For Dems, it’s always ‘butter’ over ‘guns’

In the wake of the Obama Administration’s looming failure with its government health insurance and possibly its cap-and-trade proposals, it has made a grand splash on the international stage–at the United Nations in New York and the G-20 (formerly G-7) meeting in Pittsburgh. No one could fairly call Obama a tyrant, for he lacks a tyrant’s power, and he is certainly not acting like one (except for Honduras). When a tyrant runs into difficulties at home, he diverts attention by stirring up troubles abroad. But Obama is apparently contemplating reversing course in Afghanistan.

Like previous Democrats, President Obama’s international strategy seems rather to diminish than enlarge our world role. When he is not denigrating the previous administration or apologizing for his country, Obama is determined to build up the power and prestige of international organizations. Ostensibly aimed at curbing the aggressive designs of rogue nations like North Korea and Iran, the President’s real objective is to check the supposedly imperial ambitions of the United States.

Like failed presidential candidate George McGovern, Obama wants America to "come home" from its international responsibilities, dropped into its lap by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 and kept there by the Soviet Union’s drive for world domination. Liberal Democrats believe that almost all international "tensions" arise from either misunderstandings or America’s own failings.

When one puts this together with the pressures from domestic politics, we get retreat from international leadership. As liberal Democrats in Congress indicate their displeasure with Obama’s attempts to rescue its health care "reform" by reducing or masking its socialistic features, Obama may have found the tactic that will placate them.

Early on, Obama seemed to make good on his promise to give our efforts in Afghanistan the priority they have long deserved by a commitment of 40,000 troops with a new commander. However, liberal Democrats in Congress made it clear that they did not wish to continue our efforts there.

So when someone in the Beltway leaked to the Washington Post that the commanding general wants to ratchet up the total numbers to 100,000, the President suddenly announced that, until we have settled on our strategy and tactics, he cannot approve the request without more study. Friends, this was the "good war" that the bad Bush neglected for nation building in Iraq. Why the abrupt change?

I submit that, however forcefully Obama declared that he would prosecute the war in Afghanistan, his heart was never really in it. The truth is, the wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan were fought against the same enemy, often working in tandem with each other and always against the United States and the Western world. As Bin Laden is a terrorist without a government, Saddam Hussein was a terrorist with a government.

It was clever and useful for Obama to distinguish between the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, for it gave a patina of truth to his claim that his quarrel with Bush was tactical, not strategic. Obama needed only to accept the windup of the American campaign in Iraq, but Afghanistan turned out to be more difficult than he thought.

So now that the left wing of his political party (Obama’s wing) shows signs of restiveness over his domestic policy, that faction’s zealotry for socialism and indifference to the plight of other nations is combining to cause the biggest disaster for America since the fall of southeast Asia to Communism. That defeat, too, was a direct result of the left’s hostility to political freedom abroad and its disrespect for American honor.

Just as our retreat in Vietnam made meaningless the sacrifices of our fighting men in that long conflict, so those brave men and women who have served and continue to serve in harm’s way in Afghanistan face a similar prospect.

Lyndon Johnson was determined not to follow the example of his hero, Franklin Roosevelt, who shelved the New Deal in order to give priority to saving America from German and Japanese imperialism. The war in Vietnam was the "bitch" that Johnson felt he was cursed with but which he would not permit to delay his cherished Great Society.

Like LBJ, Obama would rather "transform" American society than attend to the common defense. Placing its faith in international organizations, this administration imagines that foreign threats will go away as long as our nation takes the socialistic course. We will pay for this folly.

Chickenhawk in Chief

Barack Obama scored big points during the 2008 campaign by reminding voters of his opposition to the war in Iraq in 2002 (when he was an Illinois State Senator without an actual vote). He called it "Bush's war of choice" and repeatedly spoke of its folly; later, as a United States Senator in 2006 and 2007, he voted against the Bush "surge" and consistently called for an immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces. At the same time, in an obvious effort to push his "tough on terrorism" credentials, Obama repeatedly criticized Bush for ignoring the all-important war in Afghanistan, and made it clear that as president, he would finish the job of destroying Al Qaeda there. "Afghanistan is a war of necessity, not of choice" he has said many times. Many conservatives (myself included) always suspected that Obama was using Afghanistan as a cudgel with which to beat Bush (and McCain) around the head and shoulders on the unpopular war in Iraq -- a calculated political move that was more about getting elected than it was about really winning in Afghanistan. Back in February when I was a guest on a John Andrews' talk show Backbone Radio, I talked about Obama's emerging foreign policy as one of "valuespolitik". When I was asked about Obama's plans for Afghanistan, I made the comment then that I believed Obama would never allow a growing war in Afghanistan to get in the way of his domestic agenda -- making the comparison to how LBJ tried to manage the war in Vietnam so as not to destroy his "Great Society" programs. Obama would temporize, stall, delay and find some reason to abandon the war, because it is clear that the fierce opposition to the war from Obama's left-wing political base would make having "guns and butter" not possible -- particularly for this president with his grand plans to remake American society.

I never saw making such a prediction as going out on a limb, of course, because I always saw Obama as a "chickenhawk" -- someone who talks tough about military action but never puts himself (or his interests) in the cross-hairs. I always knew that Obama's true goals were redistributionist, and that his primary objective was (and is) to remake America in a "kinder, gentler" image that removes the rough edges in favor of a safer place for union members, ACORN supporters and others needing protection from the jungle of American capitalism. Obama-the-opportunist used tough talk on Afghanistan to convince the American people into believing that he was up to the job. Like everything else in his campaign, it was pure manipulation.

But posturing never stands up to reality, and this month events on the ground in Afghanistan are going to push Obama to making a real decision on Afghanistan. General Stanley McChrystal was sent to Afghanistan to develop a "Patraeus-style" counterinsurgency plan, and to come back with a recommendation (and request) for the forces he needs to be successful. He has now done so. But based on comments made over the weekend by Obama on his round-robin of talk show appearances, the president is now hesitating on his commitment to finishing even the "war of necessity". My bet is that he will use the compromised Afghan national elections of the past two weeks to make a case for pulling back -- and that he will find some "middle-ground" approach that will reduce the number of troops in favor of reliance on "high-tech" weapons like pilot-less drones, cruise missiles and the like. An "offshore" war fighting strategy.

Leslie Gelb has an interesting take on Obama and Afghanistan in the Wall Street Journal this morning entitled "Obama's Befuddling Afghan Strategy". Gelb is no conservative, and supported Obama in the 2008 election. He seems to be confused by Obama's flip-flop on support for the mission in Afghanistan, though he also clearly understands that Obama's left-wing base wants an immediate withdrawal. "Americans are now confused and caught somewhere between remembering the president's insistence on Afghanistan's importance to U.S. security and rapidly rising pressure from his party to bring the troops home." For Gelb, however, "the president's failure in Afghanistan would be America's failure, and we cannot allow this to happen."

It is good that someone on the left understands that central point -- but it gives me little confidence that the president will not let our efforts in Afghanistan go down the proverbial rat hole. Temporizing on Afghanistan would be just like Obama-the-chickenhawk. And it is exactly what we should expect from a president who seeks accommodation with Iran, Russia and other states who manifestly do NOT have our interests at heart. Obama said he wanted to "reset" our relations with the rest of the world and he is certainly doing so. We are now forsaking our friends and embracing our enemies, and are now on the verge of abandoning a critical component of the war on terror.

That certainly is change -- but not the kind I can believe in.

Iran's election shows Obama is a lot like Bush

Barack Obama apparently has more in common with his reviled predecessor, George W. Bush, than anyone on the left would like to believe. We've seen, of course, some grounding in Obama's national security policy since the election that has prompted him -- and other Democrats -- to maintain many of the Bush era's tactical policies in the war on terror (oops -- I meant "the fight against man-made disasters".) And while it true that he has recently sidled left on many issues -- releasing Gitmo detainees to Bermuda and Palau so that they can bask in the sun, for example -- the Obama administration has not gone nearly as far in rolling back the Bush national security regime than the left-wing base of the party has wanted. But the Obama administration's response to the Iranian elections shows a different kind of "Bushism", one that is less about policy and more about temperament and judgment. It seems that Obama's tepid response to the protests and the obvious fraud in the results may be a response to the president's simple inability to adjust his strategy to new information on the ground. As Robert Kagan writes in the Washington Post today, Obama has a plan for dealing with Iran, and it is based on having a stable leadership in place:

One of the great innovations in the Obama administration's approach to Iran, after all, was supposed to be its deliberate embrace of the Tehran rulers' legitimacy. In his opening diplomatic gambit, his statement to Iran on the Persian new year in March, Obama went out of his way to speak directly to Iran's rulers, a notable departure from George W. Bush's habit of speaking to the Iranian people over their leaders' heads. As former Clinton official Martin Indyk put it at the time, the wording was carefully designed "to demonstrate acceptance of the government of Iran."

This approach had always been a key element of a "grand bargain" with Iran. The United States had to provide some guarantee to the regime that it would no longer support opposition forces or in any way seek its removal. The idea was that the United States could hardly expect the Iranian regime to negotiate on core issues of national security, such as its nuclear program, so long as Washington gave any encouragement to the government's opponents. Obama had to make a choice, and he made it. This was widely applauded as a "realist" departure from the Bush administration's quixotic and counterproductive idealism.

It would be surprising if Obama departed from this realist strategy now, and he hasn't...Whatever his personal sympathies may be, if he is intent on sticking to his original strategy, then he can have no interest in helping the opposition. His strategy toward Iran places him objectively on the side of the government's efforts to return to normalcy as quickly as possible, not in league with the opposition's efforts to prolong the crisis.

So it appears that the tail (Obama's original strategy of engaging Iran's hard-line government in diplomacy) is now wagging the dog -- namely the unprecedented grass-roots democratic movement that is collectively risking life and limb on the streets of Tehran. The goal of the U.S. government should be to encourage and empower true democracy in Iran -- not to legitimize the totalitarian Islamic regime that is in power. By the luck of the Iranian regime's sheer arrogance, that opportunity now exists. But Obama is too vested in his original course of action to change, and can't seem to see that a new approach might now be warranted. He's following a strategy that is almost certain to fail; most people can clearly see that the prospects of real progress with the theocracy in Iran is poor at best. It's a double down on a bad hand.

The parallels with Bush in Iraq in 2005-2006 are striking. During the height of the insurgency and the sectarian strife that followed, Bush stuck far too long with the failed "attrition" strategy of Gens. Abizaid and Casey, preferring to double down on a bad hand of his own. The tactics of the American military in Iraq were clearly not working; month-after-month the evidence was coming in that things were getting worse and not better. Bush knew that his strategy in Iraq was failing, and yet seemed paralyzed to make the kind of strong, decisive decision to change that he was known for. Not until early 2007 did the surge take root with real changes in tactics, strategy and personnel.  For far too long, Bush didn't have the judgment and temperament to look closely at the results of his previous policies.  The result was that the successful surge of 2007-2008 could have likely been done earlier,  in 2004-2005, with much better results for both America and Iraq.

Obama is in the midst of a similar paralysis; he needs a "surge" on Iran, but he is afraid to tear up his script. His policy of "negotiating without preconditions" with Iran is a cornerstone of his foreign policy plan, and his deep belief in the power of his own diplomatic skills in getting some trans formative change from Iran is dominant. Its where hubris meets naivete -- and its a dangerous place for America to be.

Obama is no friend of Israel

Last year I wrote a piece that examined the stark dichotomy in political views between American and Israeli Jews. American Jews vote overwhelmingly for Democrats, and see liberal policies -- both domestic and foreign -- as largely consistent with their world view. Indeed, in the 2008 election, 78% of American Jews voted for Obama -- an outcome that was a full 10 points better than most of the pre-election polling. Contrasted with the pre-election polling of Israeli Jews, which preferred John McCain by better than 2:1, and it is clear that their is a wide gulf between the reflexive idealism of American Jews and the sober realism of their Israeli counterparts. Today we have proof that Israeli Jews understood Obama better than those in America. In a widely anticipated speech today in Cairo, Obama gave his version of Kennedy's famous "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech, pandering to Muslims by showing that he "feels their pain", apologizing for a litany of American sins, while drawing a stark moral relativism between Israeli and Palestinian violence. Indeed, Obama has now made clear that he sees Israel as just as much to blame for the continuing violence in the West Bank and Gaza, and has openly called for a "two state" solution to be the stated policy of the United States. Before he left on his trip to the Middle East -- where he pointedly chose not to visit Israel -- Obama called for a freeze on settlements in the West Bank -- a message he conveyed directly to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last month.

For anyone paying attention, Obama's statements toward Israel are chilling -- and reflect the generally accepted belief among the left that the Palestinians are the victims and the Israelis are the aggressors.  Obama is quickly proving that old adage: with friends like these, who needs enemies?

There was much to dislike about Obama's message in Cairo, where he attempted to draw linkages between our Judeo-Christian history and Islam. It was pandering at its finest. Further, he gave this speech in Egypt -- one of the most repressive regimes in the Middle East, and spent a good portion of the speech trying to explain away our efforts to bring democracy to millions in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was yet another example of the leader of our nation taking great pains to minimize the good and noble sacrifices we have made in the name of freedom, while attempting to curry favor with regimes that continue to repress their people.

To American Jews I can only say this: you've been hoodwinked. Though you say overwhelmingly that the security of Israel is important to you, you have voted for a man who actively supports the appeasement of your terrorist enemies. By voting for Barack Obama, you have actually created a new existential threat -- that of an American administration focused on Palestinian rights and grievances, and committed to diplomacy with Iran and Syria. In one presidential election, you have done great damage to Israel -- a nation that you claim to love and cherish.

One can only hope that Benjamin Netanyahu has the moral courage to defy Obama and his appeasers; to remain steadfast in facing down the threats from Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran. It is Israel's only real hope for survival.

Is this the best we can do?

Much is being made of the Dick Cheney vs. Barack Obama "debate" now going on in the media over national security. The Wall Street Journal has it on the front page today, after Cheney and Obama gave dueling speeches yesterday -- Obama from the rotunda of the National Archives and Cheney from the American Enterprise Institute. As has been his consistent message, Obama again reiterated his view that the Bush administration had "gone off course" in using enhanced interrogation techniques and off-shore prisons, saying that he is seeking to restore "the power of our most fundamental values". The former Vice President, meanwhile is having none of it. Calling the Bush policies "legal, essential, justified, successful and the right thing to do", he again took on the administration's critics by pointing out that "After the most lethal and devastating terrorist attack ever, seven and a half years without a repeat is not a record to be rebuked or scorned, much less criminalized. It is a record to be continued until the danger has passed."

This is an exceedingly vital debate. President Obama has made decisions on the basis of politics that I believe are putting our nation at risk. He caved to the left in precipitously deciding to close Guantanamo without any alternative plan; now it turns out that many of the most hated Bush policies -- using military tribunals and indefinite detention -- will continue. Why? Because more than half of the remaining Guantanamo detainees are too dangerous to try in court or to release back into the civilized world. But where will they go once Guantanamo is closed? No one has a clue, because nobody in Congress wants these lethal prisoners in their backyard. In the halls of Congress, NIMBY is the rule -- unless, of course, it's pork.

The problem for those who think that Obama is on a dangerous path, however, is that it is Dick Cheney leading the charge. Where is the spokesperson for the opposition to this president who isn't past his prime and considered a cross between an "angry white man" and Darth Vader?

We know, of course, that John McCain -- the Republican candidate for president just a short 6 months ago who got more than 44 million votes in the election -- is of little help on this issue, having campaigned himself against enhanced interrogation and for the closing of Guantanamo. So he's been -- by necessity and by temperament -- silent in this debate. But where are the others? Are there any conservatives who have a future (as opposed to a past) in politics willing and able to stand up and say to the nation what it already suspects? That Obama's inexperience and desire to "make everyone happy" is putting us at risk? That his world view -- and thus his emerging foreign policy -- is dangerously naive?

You have to give Obama credit -- he certainly likes to talk as if he is reasoned and balanced in his approach, that he has command of the vital issues that face us as a nation. He is nothing if not outwardly confident. But this president doesn't deal well with specifics and facts. He's long relied on soaring rhetoric that sounds great but says nothing. Like many liberals, he makes statements of opinion as if they are fact, saying it in such a way that it seems beyond dispute -- but offering no evidence to back it up. As the WSJ recounts in its lead editorial today: The President went out of his way to insist that its existence "likely created more terrorists around the world than it ever detained," albeit without offering any evidence, and that it "has weakened American security," again based only on assertion. What is a plain fact is that in the seven-plus years that Gitmo has been in operation the American homeland has not been attacked.

It is also a plain fact -- and one the President acknowledged -- that many of the detainees previously released, often under intense pressure from Mr. Obama's anti-antiterror allies, have returned to careers as Taliban commanders and al Qaeda "emirs." The New York Times reported yesterday on an undisclosed Pentagon report that no fewer than one in seven detainees released from Gitmo have returned to jihad.

Mr. Obama called all of this a "mess" that he had inherited, but in truth the mess is of his own haphazard design. He's the one who announced the end of Guantanamo without any plan for what to do with, or where to put, KSM and other killers. Now he's found that his erstwhile allies in Congress and Europe want nothing to do with them. Tell us again why Gitmo should be closed?

President Obama is making things up out of whole cloth and peddling them as fact; he is tremendously vulnerable on these issues, because what he says doesn't pass the simple smell test. Why is it Dick Cheney -- a man whose career is over -- shooting the arrows at the president and his party over this?

Is this really the best we can do?