Info request on Obama FP experience

[Stoop Dawg]

I Googled and search here too, but didn't find anything. I'm hoping that maybe someone here knows of a source.

I've seen a lot of talk about Palin not having met with any foreign leaders until very recently. I'm wondering though, how many foreign leaders has Obama himself met prior to his trip earlier this year? No doubt Biden and McCain have a lot of experience, and no doubt Palin does not. But what about Obama? I see links on his opinions, but not on his experience.

Your help is appreciated.

(P.S. I know this may look like flame bait, but it's not. Feel free to PM me if you prefer.)

[olevetonahill]

I dont understand the Uproar over SP not having any FP experience . since BO dosent have very much either .
Hell Hes runnin against JSM fer Pres. Not Palin

[SoonerProphet]

Don't know if this is what you are looking for, but it is a pretty good list of foreign policy advisors and the like.

http://www.nationalinterest.org/Article.aspx?id=19802

[Frozen Sooner]

Giving just factual information without expressing an opinion, foreign leaders Obama has met with off the top of my head:

King Abdullah (Jordan)
Shimon Peres (Israel)
Nicolas Sarkozy (France)
Andrea Merkel (Germany)
Nouri al-Maliki (Iraq)
Gordon Brown (UK)

Obama was also on the Senate Foreign Relations committee and the Homeland Security committee.

[Stoop Dawg]

Don't know if this is what you are looking for, but it is a pretty good list of foreign policy advisors and the like.

http://www.nationalinterest.org/Article.aspx?id=19802

I'm really looking more for 1st person experience.

[Stoop Dawg]

Giving just factual information without expressing an opinion, foreign leaders Obama has met with off the top of my head:

King Abdullah (Jordan)
Shimon Peres (Israel)
Nicolas Sarkozy (France)
Andrea Merkel (Germany)
Nouri al-Maliki (Iraq)
Gordon Brown (UK)

Obama was also on the Senate Foreign Relations committee and the Homeland Security committee.

Did he meet those before his trip earlier this year?

[Frozen Sooner]

Pretty sure that he had met with al-Maliki, Sarkozy, and Brown before the trip, but don't quote me on that. Don't know about the rest.

Oh, yeah, and he'd met with a few African heads of state before the trip as well.

Sorry, I had apparently skimmed over the requirement from your first post that it all be pre-world-tour.

[Whet]

Other than those messiah Barack of Obama met on his citizen of the world tour, here is a list of advisers:

On February 1st, 2008, Obama, shows his international naiveté by naming, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the architect of the current situation in the middle east, as his Chief Foreign Policy Advisor.

Two weeks after Obama names Zbigniew Brzezinski as his Chief Foreign Policy Advisor, Brzezinski arrives in Damascus, Syria, to begin talks with the terrorists and political assassins of the Assad regime.

The visit is not coordinated with America's embassy and will not be covered by the press, although Syrian press accounts said the delegation would visit Syria's president, Bashar al-Assad; vice president, Farouq al-Sharaa, and foreign minister, Walid Mouallem.

The latest Obama foreign policy adviser who turns out not to like Israel very much is Joseph Cirincione.

Last September, in response to reports that the site in Syria that Israel bombed was a potential nuclear facility being established with the help of North Korea, Cirincione insisted that the site was no such thing. "This story is nonsense," Obama's Adviser on Nuclear Threats told Foreign Policy magazine's blog.

Richard Danzig, who served as Navy Secretary under President Clinton and is to become National Security Adviser in an Obama White House, told a major foreign policy conference in Washington that the future of US strategy in the war on terrorism should follow a lesson from the pages of Winnie the Pooh, which can be shortened to: if it is causing you too much pain, try something else.

Mr. Danzig told the Centre for New American Security: "Winnie the Pooh seems to me to be a fundamental text on national security."

Obama has appointed Daniel Kurtzer as his key Middle East Adviser
Kurtzer, a former U.S. Ambassador to Israel, has long been recognized by Israel leaders, including prime ministers, as biased against Israel and is notorious for urging extreme concessions from the Jewish State.

Kurtzer faulted the Bush administration for not doing enough to pressure Israel into dividing Jerusalem.

"With Jews like Kurtzer, it is impossible to build a healthy relationship between Israel and the United States," Benjamin Nentanyahu was quoted saying in 2001 by Israel’s Haaretz newspaper.

Samantha "Sam" Power [since fired] is the author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning book on genocide, and she has a professorship at Harvard. She is also a Senior Foreign Policy Adviser to Barack Obama. The Washington Post has identified her as "closest to Obama, part of a group-within-the-group that he regularly turns to for advice." She "retain(s) unlimited access to Obama." The New York Times said that Power has an "irresistable profile" and "she could very well end up in [Obama's] cabinet."

She also has a problem: a corpus of critical statements about Israel. These have been parsed by Noah Pollak at Commentary's blog Contentions, by Ed Lasky and Richard Baehr at American Thinker, and by Paul Mirengoff at Power Line.

Power made her most problematic statement in 2002, in an interview she gave at Berkeley. The interviewer asked her this question:

Let me give you a thought experiment here, and it is the following: without addressing the Palestine-Israel problem, let’s say you were an advisor to the President of the United States, how would you respond to current events there? Would you advise him to put a structure in place to monitor that situation, at least if one party or another [starts] looking like they might be moving toward genocide?

Power gave an astonishing answer:

What we don’t need is some kind of early warning mechanism there, what we need is a willingness to put something on the line in helping the situation. Putting something on the line might mean alienating a domestic constituency of tremendous political and financial import; it may more crucially mean sacrificing -- or investing, I think, more than sacrificing -- billions of dollars, not in servicing Israel’s military, but actually investing in the new state of Palestine, in investing the billions of dollars it would probably take, also, to support what will have to be a mammoth protection force, not of the old Rwanda kind, but a meaningful military presence. Because it seems to me at this stage (and this is true of actual genocides as well, and not just major human rights abuses, which were seen there), you have to go in as if you’re serious, you have to put something on the line.

Unfortunately, imposition of a solution on unwilling parties is dreadful. It’s a terrible thing to do, it’s fundamentally undemocratic. But, sadly, we don’t just have a democracy here either, we have a liberal democracy. There are certain sets of principles that guide our policy, or that are meant to, anyway. It’s essential that some set of principles becomes the benchmark, rather than a deference to [leaders] who are fundamentally politically destined to destroy the lives of their own people. And by that I mean what Tom Friedman has called "Sharafat" [Sharon-Arafat]. I do think in that sense, both political leaders have been dreadfully irresponsible. And, unfortunately, it does require external intervention.... Any intervention is going to come under fierce criticism. But we have to think about lesser evils, especially when the human stakes are becoming ever more pronounced.

It isn't too difficult to see all the red flags in this answer. Having placed Israel's leader on par with Yasser Arafat, she called for massive military intervention on behalf of the Palestinians, to impose a solution in defiance of Israel and its American supporters. Billions of dollars would be shifted from Israel's security to the upkeep of a "mammoth protection force" and a Palestinian state -- all in the name of our "principles."

As a Senior Foreign Policy Adviser to Obama, Susan Rice, 43, has taken a leading role in helping to shape the freshman Illinois senator's vision for the world, building on a bond forged in part by their shared -- and outspoken -- opposition to the war in Iraq.

An assistant secretary of state under President Clinton, Ms. Rice also served as a senior adviser on the Kerry-Edwards campaign in 2004.

"Supporting Senator Obama was a clear choice for me," she said.

According to multiple sources, including former Clinton official Mansoor Ijaz and Richard Miniter, author of the bestseller Losing Bin Laden, it was she who was a major opponent of accepting Sudan’s offer to turn over the world’s most wanted mass murderer. At the time, Rice was the Clinton Administration’s Secretary of State for African Affairs and a former assistant National Security Advisor under Sandy Berger.

According the both Ijaz and Miniter, Rice’s personal beliefs on the Sudan’s credibility led to her convincing Berger to reject their offer to turn over Bin Laden, overruling the advice of Tim Carney, then ambassador to Sudan. Her partner in this colossal error in judgment? Bush hater Richard Clarke. Sadly, a little more than a year later, Bin Laden’s murderers blew up the African embassies, killing U. S. soldiers and citizens.

[soonerscuba]

Longest post ever without an actual opinion?

[GottaHavePride]

Meh. I think the whole "meeting with foreign leaders to increase your foreign policy cred" shtick is pretty much baloney anyway, on both sides of the court.

I mean, if you're not in charge of anything and actually trying to reach some sort of agreement, it's basically hanging out with some people saying "Hey! You're that guy! Right on, man. We should hang out sometime."

Not like there's any substance to those meetings - I fail to see how they help someone's "foreign policy experience". Go serve at a few embassies and actually DO something. That's experience actually worth something.

[Curly Bill]

Meh. I think the whole "meeting with foreign leaders to increase your foreign policy cred" shtick is pretty much baloney anyway, on both sides of the court.

I mean, if you're not in charge of anything and actually trying to reach some sort of agreement, it's basically hanging out with some people saying "Hey! You're that guy! Right on, man. We should hang out sometime."

Not like there's any substance to those meetings - I fail to see how they help someone's "foreign policy experience". Go serve at a few embassies and actually DO something. That's experience actually worth something.

Yup

[SoonerProphet]

"With Jews like Kurtzer, it is impossible to build a healthy relationship between Israel and the United States," Benjamin Nentanyahu was quoted saying in 2001 by Israel’s Haaretz newspaper.

That is rich, I am surprised Bibi didn't call him an anti-semite. Some pretty objective opinions given up there in that litany of nonsense.

[SleestakSooner]

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/new...cle3080794.ece

That article has a conservative tint to it that I am sure most of you will like, but it was written back during the primaries.

You guys forgot to mention the witch hunting African preacher man that Palin loves to hang out with... she's got that mojo working for her too.

[SoonerInKCMO]

You guys forgot to mention the witch hunting African preacher man that Palin loves to hang out with... she's got that mojo working for her too.

I posted a YouTube video of his visit to her church yesterday... it didn't get much play.

[85Sooner]

http://www.soonerfans.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=120783

[Animal Mother]

I Googled and search here too, but didn't find anything. I'm hoping that maybe someone here knows of a source.

I've seen a lot of talk about Palin not having met with any foreign leaders until very recently. I'm wondering though, how many foreign leaders has Obama himself met prior to his trip earlier this year? No doubt Biden and McCain have a lot of experience, and no doubt Palin does not. But what about Obama? I see links on his opinions, but not on his experience.

Your help is appreciated.

(P.S. I know this may look like flame bait, but it's not. Feel free to PM me if you prefer.)

Quite a few morons on this board say he is a foreign leader.

[Stoop Dawg]

You guys forgot to mention the witch hunting African preacher man that Palin loves to hang out with... she's got that mojo working for her too.

[If I'm reading this right, it's a dig at Palin. Otherwise, sorry for the confusion.]

This is *exactly* the kind of **** I don't get coming from the Dems. Criticize Palin for no FP experience when you're candidate for PRESIDENT doesn't have any either? Try to bring up a "witch hunting African preacher" after the scandal your candidate for PRESIDENT had with his preacher?

[SoonerKnight]

I dont understand the Uproar over SP not having any FP experience . since BO dosent have very much either .
Hell Hes runnin against JSM fer Pres. Not Palin

He is like older than methusala and he might croak so it may be important at some point if he wins. (maybe first 5 mos) ?????

[Stoop Dawg]

Palin *may* end up being president if JM is elected. Obama *will* be president if he is elected.

Am I to assume that you prefer certain lack of FP experience over potential lack of FP experience in the White House?

There are plenty of reasons to vote one way or another, but Palin's FP experience (or lack thereof) simply isn't one of them.

[SoonerProphet]

I think making a big deal out of either one of the candidates is pointless. Both will appoint knuckleheads from think tanks and policy houses, neither will put us on a path to security or stop passing out foreign aid like it is tic tacs.