Many folks have noted Obama’s comment about needing more Arabic speakers in Afghanistan. (While the Obama campaign hasn’t offered this defense, I note it’s theoretically possible that we could use Arabic speakers to interrogate captured foreign fighters.) But Dari and Pashto languages aren’t spoken in Iraq, so it’s unlikely that too many of our translators for that language are in that country right now.

OBAMA: Right now, we don’t have enough troops, and NATO hasn’t provided enough troops because they are still angry about us going into Iraq. So we just don’t have enough capacity right now to deal with — and it’s not just troops, by the way. It’s like Arab — Arab — Arabic interpreters, Arab language speakers, we only have a certain number of them, and if they’re all in Iraq, then it’s harder for us to use them, and — and obviously they may not speak Arabic, but the various dialects that they speak in Afghanistan, oftentimes people who speak Urdu or Pashtun or whatever the languages are, they’re going to be needed in those areas, and a lot of them have ended up being placed elsewhere. So we’ve got to focus on Afghanistan.

Transcript courtesy Rush.

But in the immediately preceding sentence, Obama offered a statement that I think is worthy of more attention:

OBAMA: Right now, we don’t have enough troops, and NATO hasn’t provided enough troops because they are still angry about us going into Iraq.

Maybe that’s still a factor, but it’s tough to argue that it is still the factor. For starters, in many NATO countries, a majority or near-majority of public opinion opposes military troops just about anywhere in the Muslim world.

(Example: “A poll of 1,000 Germans conducted this week for the newspaper Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger found that 61 percent opposed extending the Afghanistan mandate and only 29 percent favored it.” Another: “Two-thirds of respondents, or 67%, said Canadian troops should leave Afghanistan at that time. Only 26% of respondents thought the military mission should be extended “if that is necessary to complete our goals there.”)

Doesn’t the fact that few NATO allies spend as much on defense, and thus have fewer resources to commit to overseas deployments a factor?

While the U.S. spends about 3.7% of its gross domestic product on defense, most member countries spend less than 2%, he said.According to estimated figures published on NATO’s website, France spent 2.5% of its GDP on defense last year, Britain devoted 2.4% and German expenditures were at 1.4%, down from 2% at the end of the Cold War. Canada was among the members with the lowest spending, at 1.1% of its GDP.

Or that few of their militaries are set up to project power overseas, or maintain long-term peacekeeping and counterinsurgency operations in hostile environments?

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has publicly criticized some fellow NATO forces in Afghanistan, saying they do not know how to fight a guerrilla insurgency.The remarks by Gates, who on Tuesday ordered extra 3,200 U.S. Marines to Afghanistan, were expected to raise the hackles of other NATO states, many of which have found fault with the U.S. approach to conflicts in both Afghanistan and Iraq.
In an interview published in the Los Angeles Times on Wednesday, Gates said that some European allies were still geared to the type of combat envisioned by Cold War planners before the fall of the Soviet Union.
“I’m worried we’re deploying (military advisors) that are not properly trained and I’m worried we have some military forces that don’t know how to do counterinsurgency operations,” the newspaper quoted him as saying.
“Most of the European forces, NATO forces, are not trained in counterinsurgency. They were trained for the Fulda Gap,” said Gates, referring to the German region where a Soviet invasion of Western Europe was considered most likely.

Doesn’t the fact that these countries barely could scrape together peacekeepers for the Israel-Hezbollah war of a few summers ago suggest that these countries are reluctant to send troops into harm’s way even when the U.S. isn’t even involved? I’m reminded of one great illustrative quote from that time: “All the politicians are saying, ‘Great, great’ to the idea of a force, but no one is saying whose soldiers will be on the ground,” said one senior European official. “Everyone will volunteer to be in charge of the logistics in Cyprus.”

This is what’s truly disturbing about Barack Obama’s foreign policy vision — it sees ending the Iraq War as the Philosopher’s Stone that, once found, will turn all of our leaden overseas problems into golden opportunities.

The job of the press in a presidential election is to express skepticism. When John McCain argues for a continued U.S. presence, the press is right to hit him with the tough questions — how do we know that we’re actually building “sustainable stability”? How do we know that Iraq won’t fall apart the moment we leave? Are we just keeping the lid on a cauldron that is destined to boil over eventually? If the effort is futile, why keep spending blood and treasure?

But Barack Obama ought to encounter the same skepticism. And he isn’t. His supporters ought to be glad he’s getting asked about flag pins.

UPDATE: I think his misunderstanding of the motivation of NATO allies is a bigger issue than this gaffe, but perhaps it’s funnier:

“We need agricultural specialists in Afghanistan, people who can help them develop other crops than heroin poppies, because the drug trade in Afghanistan is what is driving and financing these terrorist networks. So we need agricultural specialists,” he said.
So far, so good.
“But if we are sending them to Baghdad, they’re not in Afghanistan,” Obama said.
Iraq has many problems, but encouraging farmers to grow food instead of opium poppies isn’t one of them. In Iraq, oil fields not poppy fields are a major source of U.S. technical assistance.