Much has been made of Barack Obama’s foreign policy inexperience, after all so many of our past presidents have been foreign policy experts…lets see since Theodore Roosevelt too office in 1901 we’ve had quite a few governors to become president, including Wilson, Coolidge, F. Roosevelt, Carter, Reagan, Clinton and GW Bush, well there certainly a great deal of foreign policy experience to be had there oh then there have been, all the remain men who have served as president were members of Congress with the exception of Hoover and Eisenhower. Among them perhaps only Taft and Eisenhower could be said to have in real foreign policy experience having served as Secretary of War and NATO Commander respectively.

Perhaps if we would just settle on a candidate with common sense that would be a marked improvement. Nonetheless, Obama has received a great deal of criticism in the last few days for suggesting that the US should consider relaxing the embargo with Cuba. For this suggestion Obama has been lambasted by the right and the left, but has anyone considered that Obama’s position is correct, at least in this particular matter. The Cuban embargo has been and continues to be the height of diplomatic hypocrisy. Since it’s inception over 40 years ago, Cuba has been isolated economically and politically from the United States.

Albeit true Castro and company are brutal tyrants with no regard for the concept of liberty or freedom but then again the same can be said of China, Russia and a host of other nations that we eager trade with and maintain full diplomatic relations. Perhaps not country has less regard fro human life than the People’s Republic of China, yet China is one of America’s largest trading partners. Nonetheless, our political leaders continue to assert the long held belief that through engaging brutal regimes like China and the Soviet Union before them, that we can eventually bring them into the fold of civilized nations, if this assertion is true, then why one set of rules for tyrannical regimes like Saudi Arabia and China and another set of rules for Cuba?

There isn’t a single documented case in all of human history where a trade embargo has played even the slightest role in toppling a dictatorship, not in Iraq, not in fascist Italy and certainly not in Cuba, even anything embargo’s serve only to embolden a tyrant giving fuel for their propaganda machine and at the same time ensuring the people remain entrenched in squalor and poverty. For we can rest assured that Fidel and brother Raul aren’t wanting for anything. The Cuban embargo has no place as a tool of US foreign policy, Obama should be applauded for challenging the concept. To be sure, Obama like most of his leftist companions, who’s socialist tendencies are without question, is quite undeserving of the office of president, it is not because of his position on Cuba.
http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/08/21/obama.cuba/

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