A. McCarthy: Pawlenty's Foreign Policy (like John McCain's?)

National Review ^ | July 2, 2011 | Andrew C. McCarthy

[Clairity]

Tim Pawlenty winced audibly when The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg made the obvious explicit. In the race for the GOP presidential nomination, the columnist posited, "I guess you represent the John McCain-Lindsey Graham foreign-policy wing."

Mr. Goldberg's question, after all, was asked only after listening to Pawlenty's speech at the Council on Foreign Relations - a McCain redoubt where dreams of a progressive world order frequently substitute for the world that is.

Pakistan, is urging the Afghans to dump the United States and look not just to Pakistan and Iran but also to China for help striking a deal with the Taliban and shifting to a very different kind of nation-building.

Pawlenty's apparent answer to all this is to make believe it's not happening. Like McCain and Graham, he'd have you believe Iran is cornered because the dynamic force in the region is the forward march of freedom, not Islamism.

[Clairity]

Well, I didn't know much about Pawlenty, didn't really have anything for or against him, but reading this article seems to demonstrate he is not presidential material, at least not "GOP-type" presidential material.

It's a good, detailed article by Andy McCarthy, you really need to read the whole thing, excerpts don't do it justice.

[Slings and Arrows]

Pawlenty gets compared to Lady Linda, to neither’s benefit.

[Venturer]

I don’t think I will be casting a vote for Pawlenty.

[Palter]

So now National Review is against nation building and throwing money at Islamic countries?

[jocon307]

I submitted a comment to this piece, but so far I have not passed muster.

In essence what I said was that McCarthy (of whom I’m very fond as we are both suffering Mets fans and because he’s so good on the truth of international jihad) offered a lot of complaints about what we’re doing and a lot of abstract concepts, but for all his complaints he doesn’t offer any advice regarding what we should actually be doing.

Maybe they didn’t publish my comment because I said my own response would be of the Ann Coulter school. Invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity.

That piece got her canned from NRO, so maybe that was it.

And, not to put to fine a point on it, maybe the Coulter plan is over broad, or perhaps lacking, or immoral, but at least it is a PLAN.

McCarthy seems to hate the current plans and Pawlenty’s plans, but he doesn’t seem to have a plan of his own.

[newzjunkey]

That's how I read it.

He paints a very bleak picture on Iraq & Afghanistan.

From his view, the outcome of these interventions could lead to the same situation as the end of WWI which set up the environment leading to next World War.

[rmlew]

McCarthy is not National Review, just one author. He is no isolationist either.