Obama's First Full Day To Focus On Foreign Policy

By Cernig

Why were so many people in foreign lands so heavily invested in the US presidential race? Because even at a time of massive domestic economic crisis, by the nature of the beast an American president has to be at least as concerned about foreign affairs as any domestic agenda. Who the person in the White House is matters to those who don't get a vote far more than any other world leader. That's not to say anything about whether that's a good thing or not - them's just the facts.

Obama is no different. The president who won an election primarily on domestic issues will spend his first full day in office on foreign policy.

As one of his first actions, Obama plans to name former senator George J. Mitchell (D-Maine) as his Middle East envoy, aides said, sending a signal that the new administration intends to move quickly to engage warring Israelis and Palestinians in efforts to secure the peace.

Mitchell's appointment will follow this afternoon's expected Senate vote to confirm Hillary Rodham Clinton as secretary of state. And tomorrow afternoon, aides said, Obama will convene a meeting of his National Security Council to launch a reassessment of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

By the end of the week, Obama plans to issue an executive order to eventually shut down the military detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and to lay out a new process for dealing with about 250 detainees remaining at the prison.

...The first concrete evidence of a new foreign policy approach will begin with the meeting tomorrow. Obama will instruct the Pentagon to prepare for a stepped-up withdrawal of combat troops from Iraq, to be completed within 16 months, and will hear proposals for turning around the deteriorating war in Afghanistan. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Michael Mullen, will attend, and Gen. David H. Petraeus, head of Central Command, and Gen. Raymond Odierno, U.S. commander in Iraq, will weigh in via live video connection.

I admit I'm entirely opposed to the notion of a surge in Afghanistan simply to give Obama time to figure out what to do there. That kind of missionless muddling along, with its inevitable additional costs in both blood and treasure, is how the Bush administration pulled imminent defeat from success in Afghanistan in the first place. I'm looking forward to reading reports about that meeting with military bigwigs - it should tell us a lot about whether Obama is going to continue the "bigger hammer" theory of military intervention while only talking about talking. But other than those zealots who don't want peace if it means any budge at all from the sense of entitlement Bush's carte blanche gave Israel, I believe few have any problem with Mitchell's appointment.

There's one thing I'd really like to read in reports later this week though. That Obama eschewed the "Now I R King!" instant-redecorating tomfoolery of the last two incumbents, that had Clinton's redecorator whisked down cleared streets by a full colonel and Bush's people hanging pictures of his own inauguration within hours. There's enough work to do that the unpacking and redecorating take a few weeks instead. That'd be a good message to send to a watchful world.