Photograph courtesy of Army.mil

The 44th President of the United States will be a crisis president. But he won’t just have an economic disaster to deal with. He’ll also inherit twin military deployments in the region between Israel and India — an area we should perhaps think of as one massive region, one massive problem, but for political reasons do not. From a global perspective, this is the biggest issue in the election, and marks the biggest difference of opinion between the candidates.

Christopher Hitchens analyses the matter. Just as an Iranian-sponsored al-Qaeda poses a threat that won’t go away, a Pakistani-sponsored Taleban is an enduring danger to Afghanistan. George Bush has helped matters today by forging a nuclear alliance with India, but how will the next president act? On rhetoric alone, Barack Obama has been surprisingly hawkish. He would see America abandon Iraq, only to re-engage in Pakistan.

American liberals can’t quite face the fact that if their man does win in November, and if he has meant a single serious word he’s ever said, it means more war, and more bitter and protracted war at that—not less.

The first if is looking like a certainty, but the second? Opposing Obama to “liberals” is like opposing Sarah Palin to rednecks. Obama is pedigree liberal, and will retain in office the anti-war sentiment he’s taken on the campaign trail. It seems self-evident to me that only the candidate prepared to sanction an indefinitely prolonged fight for stability in Iraq is likely to do the same on the increasingly blurry Afghanistan/Pakistan border — and that’s, unsurprisingly, the candidate who isn’t winning.

Filed under: afghanistan, barackobama, election2008, iraq, jonathanbirch, uspolitics on October 2nd, 2008