Kumbaya child of the '60s has sadly misunderestimated him, to use George Bush's term," said retired Gen. Merrill McPeak.

Still, the mostly conservative retired officers, industry executives and current defense officials interviewed by The Washington Times cite Mr. Obama's lack of experience in national security. They also point to his determination to pull American combat units from Iraq at a time when a troop surge has reduced violence, damaged al Qaeda and allowed the Iraqi government to progress toward Sunni-Shia-Kurd reconciliation.

"We're very concerned about his apparent lack of understanding on the threat of radical Islam to the United States," said retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney, who is pro-Iraq war and a Fox News analyst. "A lot of retired senior officers feel the same way."

Meanwhile, Mark Penn, chief strategist for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, held a conference call with reporters to say the campaign will make the president's role as commander in chief a top issue leading up to March 4 primaries in Texas and Ohio.

Lawrence Korb, a military analyst at the Center for American Progress and one of a dozen or so national security advisers to the Obama campaign, rebutted the lack-of-experience complaint, saying neither President Bush nor John F. Kennedy could claim an extensive national security background before entering the White House.

Unlike Mr. Obama, though, both men served in the military.

"I think Obama would be very good." Mr. Korb said. "I think the job of the commander in chief is to listen to all of the inputs he gets and then have a sense of world history and the way the world works, and to be able to apply the advice he gets from his military people. Remember, Obama was one of the first ones to support a larger military, a larger Army and Marine Corps, well before the administration did."

Mr. Obama has visited Iraq and other nations as a Senate Foreign Relations Committee member.

A senior Pentagon official said an Obama swearing-in "will give the Arab street the final victory, the best optics, and the ultimate in bragging rights. They win. We lose."

Retired Army Gen. John Keane, an architect of the Iraq troop surge, worries that talk of a U.S. pullout makes reconciliation more difficult. Gen. Keane has not endorsed any presidential candidate.

"Anyone who is advocating a precipitous pullout of U.S. forces, believing this will be a catalyst for political progress, does not understand the realities of Iraq and the minds of the key political leaders," Gen. Keane told The Washington Times. "The U.S. military presence is the glue that is holding things together in Iraq and is the fundamental reason for the recent political progress. If you remove this presence, the political leaders in Iraq will believe they are on their own and will fall prey to their own fears and paranoia. ... They will bunker down and the political progress will come to a dead stop."

Mr. Korb said Mr. Obama has a "technically sound" proposal for withdrawing troops. He said that the candidate realized before the war, unlike many politicians in Washington, that things would go wrong in Iraq.

"If you go back and you look at the speech he gave on Iraq before the war, I think that it was very well reasoned and well argued," the adviser said.

As a state senator in 2002, Mr. Obama said, "I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences."

Gen. McPeak, who is an Obama campaign co-chairman, said the senator's intelligence will dazzle the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

"I think Obama is going to be an outstanding commander in chief, not just an ordinary commander in chief," he told The Washington Times. "He has the potential to be one of the all-time greats. I think the senior military will learn that about him starting from the first minute he occupies the Oval Office. ... There's no question that he is kind of scary smart. I think just plain intelligence is a very good quality to have in a commander in chief."

Gen. McPeak said it is a "fair comment" that Mr. Obama is viewed skeptically by senior officers. The general, who led the Air Force during the historic Desert Storm bombing of Iraq in 1991, believes the second war was unnecessary. He switched from Republican to Democrat in protest.

"I think that's undoubtedly true that the surge has reduced the violence there," he said. "But at the strategic level they did not set the initial conditions properly and therefore we can never be a success."

Defense industry executives worry that Mr. Obama will end six years of defense budget increases and, as he has repeatedly said on the campaign trail and in debates, tap into war and military funds to support his plan for universal health care.

"We've got some trepidation. There is no track record," said an industry executive of the first-term senator. "He's an unknown quantity and that scares us a little bit."

The National Journal ranked Mr. Obama as the Senate's most liberal member in 2007, based partly on his string of votes in favor of amendments that mandated a combat troop pullout from Iraq.

Mr. Obama does, however, acknowledge that America is in a war against extremists.

"The terrorists are at war with us," he said in "The War We Need to Win," a major policy speech. "They seek to create a repressive caliphate. To defeat this enemy, we must understand who we are fighting against, and what we are fighting for."

Mrs. Clinton has the backing of two dozen flag officers. "She knows and respects our armed forces," said Lee Feinstein, her campaign's national security director. "She is the person in this race who is most qualified to be commander in chief."

But Loren Thompson, who runs the Lexington Institute and stays in touch with defense industry executives, said Mr. Obama is difficult to categorize.

"His views are all over the map depending on whether its nuclear proliferation, energy independence or the global war on terror," he said. "How many liberals say they are going to bomb al Qaeda in Pakistan no matter whether the Pakistanis like it or not? He's much harder to pin down."

"Military fears 'unknown quantity'" by Rowan Scarborough, Washington Times, Feb. 26, 2008

Casey: Obama's Shortages Claim Plausible

Gen. George Casey, the Army's chief of staff, said Tuesday he has no reason to doubt Barack Obama's recent account by an Army captain that a rifle platoon in Afghanistan didn't have enough soldiers or weapons. But he questioned the assertion that the shortages prevented the troops from doing their job.

"I have no reason to doubt what it is the captain said," Casey said. "This was 2003 and 2004, almost four and a half years ago. We acknowledge and all worked together to correct the deficiencies that we saw in that period, not only in Afghanistan but in Iraq. It was a period that we worked our way through."

During a Democratic debate last week, Obama said an Army captain remembered leading a platoon in Afghanistan that was short on men, ammunition and humvees.

"They were actually capturing Taliban weapons, because it was easier to get Taliban weapons than it was for them to get properly equipped by our current commander in chief," Obama said.

Obama's account prompted denials from the Pentagon. In a letter to Obama, Sen. John Warner, R-Va., demanded the name and whereabouts of the captain so he could investigate the matter.

"There may have been some spot shortages in spare parts and ammunition," he [Casey] said. "But the commander said that there were never a shortage of ammunition that impacted the units ability to accomplish its mission."

"Casey: Obama's Shortages Claim Plausible" by Anne Flaherty, TownHall.com, Feb. 26, 2008

Barack Obama Prefers Cooperation Abroad

Democratic presidential hopeful, Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., right, huddles with Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., left, on Capitol Hill in Washington in this Jan. 31, 2007 file photo during the committee's hearing on Iraq. Based on his Senate history, Obama as president would likely push to expand human rights and reduce poverty abroad using cooperation rather than confrontation. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh, File)

Based on his Senate history, Barack Obama as president would likely push to expand human rights and reduce poverty abroad using cooperation rather than confrontation. If foreign events permit.

Aside from his vigorous opposition to the Iraq war, Obama spent more of his time on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on speeches and inspirational trips than on investigations and aggressive oversight. He was a junior senator with an agreeable manner who was just beginning to cut his teeth on foreign policy issues when he decided to run for president.

Since he took office in 2005, much of Obama's work attracted little, if any, attention because of the nation's focus on the Iraq war. Obama pushed through legislation that condemned violence by the Zimbabwe government, for example. He helped raise awareness about Darfur and called on the administration to do more to reduce global poverty.

In 2005, he traveled with Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind. [at Lugar's request], to Russian nuclear sites. In 2006, he visited the Middle East and Africa, where he and his wife publicly took HIV tests in Kenya to encourage citizens there to do the same.

The young senator's approach to issues attracted the attention of Lugar, the committee's senior Republican. After their visit to former Soviet states, the two co-sponsored legislation aimed at making it easier to detect and destroy weapons stockpiles. More recently, Lugar signed on as co-sponsor of Obama's anti-poverty proposal.

When Obama took charge of the European affairs subcommittee in early 2007, he didn't seize the opportunity to scrutinize the Bush administration. With his campaign in full swing, the busy senator did not lead a single policy hearing on any of the hot topics in the panel's jurisdiction: missile defense, counterterrorism and concern over the waning commitment of European countries to NATO.

His approach was in sharp contrast to Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., who relied heavily on his full committee chairmanship to push his foreign policy agenda as an aspiring presidential nominee. Also different was Obama's more mild approach to questioning top administration officials than the more vocal _ and often abrasive _ senior members on the panel, including Sens. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., and Chuck Hagel, R-Neb.

Obama's aides say it's not unusual for a Senate subcommittee to hold few hearings, with the majority of work being done by the full committee. They also defend Obama's work on the committee as extremely successful.

"While his efforts on the committee don't always get headlines, he's worked across the aisle on critical issues like nuclear nonproliferation, pressing (then-U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay) Khalilzad for a commitment for no permanent bases in Iraq, stopping the genocide in Darfur, and bringing war criminals to justice," said Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor.

But critics say Obama's brief experience in the Senate leaves voters in the dark about how he would handle foreign policy. They also attack some of his positions as naive, including his expressed willingness to meet leaders of Iran, Syria, Cuba, Venezuela and North Korea in his first year of office.

Obama caused a stir last August when he said the United States should act on intelligence about top terrorist targets in Pakistan even if President Pervez Musharraf refuses. His comments prompted Pakistani officials to warn against U.S. incursions into their country.

"Will the next president have the experience?" asked Sen. John McCain, the likely GOP presidential nominee, in a thinly veiled reference to Obama. "Or will we risk the confused leadership of an inexperienced candidate who once suggested bombing our ally, Pakistan, and suggested sitting down without preconditions or clear purpose with enemies who support terrorists and are intent on destabilizing the world by acquiring nuclear weapons?"

Confronting claims he's light on foreign policy experience, the senator has surrounded himself with well-known foreign policy advisers, including several who served in the Clinton administration: former national security adviser Tony Lake, former Navy Secretary Richard Danzig and Susan Rice, who was assistant secretary of state for African affairs.

Obama's chief foreign policy adviser on the campaign is Denis McDonough, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. McDonough took the job after Mark Lippert, a Navy reservist, was called to serve in Iraq.

When not campaigning, the senator often used full committee hearings to express his opposition to the Iraq war or his concern about the Bush administration's policy toward Iran.

In January 2007, he sharply questioned Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on why the U.S. wouldn't consider a drawing down U.S. troops if inaction by the Iraqi government continued. Later that month, he voted for a committee proposal to condemn President Bush's plans to increase troops strength in Iraq as "not in the national interest."

"We are past the point where we can simply take it on good faith from the president that this will work," he said of the president's troop buildup.

He proposed separate legislation that would have required troop withdrawals to begin that spring. Later that year, he introduced a measure intended to prevent a potential conflict with Iran. But like many of the anti-war proposals on Capitol Hill, neither measure received a vote.

In another committee hearing, Obama voiced skepticism about Biden's suggestion that the Baghdad government could achieve peace by giving more autonomy to its provinces, which are divided along sectarian lines.

The question is whether "we should be initiating (strategy), as opposed to letting that unfold as a consequence of us putting more pressure on the Iraqis to figure out their problems," Obama said.

"Barack Obama Prefers Cooperation Abroad" by Anne Flaherty, TownHall.com, Feb. 26, 2008

One of the things about Obama's advisers that makes me uneasy is the presence of Zbigniew Brzenzki, President Carter's National Security Advisor, who has a "global conquest" mindset much like Karl Rove and the George Bush inner circle.

Intel Adviser Breaks with Obama over FISA, Telecoms

In a new interview with National Journal magazine, an intelligence adviser to Barack Obama's presidential campaign broke with his candidate’s position opposing retroactive legal protection for telecommunications companies being sued for cooperating with a dubious U.S. government domestic surveillance program.

"I do believe strongly that [telecoms] should be granted that immunity," former CIA official John Brennan told National Journal reporter Shane Harris in the interview.  "They were told to [cooperate] by the appropriate authorities that were operating in a legal context."

"I know people are concerned about that, but I do believe that's the right thing to do," added Brennan, who is an intelligence and foreign policy adviser to Obama.

That wasn't just a personal opinion, Brennan made clear to Harris. "My advice, to whoever is coming in [to the White House], is they need to spend some time learning, understanding what's out there, identifying those key issues," including the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, he said -- the law at the heart of the immunity debate.

"They need to make sure they do their homework, and it's not just going to be knee-jerk responses," Brennan said of the presidential hopefuls.

Last month, Obama voted to strip language in an intelligence bill that would have granted to Verizon, AT&T and other companies the immunity Brennan favored.  The firms have been identified in lawsuits as having cooperated with a National Security Agency program to intercept phone calls and other communications data within the United States.

What does Obama think? "Sen. Obama welcomes a variety of views, but his position on FISA is clear. He and Brennan differ," said campaign spokesman Tommy Vietor.

Before leaving government to join the private sector, Brennan was the head of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), a joint office operated by the CIA, FBI and other government agencies.

"Intel Adviser Breaks with Obama over FISA, Telecoms", ABC News, Mar. 7, 2008

The consensus out there is that the telecoms have the best lawyers out there and they would of demanded in writing a protection of immunity. The government gave them these documents (illegally) and now want to cover this up by giving them immunity via another vehicle so that the illegal protection does not come to light. As soon as a trail starts against the telecoms they will pull out their peace of paper and bush will look bad.

If, as the ACLU has reported, there are now 900,000 Americans "suspected of being or known to be terrorists", then the telecoms need to be held accountable for their their role in the destruction of the Constitution and Bill of Rights.