Obama has spent more time ‘on the ground’ in Iraq and Afghanistan than Bush

Democratic presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama has come under fire for his foreign policy experience, or lack thereof, especially with regard to war.

Ironically, as Paul Kennedy, Professor of History and director of International Security Studies at Yale University, points out in an op-ed piece, Obama has spent more time on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan than the current commander-in-chief, President George W. Bush.

Kennedy offers the following tally as a mode of comparision:

Nov. 27, 2003, for two and a half hours , at a Thanksgiving dinner with American troops, exclusively in the large U.S. base at Baghdad International Airport.

June 3, 2006, for five to six hours, in Baghdad’s heavily fortified Green Zone Sept. 3, 2007, for six to seven hours , visiting Al-Asad Air Base, the American fortress in western Anbar Province.

That’s not even a full day in Iraq in more than five years of fighting. Wow! Those who doubt presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama’s experience of, and familiarity with, the world outside the United States may have forgotten that during his January 2006 visit to Iraq, he actually spent two days (according to ABC News) “flying to areas outside the safety of the green zone to meet with American and military commanders on the ground.”

The president has visited Afghanistan only once, where he spent five hours in Kabul, on March 1, 2006, when conditions were fairly stable. What, one wonders, was the point?

How can we explain this? In the case of Iraq above all, how can a leader instigate a long, messy war, keep demanding hundreds of billions of dollars for it, appeal to the American people to stay the course, and not actually spend some time there to see what is going on?

Real commanders surely ought to demonstrate, not obsessively (like Hitler) but at least regularly, a deep interest in what is happening to the forces under their command.

Kennedy made the observation while compiling research for a new book on World War II, which focuses on the travels of the two leaders of the Western Alliance, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill.

Kennedy defended the analogy between Bush and the Second World War leaders in his op-ed piece:

A comparison of the present Bush administration with the record of Roosevelt and Churchill is actually not unfair, if only because the White House itself has so insistently invoked that earlier age, the era of “the greatest generation.”

To most members of the present Bush administration — and to American neoconservatives more broadly — Churchill himself is an icon, the historic embodiment of what they in their turn have been pursuing in their own global war.

It is, therefore, instructive — and to me, rather disturbing — to list the number and the duration of the visits that President Bush has paid to the actual theatres of war since our invasion of Afghanistan and then Iraq, beginning in 2001, nearly seven years ago (remember, Churchill was prime minister a lesser time).

Based on the comparison, Kennedy draws two conclusions:

The first is that this president finds it emotionally difficult to be at close quarters with the aftermaths of disaster and setbacks, whether in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, in the ravaged streets of Iraqi cities, or in the rubble of the World Trade Center after the Sept. 11 attacks. It would have been something if Mr. Bush had been seen shoulder-to-shoulder with the combative Mayor Rudy Guiliani, supervising the rescue operations following that vicious attack.

Secondly, I do not buy the argument that, in order to avoid another Kennedy-type assassination, the president of the United States should be cocooned from absolutely any danger. It is a completely unhealthy state of affairs that the most important decision-maker in the world should be so relentlessly protected from anything that is unpleasant, like some of the later czars of Imperial Russia.

It is unhealthy that presidential Press conferences are increasingly such prefabricated, uncontroversial events. It is truly unhealthy that there exists no political place where the head of government has to debate his critics.