Sobriety

The panty bomber slips by Obama and suddenly critics emerge from everywhere, lemming-like, all targeting BO’s back side, even some Democrats, as if they have suddenly come upon something birthed by original insight, a first. Hardly. They’re the last to catch on, obviously failing to read this blog.

This latest lapse in security is a surprise? The masses elected a community organizer as president. What did they expect? Oh, we forgot, that wars would end when he wants them to, including the one on terror. That’s what he told everybody who would listen. As one observer put it, "The electorate voted in effect to repudiate the previous eight years and seemed genuinely under the delusion ....that war is all a bit of a bore, and they’d rather the gov’t spend the next eight years doing to health care and the economy what they were previously doing to jihadist camps in Waziristan."

Unlike the Rebel guerilla Nathan Bedford Forest, BO doesn’t "put the skeer in them fellas". Our enemies know this guy is a push over. Muslim thugs know this guy is madder at his predecessors, his allies, than he is at them. His feckless apologies for great statesmen of the recent past, including Roosevelt, Truman, Churchill, and Eisenhower, have dismayed America’s allies and delighted its rivals (and turned our stomach). It has been a year of naive amateurism, exactly as we warned it would be. And at the end of it, as Mark Steyn puts it, "The jihad sent America a thank-you note by way of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s underwear: Hey, thanks for all the outreach! But we’re still gonna kill you."

What is US foreign policy? I know, I know. It has been a fiasco. A big joke. But what is it in the minds of its makers? Let’s take a look.

Fact: BO’s core assumption re foreign policy is that the great powers today share common interests. Relations among them need "no longer be seen as a zero sum game," Obama has argued. The Obama Doctrine is about "win-win" and "getting to "yes." The new "mission" of the United States according to Sect of State Hillary is to be the great convener of nations, gathering the powers to further common interests and seek common solutions to the world’s problems. Right. It is on this basis that the administration has sought to "reset" relations with Russia, embark on a new policy of "strategic reassurance" with China, and in general seek what Clinton has called a "new era of engagement based on common interests, shared values, and mutual respect." Begin to connect the dots?

Have a 7-Up, settle your stomach. We’re not done.

The problem naturally is that throughout the world’s contested regions, an American tilt toward former adversaries unavoidably comes at the expense of its friends. From Robert Kagan, senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, "‘As it happens, the vast majority of those allies happen to be democracies, while the great powers being accommodated happen to be autocracies. The Obama administration’s apparent eschewing of the democracy agenda is not just a matter of abandoning the allegedly idealistic notion of democracy promotion in failed or transition states. It is not choosing not to promote democracy in Egypt or Pakistan or Afghanistan. And it is not just about whether to continue to press Russia and China for reform—which was part of the old post–World War II strategy, continued under post–Cold War administrations. The Obama administration’s new approach raises the question of whether the United States will continue to favor democracies, including allied democracies, in their disputes with the great-power autocracies, or whether the United States will now begin to adopt a more neutral posture in an effort to get to ‘yes’ with the great autocratic powers. In this new mode, the United States may be unhinging itself from the alliance structures it had erected in the post–World War II strategy.’" Connect the dots?

OK. From the outreach to Iran and the Muslim world, to the call for the elimination of all nuclear weapons, to the desire for a "reset" in relations with Russia, the central point of Obama’s diplomacy is that America is now different. It is no longer choosing sides. And, therefore, it is time for other nations to cooperate.

Are you kidding me?

I recall a comment from our nurseryman friend here in Marin, taken in by this cult figure. Obama, he gushed, "is a dreamer."

Truer words were never spoken.

Robert Craven