Obama vs Clinton=Giving it to McCain on a Plate?

[conspiracy analyst]

Its getting quite clear that the Democratic Party in the USA will either get elected and then do the exact opposite of what it has pledged or it is draggin out this intercine conflict indefinitely to make both parties unpopular to a broader electoral base.

Due to the racist make up of the USA it is becoming clearer they will not vote for Obama and black and Hispanic voters ain't necessarily going to vote for Ms. Clinton. If they truly wanted to win and it was such a close race they would have come to an agreement to unite behind each other and then start attacking McCain. They haven't so they dont want to win the elections it appears.

[conspiracy analyst]

Obama Adviser Calls for Troops To Stay in Iraq Through 2010
By ELI LAKE, STAFF REPORTER OF THE SUN | April 4, 2008

WASHINGTON — A key adviser to Senator Obama’s campaign is recommending in a confidential paper that America keep between 60,000 and 80,000 troops in Iraq as of late 2010, a plan at odds with the public pledge of the Illinois senator to withdraw combat forces from Iraq within 16 months of taking office.

The paper, obtained by The New York Sun, was written by Colin Kahl for the center-left Center for a New American Security. In “Stay on Success: A Policy of Conditional Engagement,” Mr. Kahl writes that through negotiations with the Iraqi government “the U.S. should aim to transition to a sustainable over-watch posture (of perhaps 60,000–80,000 forces) by the end of 2010 (although the specific timelines should be the byproduct of negotiations and conditions on the ground).”

http://www.nysun.com/politics/obama-adviser-calls-troops-stay-iraq-thr ough-2010

Mr. Kahl is the day-to-day coordinator of the Obama campaign’s working group on Iraq. A shorter and less detailed version of this paper appeared on the center’s Web site as a policy brief.

Both Mr. Kahl and a senior Obama campaign adviser reached yesterday said the paper does not represent the campaign’s Iraq position. Nonetheless, the paper could provide clues as to the ultimate size of the residual American force the candidate has said would remain in Iraq after the withdrawal of combat brigades. The campaign has not publicly discussed the size of such a force in the past.

This is not the first time the opinion of an adviser to the Obama campaign has differed with the candidate’s stated Iraq policy. In February, Mr. Obama’s first foreign policy tutor, Samantha Power, told BBC that the senator’s current Iraq plan would likely change based on the advice of military commanders in 2009. She has since resigned her position as a formal adviser.

The political ramifications of the disclosure are yet to be seen. The perception of a harder line in Iraq could help Mr. Obama combat charges by Senator McCain in a general election that Mr. Obama favors a hasty surrender and retreat in Iraq. But it could hurt the Obama campaign with anti-war voters in the Democratic primaries. Mr. Obama’s rival for the Democratic nomination, Senator Clinton, has called for withdrawing troops from Iraq, but an architect of the surge has told the Sun that she has been wary of a precipitous withdrawal. In a situation with some parallels to this one, Mr. Obama suffered some political damage on the trade issue when he called publicly for a renegotiation of NAFTA while a policy adviser reportedly met with Canadian officials and downplayed the chances of a NAFTA retreat.

In an interview yesterday, a senior Obama foreign affairs adviser, Susan Rice, said the Iraq working group is not the last word on the campaign’s Iraq policy.

“We have experts and scholars with a range of views and Barack appreciates this range of views. They are in think tanks and like me they write in their own voice, they are people who do their independent scholarship. Barack Obama cannot be held accountable for what we all write,” she said. Ms. Rice said she had not seen the paper, which is marked as a draft and “not for attribution without author’s permission.”

Mr. Kahl yesterday said, “This has absolutely zero to do with the campaign.” He added, “There are elements that are consistent with the Democratic Party’s approach, and I will leave it to others to find out if there are elements that are not.”

Mr. Kahl’s approach would call on the remaining troops in Iraq to play an “over-watch role.” The term is used by Multinational Forces Iraq to describe the long term goal of the coalition force presence in the country, Mr. Kahl said in an interview.

“It refers to the U.S. being out of the lead, largely in a support role. It doesn’t mean the U.S. does not do things like targeted counter-terrorism missions or continue to train and advise the Iraqis,” he said. “It would not be 150,000 Americans taking the lead in counterinsurgency.”

Mr. Obama’s policy to date also allows for a residual force for Iraq. In early Iowa debates, the senator would not pledge to remove all soldiers from Iraq, a distinction from his promise to withdraw all combat brigades. Also, Mr. Obama has stipulated that he would be open to having the military train the Iraqi Security Forces if he received guarantees that those forces would not be the shock troops of one side of an Iraqi civil war.

But the Obama campaign has also not said how many troops would make up this residual force. “We have not put a number on that. It depends on the circumstances on the ground,” Ms. Rice said. She added, “It would be worse than folly, it would be dangerous, to put a hard number on the residual forces.”

Mr. Kahl’s paper laid out what he called a “middle way” between unlimited engagement in Iraq and complete and rapid disengagement. The approach is contingent, he said, on the progress and willingness of Iraq’s major confessional parties in reaching political accommodation.

“There is a fundamental difference in the assumption between the Democratic approach and the Bush-McCain approach. That approach is premised on the assumption the Iraqi government wants to reach accommodation and what they need is time. The surge is premised on the notion of creating breathing space,” Mr. Kahl said. He added that his strategy would pressure and entice the Iraqi government to begin political accommodation by not only starting the withdrawal, but also by stating that America had no intention to hold permanent bases in the country.

[Linda]

http://judicial-inc.biz/83your_future_president.htm

[Stefan]

Nasty battles for candidacy are not unusual in American politics, and the media usually turns its attention to "the main fight" once the candidate is chosen. I don't think this will sabotage Democrat chances.

I think this one is getting so petty cheifly because it's highly likely that the Democrats will win this one - IF there is an election that is, and some handy pretext for martial law doesn't pop up just before...

Regardless of which way it goes - why do we care? We know the drill - republicans, democrats - just two different colours of foil wrapper for the same sh*t toffee of back door banking and corporate interests. And the march towards Global Government continues...

[conspiracy analyst]

John McCain 'would confront Russia and China'
By Alex Spillius in Washington
Last Updated: 8:48pm BST 11/04/2008


A John McCain presidency would take to a more forceful approach to Russia and China, according to senior foreign policy advisers to the Republican candidate.

The Arizona senator has already signalled that intends to confront Russian president Vladimir Putin more directly than George W Bush if he wins the White House in November.

John McCain: Tougher foreign policy?

In a recent foreign policy speech, Mr McCain advocated removing Russia from the G8 group of major industrialised powers, while this week he announced he would not attend the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics if he were in office because of China's suppression of Tibetan protest.

His experience of foreign affairs is one reason why the 71-year-old Vietnam war veteran has drawn level with both his potential Democratic rivals, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, in opinion polls, suggesting the public may accept his more muscular approach to the world.

Robert Kagan, who wrote much of the speech delivered in Los Angeles, told the Daily Telegraph: "Russia will loom large for both Europe and the US, and John McCain has been ahead of the curve and has seen this coming down the road.

"We have made the mistake of being too passive as Putin has consolidated his autocracy. There have been key moments when he took away power of opposition parties, suppressed the media and arrested key figures, which were greeted with relative silence in the West.

"Because Putin feels he has to maintain the trappings of democracy there are opportunities to be stronger but the West hasn't done that."

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At the recent Nato summit, Mr Putin succeeded in bullying Western European nations to reject applications by Georgia and Ukraine to join the alliance. The failure of their bids, championed by President Bush, was a major coup for Mr Putin.

The Russian leader hands over to his hand-picked successor Dmitry Medvedev next month but will immediately become prime minister and is expected to continue to run the government.

Mr Kagan, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a leading member of Washington's Right-wing foreign policy community, was an early advocate of removing Saddam Hussein, though he was critical of the Pentagon's handling of the war in Iraq.

He is strongly critical of Mr Putin's "increasing autocracy", arguing that a concerted Western approach to Russia, led by the United States, can produce results, as it did over the declaration of independence by Kosovo, which Moscow was forced to accept.

Mr Kagan's approach has however reportedly put him at odds with other McCain advisers such as former secretary of state Henry Kissinger, who the New York Times reported this week was disturbed by the candidate's hardline attitude to Russia in his March 26 speech.

In that address, Mr McCain, who has two decades of foreign policy experience in the US senate, described himself as a "realistic idealist". He said he would abandon the unilateralism that led Mr Bush to invade Iraq with limited approval from other states but adopt a tough stance when called for.

Mr Kagan rejects the tag of "neo-conservative" that is often attached to him.

But along with other advisers, such as Max Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, he would likely argue that American values such as democracy should steer foreign policy if they were advising a McCain administration.



Both men argue that China, like Russia, should be more robustly criticized for its human rights abuses.

While continuing a "multi-faceted approach" to Beijing, Mr Boot said the US needs "to be forthright on their human rights abuses and not shrink from condemning what they are doing in Tibet for example, or from trying to help Chinese dissidents to stay out of jail".

"There isn't an easy answer to China or Russia because have to cooperate on some issues but will clash on others. But our attempts to cut deals with Putin haven't really accomplished very much and has emboldened him to become more truculent," he said.