Why I voted for President Obama

John Bolton reminds me, today, why I voted for President Obama.

Time for an Israeli Strike?

Iran is definitely a serious flawed and corrupt democracy. But it is a democracy, nonetheless. The kind of regime change he is talking about is exactly the kind of regime change that got us the current regime in Iran, in the first place. It was this kind of machination in our support of the Shah that created the mess of Iranian theocracy, long before the current standoff. And aggressive efforts with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have not only clearly accelerated his nuclear ambitions, ambitions that he was not pursuing as vigorously as he was until after the Administration began threatening him, they have clearly played right in his hands, as it has repeatedly rallied Iranians to his defense against the Great Satans of Israel and Iran. Not to mention that they have utterly and unequivocally failed and taken us backwards, not forwards, in our desire to stem nuclear proliferation and Iran's pursuit of the bomb, by any empirical standard.

Why does John Bolton not see this? Because he doesn't want to. Because to do so would be to admit that perhaps many of his assumptions about power and its use, and abuse, are wrong. And that, perhaps, he is much more like these Iranian mullahs than he wishes to admit. And that is not something that someone like John Bolton does easily, is the truth. Ironic for a Christian, I know. Lots of irony in the world, these days. Makes things more interesting, I suppose. More deadly more often than more secure.

This is exactly why I voted for Barack Obama, for all of my concerns about his tepid commitment to free markets.

Because I knew that Obama was more likely to pause and consider, more, the larger consequences of such rash aggression.

And because Obama's instincts happen to be the right ones here. The problem with the last several years of policy towards Iran has clearly not been that we have been too soft. It has clearly that we have been too aggressive. To anyone not seeking to defend our failures that is. Failures that John Bolton helped craft. And which I have not the least amount of interest in defending.

No matter how difficult it is for John Bolton to face up to his own failures on this one.