Ross Douthat, from the Atlantic.com, has a comment on the first major policy speech by presumptive Republican Presidential candidate John McCain since he mathematically wrapped up the nomination. The speech is appropriate for our purposes, given that McCain makes a fundamentally moral case for continued US military involvement in Iraq and we have just begin to address the role of morality and ethics in foreign policy in Intro to IR.
“To walk away from the Iraqi people and consign them to … horrendous violence, ethnic cleansing and possibly genocide,” he argued, would represent “an unconscionable act of betrayal, a stain on our character as a great nation.”
Douthat then compres McCain’s speech on Iraq to that of Barack Obama’s major foreign policy address last week:
If Obama wants to claim the moral as well as the political high ground, he can’t just make the case that Americans will be better off if the United States withdraws from Iraq; he needs to mount a persuasive argument that Iraqis will be better off as well.
Here is an excerpt of McCain’s speech:
Clouds, Clocks, and Sitting at Tables 