A dangerously deluded foreign policy

Say what you will about Bill Clinton's foreign policy shortcomings, but for the most part he had the good sense not to squander Ronald Reagan's legacy of peace through strength. By contrast, Barack Obama's foreign policy seems to be predicated on a boundless faith in his own persuasive powers and the naïve notion that our international antagonists are merely misunderstood. Not since Jimmy Carter has American foreign policy been so obsequious or short-sighted.

Rather than isolate Argentine menace Hugo Chavez, President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have managed the remarkable feat of backing Chavez's acolyte in Honduras, ousted president Manuel Zelaya, while still eliciting ridicule from Latin America's most notorious thug.

Zelaya, who sought to defy Honduras' constitutional prohibition against a president seeking multiple terms, was duly prosecuted by his country's attorney general, removed from office by its supreme court, lawfully replaced by a president from his own political party, and finally deported when his supporters threatened national insurrection.

Obama and Secretary Clinton — standing alongside Chavez, Cuba's Castro brothers, and the Organization of American States — want to restore Zelaya to power and chastise the Honduran government for adhering to the rule of law.

Apparently Obama longs for the bad ol' days when the Castro boys and their Soviet Russian patrons established communist dictatorships in Central America.

Or perhaps he believes that Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin is just a harmless fuzzball, rather than an erstwhile KGB officer who laments the fall of the Iron Curtain. That would explain why last year, as a candidate, Obama's initial reaction to the Russian invasion of neighboring Georgia was to urge both sides to "show restraint."

Worse still as president Obama courts Russia's cooperation by abruptly canceling plans to deploy anti-missile defenses in Poland and the Czech Republic. He didn't revoke these promises in exchange for Russian cooperation. He simply did it and hoped that Russia would cooperate — just as his climate change policy is to disembowel America's economy and hope China, India and others do the same to theirs.

The Poles and Czechs endured decades of Russian Soviet oppression. We should help empower them to defend themselves. Instead Obama's policy is a slap in the face — no matter how his administration spins it. To the Russians and the Iranians, against whose developing ballistic missile program the defenses offered protection, Obama's pusillanimous maneuver further demonstrates weakness.

Russian president Dmitri Medvedev applauded Obama's decision, just as a shrewd negotiator insincerely compliments the strength of an adversary he recognizes to be weak. The Kiev Post explained, "Russian diplomacy is largely a zero-sum game and relies on projecting hard power to force gains." That is, Russia plays hardball and plays for keeps.

In his speech to the U.N., Obama tossed about platitudes: "the yearning for peace is universal" and "the most powerful weapon in our arsenal is the hope of human beings." But "yearning for peace" is not universal — certainly not among governing authorities in places like Russia, China, Iran and North Korea who routinely trample "the hope of human beings" in their own country and in others.

"Two great threats facing the survival of the modern liberal West," cautions Lee Harris in The Suicide of Reason, are "exaggerated confidence in the power of reason" and "profound underestimation of the forces of fanaticism."

Because most western nations haven't faced a direct threat to their placid existence in more than a generation, we too readily forget that the majority of the world's inhabitants live their entire lives governed not by reason and rule of law but by the law of the jungle and the iron fist of an oppressive government.

Reagan understood that regimes that threaten, attack and oppress peaceful neighbors are indeed "evil" and that they can be deterred only by strength and determination. Much of the world criticized him when he stood up to "the evil empire," when he walked away from arms deals that would have weakened us and strengthened our adversaries, and most notably when he exhorted Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev to "tear down this wall."

Today we know that Reagan's critics cowered because they lacked his vision.

History is replete with leaders like Obama whose sincere desire for peace blinded them to devious designs of others. Seeking peace is laudable, but lasting peace is rarely attained by those who appear desperate for it. Mark Hillman served as Colorado senate majority leader and state treasurer. To read more or comment, go to www.MarkHillman.com.

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.

Straight talk on Gitmo, 'torture'

Last year many Americans decided to support a change in presidential administration at least partly because they believed that the United States government was running an abusive prison at Guantanamo Bay and torturing suspected Islamic terrorists. The case for both horror stories was shaky at best, and now we have an eminent biographer to thank for demolishing them once and for all. Arthur Herman, whose subjects have ranged from Winston Churchill and Mohandas Gandhi to the Scottish Enlightenment and Sen. Joseph McCarthy, has written "The Gitmo Myth and the Torture Canard" for Commentary, a monthly publication of the American Jewish Committee. In 13 densely packed pages Herman manages to discredit the liberal fantasy that has tried to pass itself off as a serious critique of the Bush Administration’s policies for dealing with America’s enemies.

President Barack Obama still has not closed the Guantanamo prison, partly because it has been no simple task to transfer dangerous men to other facilities and doubtless from the knowledge that no abuse ever took place there. The success of the campaign owes more than anything else to the efforts of the misnamed Center for Constitutional Rights, headed by Michael Ratner, which disseminated misinformation repeatedly.

In fact, only three persons were ever water boarded, a technique that falls short of torture, while the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point found that 73 percent of the detainees were a "demonstrated threat" to Americans.

It is well to remember, Herman writes, that "the detention facility was created in the wake of a declaration by Congress in September 2001 that ‘all necessary and appropriate force’ should be used ‘against those nations, organizations, or persons’ [emphasis added] responsible for the attacks of September ll."

No one had to read secret documents to learn that Gitmo inmates were accorded every courtesy (and then some) to accommodate their religious and cultural needs during their long confinement. They were so well fed they gained weight. Meanwhile, some tried to commit suicide while others threw human urine and excrement at prison guards.

Those supposedly torture-rationalizing memos written by John Yoo (for which service to his country congressional Democrats would like him prosecuted) were actually written to spell out limits so that the understandable zeal with which Central Intelligence Agency officers interrogated terrorists was tempered by constitutional and legal guidelines. As Herman observes, those memos were better characterized as anti torture, rather than pro torture.

In any case, the waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation techniques were not used until after the memos were written. And when they were used they yielded high value information, particularly the plot to blow up airliners flying out of Los Angeles.

And remember the Abu Ghraib controversy? There was never any doubt that those abuses were entirely the work of the "night shift," as the Schlesinger Committee report concluded, not attributable to any high official of the Bush Administration, as was so often alleged. The least temperate critics were the late Sen. Edward Kennedy, who said that Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein’s torture chambers had reopened under American management, and Sen. Dick Durbin, who compared Abu Ghraib to Stalin’s Gulag Archipelago and Pol Pot’s death camps in Cambodia.

Unfortunately, the propaganda campaign influenced the federal courts, which ruled that detainees were entitled to due process rights, thereby second guessing the military judgment that men bearing arms on a battle field were necessarily enemies of the United States. Nearly 400 men have been released, Herman reports, at least 18 of which returned to the battlefield and 43 are listed as "suspected" of going back to the fight. In fact, one killed a judge in Afghanistan.

Now Attorney General Eric Holder is investigating whether CIA officers who interrogated suspects are guilty of violating the law, ignoring the fact that these men were (and are) at war with the very idea of the rule of law and therefore out of its protection.

We are in danger, in fact, of abandoning the war on terror, returning to the disastrous policy of the Clinton Administration, which treated terrorism as a nuisance rather than the full-fledged adversary of civilization that it is.

It is more than a little ironic that the same persons who are so solicitous of the nonexistent constitutional rights of our enemies have so little trouble making blank paper of the Constitution when it comes to governing American citizens who desire only to raise decent families and engage in honest commercial enterprise.

'Strongest Tribe' well worth reading

Like most news junkies who had followed the war in Iraq on a daily basis for six years, I thought I was pretty well informed. However when I read Bing West’s The Strongest Tribe I was stunned at how much I had missed- not just unreported or misreported events but also how to think about those events in balanced perspective. Soon after the lightning overthrow of Saddam the mainstream media began to turn against a war they had never much liked in the first place. As the war ground on their reporting disproportionately revolved around suicide bombers in Iraq and grieving families in America. Most books that promised “deeper analysis”- even well written ones like Bob Woodward ‘s trilogy- revealed a clear liberal bias and left us yearning for some Paul Harvey to tell us “the rest of the story”.

We find such a person in Bing West whose book is long on “on the ground” reporting and short on political opinion. It radiates an evenhandedness that gives a reader great confidence in its veracity.

West was a career military officer who distinguished himself as an authority on counterinsurgency warfare in Viet Nam. That war produced relatively few good books, but West’s classic The Village is one of them. Later he would serve as an Assistant Secretary of Defense under Ronald Reagan.

Published in 2008 the book covers the war from the beginning through the success of the “Surge” which snatched victory from the jaws of defeat. West employs a strictly chronological approach and avoids those annoying back and forth digressions that confuse readers.

West comes down hard on both civilian and higher military leadership who through most of the war utterly failed to define a unified and coherent American mission in Iraq. Whether it was Defense (Rumsfeld) vs. State (Powell) in Washington or their counter-parts (General Abizaid vs “Proconsul” Bremer) in Iraq their conflict and confusion over strategy profoundly undermined mission effectiveness on the ground. Underlying this confusion was an American naiveté and general cluelessness concerning cultural/historical and political realities in Iraq.

The State Dept. seemed to think that giving Iraqis a few PowerPoint presentations on tolerance/diversity, constitution writing, and Roberts Rules of Order could swiftly transform their country into an up and running self-defending democracy.

Having achieved their quick battlefield victory a la Afghanistan, the Pentagon wanted to get out of Iraq as soon as possible, and while waiting to do so corralled its soldiers in large isolated bases from which the troops “commuted to work”.

Having no coherent plans for “post-victory” operations both Defense and State bought into the bizarre “Light Footprint” doctrine which suggested that the very sight of American soldiers so inflamed young Iraqi males that they immediately ran to the nearest Al-Qaeda recruiting office to become instant jihadists.

All this confusion went on for three years (2003-2006) during which Iraq spiraled downward into chaos and the American people soured on the war.

The great strength of West’s book rests on his frequent and lengthy stays in Iraq mostly spent embedded with American troops. He persuasively demonstrates that local American commanders and local Iraqi leaders (notably the Sheiks of Anbar Province) figured out what was wrong and what was needed long before the politicans and military brass in either Washington or Baghdad.

Finally a senior military leader emerged who grasped the validity of these local viewpoints. General David Petraeus saw clearly that victory was impossible without local Iraqi support, and that support was absolutely dependent on Americans providing the people with the security and stability that would allow them to inform on and fight back against the detested foreign fighters of Al-Qaeda who were terrorizing them by systematically murdering their men and raping their women.

Petraeus took a strategy that had worked for a number of local American commanders and applied it country-wide. He took his troops out of their isolated bases and had them “move in” with the people and stay. Beginning in the deadly “Sunni Triangle” he also authorized local American commanders to recruit, arm, and pay local Iraqi males (“Sons of Iraq”) as fighting auxiliaries to the American forces. Thus empowered local leaders (mostly tribal sheiks) courageously faced murderous Al-Qaeda reprisals and blessed joint combat operations against a suddenly exposed and then decimated enemy whose power rapidly melted away in the face of this new turn of events.

Petraeus success in selling this new strategy which was the critical element in the success of the “Surge” was absolutely dependent on his views becoming known to key National Security Council staffers who orchestrated an “end run” around the Pentagon and the State Dept- both highly resistant to any notion of increased troop levels.

While West praises the gutsy decision of a politically battered President Bush to authorize the “Surge” despite the rampant and poisonous “defeatism” pervading Washington, he severely faults him for his passivity and unwillingness to challenge senior Cabinet and military leaders during the long period (over two years) when the situation in Iraq was clearly deteriorating. Citing Lincoln, FDR, and Truman as examples, West correctly insists that Presidents must be willing to aggressively intervene and even fire people when a war is obviously going badly. For too long George W. Bush failed that test.

Even more severely does West condemn the rank hypocrisy of Democratic leaders like Reid, Pelosi and Murtha who endlessly chanted their “support for our troops” while doing everything in their power to undermine the mission of those troops and also giving aid and comfort to the enemy by publicly announcing that “the war was lost” when in fact it was about to be won.

The real heroes of West’s book are American soldiers. Their valor uncelebrated by their country’s media, their mission undercut by politicians, and often poorly served by their own higher leadership, they fought against a savage and fanatical enemy in deadly battle spaces like Fallujah street by street, house to house, often room to room with incredible skill and bravery. West sternly reminds us that “They are not victims; they are Warriors”. Their individual stories- the best part of the book- will fill your heart with pain and pride.

The title of the book comes from the remark of a Sunni Sheik when West asked him why the top Al-Qaeda leader in Fallujah had fled the city in a woman’s dress. The Sheik pointed to a passing Marine patrol and in respectful tones replied “Because they are the Strongest Tribe”.

West closes his book expressing concerns about the future of the “Strongest Tribe” in a country whose martial virtues are being drained by the poisonous atmosphere of political division and cultural warfare.

We all should worry about a day when- like contemporary Europe- there will be nothing worth fighting for and no more volunteering young warriors even if there was.

William Moloney’s columns have appeared in the Wall St Journal, USA Today, Washington Post, Washington Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, Baltimore Sun, Rocky Mountain News and Denver Post.

Why Obama isn't trusted

Dear Mr. President: I believe I can help you understand why the American people are rejecting your efforts at health care reform and why you have lost the trust of so many. The following quote comes from a letter you wrote to me on February 26, 2009; “Michelle joins me in remembering Staff Sergeant Hager, who we lost on February 23, 2007, and honoring him and all the men and women in uniform who carry forward his brave mission.”

Mr. President, you did not lose Staff Sergeant Hager, his mother and I did. In fact, my son played a significant role in what became the turning point in Iraq, the Anbar Awakening. Every time you were asked about the surge you opposed the effort and claimed they would fail. My son gave his life and our forces saw great success. Throughout your campaign I sought to have a meeting with you and offered to arrange a meeting with 25 Gold Star Dads, “any where, any time.” My efforts were rejected by you and your staff.

Mr. President, it is my belief we have but one true possession as human beings, that is our personal word. When a person speaks they either speak honestly or falsely. There is no middle ground. You own everything you say. We all own our words.

Sir, you change your words to meet your needs as you see those needs in the moment. Americans know they cannot, they dare not, trust your words. It is that lack of trust that makes me angry when I hear you claim this fact is true or this law will work for everyone. Your words are neither honest or trustworthy, based upon results.

Mr. President, if you desire a better American I suggest the following simple correction to your presentation. First, stop claiming 47 million Americans are uninsured. There may be 47 million persons in the United States without medical insurance, but many millions of those are illegal aliens. Giving that group equal status with hard working American citizens may make political sense for some in your party, but that is a glaring example of your false words. We know you know the truth, and yet you would rather make false claims than be honest with us all.

Second, and most importantly, stand before the American people and make the following pledge. And having made the pledge, ask every member of Congress to join you.

“I believe the major legislation I am about to sign will improve our country and our future. It will not increase the national debt nor will the middle class face any increase in fees or taxes directly or indirectly caused by this bill. Health care will improve for all and no American will see a reduction in quality or availability of care. If these facts prove to be wrong and this legislation fails to deliver as I claim, I will resign my office as will my Vice President and the Speaker of the House. We will turn over control to those who opposed us as they were in fact right.”

Mr. President take responsibility for your words. And having taken that responsibility, act on the behalf of all Americans, not just those with whom you agree. The anger in America comes not from racial animus or ideology. It comes from being worn out by lies and spin. I am tired of asking for a five minute call from any Democratic leader in Congress or from you. America is waking up and you may not like the music we have selected. You can either start being honest or keep wasting your words, the only possession you really have.

Sincerely, Kris Hager, Gold Star Dad.