Europe's Nobel peaceniks handcuff Obama

The Nobel Peace Prize has always been a reflection of the political inclinations of the Norwegian Nobel Committee – a group of five former lawmakers and politicians from one of Europe’s most liberal countries. The list of winners over the past two decades include Al Gore, Jimmy Carter, Kofi Anan and Yasser Arafat, and reads more like a political commitment to left-wing causes than a sober award for promoting real peace in the world. This year’s award to Barack Obama is all that – and more. In fact, for the first time the Nobel Committee has managed a twofer: it has rewarded someone who shares its goal of diplomacy “first, last and always”, while at the same time placing a substantial set of symbolic handcuffs around the U.S. president’s ability to use force in the defense of American interests – including the war in Afghanistan. In bestowing the Peace Prize, the Norwegian Nobel Committee said this about Barack Obama:

Obama has as President created a new climate in international politics. Multilateral diplomacy has regained a central position, with emphasis on the role that the United Nations and other international institutions can play.

For Europe, Obama thus represents a real breakthrough: an American president who fancies himself as a “citizen of the world”, who has spent his first nine months rejecting the notion of “American exceptionalism”, and who seems to truly believe in the transformative potential for talking through even the most intractable problems. After eight years of a Bush Administration that was committed body and soul to American interests and security, Barack Obama represents a leader more interested in compromise than conflict, and who believes that American national interests are largely indistinguishable from those of the international community.

It would be a mistake, however, to view the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Obama as simply a rejection of the Bush years – or as just a pat on the back to America for electing such a cosmopolitan “man of the world”. The decision of the Nobel Committee to make award Obama was influenced heavily by the President’s commitment to a core value of the European peacenik movement – nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament. The elimination of all nuclear weapons is an idealism based on the utility of diplomacy – even with rogue states such as North Korea and Iran – and is the logical extension of Europe’s multilateral engagement strategy. As Agot Valle, a Norwegian politician and member of the Nobel Committee said in a phone interview with the Wall Street Journal after the announcement,"…this was primarily an award on his work on, and commitment to, nuclear disarmament -- and his dialogue.”

But it is really more than just about Obama’s willingness to talk. Rather, there is something more strategic involved: an attempt to restrict Obama’s range of decisions in the critical reassessment of the U.S. commitment to Afghanistan. According to Valle, the Nobel Committee reached its decision on the Obama award at their final meeting on October 5. It was thus no secret that the Obama Administration was in the midst of a full scale review of General Stanley McChrystal’s request for 40,000 additional U.S. soldiers in an expansion of the U.S. mission. Nor was it a secret that Vice President Joe Biden and others in the Administration were openly lobbying for a change in U.S. strategy that would dramatically reduce the American footprint in Afghanistan in favor of a targeted “offshore” force that would be used for surgical strikes against terrorist targets. The Nobel Committee clearly also knows that in the wake of an all-out focus on health care reform, the Obama Administration has let public support for the Afghan war drift; the latest polling shows that less than half of America supports the war that Obama himself once called “necessary” for America’s long-term security. The Norwegians know that Obama is wavering on Afghanistan, and that the Peace Prize could be an effective leverage point in convincing him to radically reduce – or even end – the U.S. war there.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee understands that awarding Obama the Peace Prize will appeal to the President’s own image as a transformational figure, and will serve to heighten the already stratospheric confidence he has in his ability to alter the status quo ante. Obama’s own belief in the power of his words is well known. Now, with the Nobel Prize in hand, he has a validation that Europe also sees him as The One. The net effect of this will put Obama in a tough position as he addresses America’s security concerns in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran and elsewhere. With little more than a press release, the Nobel Committee has achieved what Europe has been trying to do for a generation: it has handcuffed the American president with the imprimatur of “Peacemaker”, narrowing the options for unilateral action in the process. For the peaceniks of Europe, awarding Obama the Nobel was a true masterstroke of preventive medicine.

The Nobel Committee has thus given the world's most prestigious award for peace to the American commander-in-chief in a time of war. Can the Nobel Peace Prize winner really escalate the war in Afghanistan? Or, for that matter, order a military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities in the event that the current round of diplomacy fails? Even before the Prize, there was obviously much doubt as to whether Obama would make such tough choices. Now, it seems even more unlikely.

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?

Speak softly and carry a limp stick

Way back in July, 2005 -- just days after the deadly terrorist attack on the London Transport system that killed 51 people -- I wrote a post at my blog entitled Britain's Homeless. The post was prompted by a report issued by the Royal Institute of International Affairs that linked the London attack to British support of the Iraq war, which the report's authors claim has made "Britain a more likely target for terrorism, claiming that there is “no doubt” that the 'invasion has enhanced propaganda, recruitment and fund-raising for al-Qaeda'. Unfortunately, in the almost four years since that post little has changed in Britain. Con Coughlin has recently written a provocative piece in the U.K. Telegraph entitled "Britain is fighting a war -- and we are too soft on our enemies". He cites that fact that there is growing evidence of the complicitness of UK Muslims in the war on terror that has put UK military lives in danger -- and that this information has been suppressed by UK authorities for fear of -- you guessed it -- inciting Muslim anger:

The active involvement of radical British Muslims in the Afghan insurgency has led senior officers to claim that they are engaged in a "surreal mini-civil war" in Afghanistan. And yet, for all the compelling evidence that British-based Islamist radicals are actively participating in a jihad against Britain and its coalition allies, the Government, together with those who have opposed our involvement in the War on Terror from the start, seems determined to give the Islamist radicals the benefit of the doubt.

Even when incontrovertible proof is found that British Muslims are aiding and abetting the enemy in Afghanistan and elsewhere, the Government's instinct is to try to cover up their involvement, for fear of further inflaming Islamist sensitivities.

Twice in the past year I have been admonished by our military establishment for revealing details about the support British sympathisers are providing to the Afghan insurgency, whether it involves actually fighting alongside the Taliban or providing them with the means to kill and maim British personnel. Officials did not question the reports' veracity. On both occasions, I was told that it was simply not helpful to expose such details, as they might cause offence to the Muslim community, or encourage Islamist radicals to intimidate British soldiers returning from combat.

This kind of thinking is appeasement, pure and simple. If we just be "nice to them" they will certainly leave us alone, won't they? Speak softly and carry a limp stick. I wonder whether the people of Britain are really as dumb as the UK government apparently thinks they are?

Tony Blair, to his credit, was steadfast in calling out the threat of Islamic terrorism and the importance of being honest about the nature of the forces working against us. In an important speech he gave recently to the Council on Global Affairs that I wrote about last month, Blair said that the "(radical terrorist" ideology, as a movement within Islam, has to be defeated. It is incompatible not with "the West" but with any society of open and tolerant people and that in particular means the many open and tolerant Muslims."

Alas, Tony Blair is no longer in power. In his place is Gordon Browne, a leader invested in accommodation who seems to be afraid of his own shadow. And lest you think that this is just a British problem, you should think again. The same policies of appeasement are winding their way through the Obama administration: We move to close Guantanamo without a reasonable alternative, we unilaterally give away our ability to even threaten the use of enhanced interrogation of terrorist detainees, and we release selective memos and photographs that put the worst light possible on America's effort to protect itself. It is at the core of the left's "shared values" strategy: part self-flagellation as a way of purging guilt, part moral high ground for the purpose of showing the new face of our kinder, gentler foreign policy. For Barack Obama and his administration, it is clearly the most important part of America improving its image in the eyes of the world.

If this makes you feel safer, there is a bridge I have to sell you...

Sorry for saving the world

One of the most frustrating things about the left is that they seem to have little use for history and even less regard for objective facts. Facts have little use when you just "know" -- in your gut and with every fiber of your being -- that you are right. Emotion trumps rationality every time. How well policies work is always less important than how they make you feel. Try telling a liberal, for example, that the evidence is clear that socialism in Europe has led to flat economic growth, falling birth rates and a 1970s-style economic and social malaise, and you will get a retort about social justice, the moral imperative of universal health care and the "progressive enlightenment" of European environmental policies. On the left, its better to be enlightened than it is to be rich, I guess. In an academic exercise, such tripe is irritating but tolerable. But when such denial of reality becomes the dominant force behind U.S. government policy -- on almost every issue of importance -- it is time to take notice.  I've written many times that Barack Obama lives in a "parallel universe" inhabited by lots of feel-good imagery, moral clarity and social justice. This is the universe of Europe, and his recent trip showed him quite at home among the hand-wringers and apologists who value symbolic gestures over concrete action.

On Sunday, for example, Obama spoke in Prague before a huge crowd and talked about setting the stage for nuclear disarmament -- a long-time moral imperative of the left -- even as North Korea was launching a test missile capable of delivering one of its newly-developed nuclear warheads as far as Tokyo. Mr. Obama responded to this clear violation of U.N. resolutions by referring it back to the U.N. for "further action" -- meaning more hand-wringing backed by timidity. In Obama's world, of course, the U.N. has a special moral authority, and is the arbiter of choice in this kind of crisis. Forget about its track record. The symbolism of China, Russia and France -- not to mention Syria, Gabon and Tahiti -- being in charge of global security is the kind of image that brings smiles to those who believe that the United States is "just another nation". You know who those people are, right? They are the ones now in charge of your government.

Image, as it turns out, is everything on the left. So you will forgive Obama for apologizing all over himself for American "transgressions". He goes to Turkey and apologizes in effect for America's war on terror -- saying that we "are not at war with Islam" -- when, in fact, we are at war with a significant, virulent strain of the religion. He apologizes for the excesses of American capitalism as the root of the current economic crisis, when in reality the engine of the American economy has lifted the standard of living across the world.

Obama is so sorry. In the ultimate irony, the most hubristic of presidents in modern times want to walk the globe with humility. He wants the world -- the same world that America, with its blood and treasure, has saved repeatedly from extremism of all kinds -- to know how badly we feel and how sorry we are. We feel badly for being exceptional, for leading and for fighting for human freedom.

We're sorry for saving the world. I guess next time, we'll leave you with Hitler, Stalin and Saddam Hussein.

There will be blood

Recently I wrote a piece noting that Obama's economic policies are less about fixing the economy and more about retributive justice -- a pernicious form of wealth redistribution designed to achieve a liberal social agenda. This agenda is at the heart of Obama's philosophical orientation -- that same "spreading the wealth around" view that he inadvertently let slip to "Joe the Plumber" on the campaign trail. Many didn't pay attention to this off-hand comment -- but we know now just how revealing it was. Daniel Henninger reinforces the retributive justice argument in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today and highlights the underlying theory that alights the Obama redistribution plan. He cites a graph created by Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, French economists who "are rock stars of the intellectual left."  Their specialty is "earnings inequality" and "wealth concentration" -- code words for socialist theory designed to validate confiscatory economic policies. It turns out that Piketty and Saez are for Obama what Arthur Laffer was to Ronald Reagan. Perhaps it tells you all you need to know about Barack Obama that his economic philosophy comes from French economists -- that nation of stagnant growth, high taxes and huge public sector unionization. That in itself should be troubling enough.

Piketty and Saez have provided the Obama Administration with their rationale for "soaking the rich". See the following graph:

"As described in Mr. Obama's budget, these two economists have shown that by the end of 2004, the top 1% of taxpayers "took home" more than 22% of total national income. This trend, Fig. 9 notes, began during the Reagan presidency, skyrocketed through the Clinton years, dipped after George Bush beat Al Gore, then marched upward. Widening its own definition of money-grubbers, the budget says the top 10% of households "held" 70% of total wealth."

This kind of income inequality is anathema to those who see an equality of outcomes in society. Never mind, of course, that the top 1% of earners pay almost 40% of all Federal income taxes to begin with, and that from these earners come a huge percentage of the jobs that fuel the economy. Socialists like Piketty and Saez would prefer that everyone dumb down to a common denominator where so-called "winners" and "losers" were much closer together. They would prefer that everyone be mediocre rather than have a few big winners who raise the tide for everyone. And it is exactly the economic philosophy that Obama has now embraced. Massive wealth transfer as social policy.

And it matters not that it is bad economic policy, because fixing the economy is a poor second to the need to dumb America down. In Obama's own words:

"While middle-class families have been playing by the rules, living up to their responsibilities as neighbors and citizens, those at the commanding heights of our economy have not.

Prudent investments in education, clean energy, health care and infrastructure were sacrificed for huge tax cuts for the wealthy and well-connected.

There's nothing wrong with making money, but there is something wrong when we allow the playing field to be tilted so far in the favor of so few. . . . It's a legacy of irresponsibility, and it is our duty to change it."

So if you made a lot of money you somehow cheated -- not living up to your responsibilities, even though you paid your fair share of taxes in what is already a highly progressive tax code.

What a tremendously offensive statement.

This is class warfare pure and simple. Or, as Henninger says, "the primary goal is a massive re-flowing of "wealth" from the top toward the bottom, to stop the moral failure they see in the budget's "Top One Percent of Earners" chart.

And for those top earners -- the engine of our economy -- there will be blood.