In this week’s CFR.org Online Debate, Ted Galen Carpenter, vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, and James Phillips, a research fellow for Middle Eastern affairs at the conservative Heritage Foundation, debate the consequences of withdrawing U.S. forces from Iraq.
The Washington Post hears echoes of John Edwards’ populism on trade issues during recent campaigning by Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) in Texas, Ohio, and Rhode Island. It is part of an effort to reach working class voters who see free trade moves of the past two decades as responsible for the loss of better-paying jobs. Big primaries loom March 4 in Texas and Ohio. Clinton’s chief challenger, Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL), has answered her campaigning by linking her to support for the North American Free Trade Agreement, which many workers blame for hurting their livelihood. NAFTA was approved after a push by the Clinton administration (WSJ) in the 1990s.
“Not so along go Senator Obama favored complete normalization of relations with Fidel Castro’s Cuba. Last night, he said that as president he’d meet with the imprisoned island’s new leader ‘without preconditions.’ So Raul Castro gets an audience with an American president, and all the prestige such a meeting confers, without having to release political prisoners, allow free media, political parties, and labor unions, or schedule internationally monitored free elections.
The Democratic candidates participated in a CNN/Univision debate in Austin, Texas Wednesday night, where Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) tried to stop the Obama campaign’s seeming momentum after his eleven straight victories (NYT) in the recent weeks of the primary season. In their first debate in three weeks, Clinton said she would not meet with Cuban leader Raul Castro unless there is evidence that he is freeing political prisoners, ending “some of the oppressive practices on the press,” and “opening up the economy.”
Reader William deB. Mills writes:
It is time for the U.S. to put its relations with Moslem societies on a more professional and less emotional basis…and to put relations with each in the broader context. Pakistan and Iran are the two critical cases in point.
Speaking at New York City’s Hunter College on Wednesday, Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) highlighted distinctions between herself and Sen. Barack Obama, (D-IL) and between herself and Sen. John McCain (R-AZ). McCain is willing to “continue the war in Iraq for a hundred years,” she said. Clinton said she will “start bringing our troops home within sixty days.” McCain has sought to clarify his comment about a long-term engagement in Iraq by comparing it to 60-year U.S. deployments in Europe and Asia.
Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) and Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) each won their respective party primaries in Wisconsin Tuesday. In Wisconsin, a rare state where Republican delegates are distributed proportionally, McCain won 55 percent of the Wisconsin vote, while Mike Huckabee won 37 percent. McCain also won the Washington State Republican primary (Bloomberg) .
Responding to CFR.org’s Daily Analysis Brief, After Kosovo’s Secession, reader Dan Darling writes:
Though caught up in two new nominating votes, which take place in Wisconsin and Hawaii today, Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) and Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) both took a moment to endorse Kosovo’s declared independence from Serbia. Obama expressed hope that “Kosovo’s government and people act with urgency to ensure that Kosovo becomes a positive example of democratic governance and the rule of law.” He also said the reelection of Serbian President Boris Tadic was a “critical step in moving Serbia closer to the goal of full integration into the democratic West.”
In the final exchange of CFR.org’s Online Debate on post-conflict reconstruction today, Craig Cohen of the Center for Strategic and International Studies and Col. Garland H. Williams, author of Engineering Peace: The Military Role in Post-Conflict Reconstruction, seem to have found some common ground. 
Cohen, who has argued that post-conflict reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan should be led by civilian, not military efforts, says he and Williams agree that military and civilian agencies can be “complementary” in a post-conflict scenario, and that civilian agencies “currently lack the standby capacity to deploy.” They also agree that post-conflict reconstruction “occurs in dynamic environments that do not lend themselves to neat typologies or one-dimensional thinking.” Still, he concludes, the political nature of a post-conflict environment, efforts should be headed by “a civilian ambassador rather than a military officer.”
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With Barack Obama set to become the forty-fourth president of the United States today, analysts of international affairs are looking…
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