Category Archives: foreign policy

Red Lines and Retreat

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Thursday, President Barack Obama finally acknowledged what we’ve known—what our allies have demonstrated to us—for some months: that Bashar al Assad has been using chemical weapons on his own people for as long as a year and a half.

Obama’s big, wide, squishy red line, drawn last August during the Presidential Campaign season, has been crossed, he finally admits (coincidentally, the day after former President Bill Clinton said

(You just think how lame you’d be…suppose I had let a million people, two million people be refugees out of Kosovo, a couple hundred thousand people die, and they say, “You could have stopped this by dropping a few bombs.  Why didn’t you do it?” And I say, “Because the House of Representatives voted 75% against it?”  You look like a total wuss, and you would be.
(…
(If you refuse to act and you cause a calamity, the one thing you cannot say when all the eggs have been broken is, “Oh my god, two years ago there was a poll that said 80% of you were against it.”  You look like a total fool[.])

Crossing such a red line would change Obama’s “calculus,” he said at the time he smeared his red line in the sand.

But what does this mean in terms of actually doing anything?  Recall that Obama also has already said that changing his calculus means

It would cause us to rethink the range of options that are available to us[.]

Only now, having conceded that his line in the shifting sands survived long enough to be crossed irrefutably, will he begin to figure out what to do about it.  Starting next week.  In consultation with the G-8.  Because he doesn’t know what to do.  He didn’t start contingency planning when he painted his red decoration.

While Obama hides his head under the red sand, more Syrians will die.  Because he can’t, or refuses to, plan ahead; he’ll only plan reactively, in real time.  To figure out how to retreat from this commitment.

Immigration and Integration

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Michael Adebolajo, the terrorist who butchered a British soldier, is along with his accomplice, a man who has no use for British culture, British economics, British politics, British mores, British anything.  He is a soldato [sic] in an Islamic jihad that seeks to destroy Great Britain.

[Founder of the now-banned Islamist organization al-Muhajiroun Anjem] Choudary says that he was [Omar Mohammed, a radical Islamist cleric who urges his followers to fight the jihad] Bakri’s right hand.  Working together, he says, they aimed to rally Muslim youth throughout the country against the policies of the British government and usher them onto the streets.

When he is asked how he wants to change the UK, Choudary smiles gently.  …  He insists that he wants to introduce Sharia law throughout the country as well as ban alcohol and gambling.  And, of course, abolish the monarchy.  He wants to transform Buckingham Palace into a mosque.  Choudary sees jihad as a means of defending Islam.  He has praised the 9/11 terrorists—and he refuses to condemn the London bombers from 2005.

And

A friend of Choudary’s steps up to the table.  He calls himself Mohammed and also wears a black robe.  He is in an excellent mood.  “The entire country’s afraid now,” he says with glee.  Mohammed says that he happened to run into Adebolajo a few weeks ago, “but didn’t notice anything special about him.”

These people did not “immigrate” into Great Britain in order to participate in and take advantage of all that Great Britain and British culture had to offer.  They came to radically change the very culture that made the country great, to make it over into the country from which these people came.

They refuse to assimilate into British society; instead they demand that British society assimilate into their homeland’s society.

The British have no obligation to accommodate them, nor do the British have an obligation to accept into their country people such as these—indeed, no nation has an inherent obligation to accept any individual or group who wishes, for any reason, to enter.

The British should accommodate these people and their ilk in one respect, though: accept their refusal to assimilate—send them back home.  The safety, the very identity, of the country demands it.

And so does the safety and identity of the United States demand similar responses to those who do not wish to integrate themselves into that which has made us so great, but who, on the contrary, wish to radically change us, to make us over into an extension of their homeland.

Some Later Thoughts on Obama’s Counterterrorism Speech

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President Barack Obama had this to say, also, in that…speech:

We unequivocally banned torture, affirmed our commitment to civilian courts, worked to align our policies with the rule of law, and expanded our consultations with Congress.

Let’s see how he did that:

He banned interrogation techniques that produced results, after torture had already been banned for years.

He’s been pushing for five years to try terrorists and other illegal combatants as common criminals and to try Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp in New York courts or to release them outright.

He interrupts interrogations in progress in order to read the prisoner his Miranda “rights.”

He had his Attorney General drop a voter intimidation case involving the New Black Panthers and their white voter victims after the particular NBP miscreants had pled out.

He’s done nothing material about his DoJ’s program of running guns to Mexican drug cartels.

He’s had his HHS Secretary “encourage” fund “contributions” to his federal health insurance exchange from the insurance companies she regulates.

He’s doing nothing material about his Treasury Department’s IRS (which he falsely claims is an “Independent Agency”) program of targeting Americans and groups of Americans of whom he disapproves for the special treatments of tax audits, invasion of their donor lists, deliberate and prolonged delays on finalizing their tax exempt status applications.

He’s actively covering up his and his State and Defense failures in the run-up to the Benghazi terrorist attack in which an American ambassador and three men attached to him were murdered, their failures during the attack, and their failures in the aftermath.

He’s doing nothing material about his DoJ’s assault on our free press via secret seizure of phone records, emails, and obtaining search warrants by falsely accusing individual journalists of criminal activity.

He’s played a couple of rounds of gold with the House leadership and invited them to dinner, and then he’s castigated them for not kowtowing to him and giving him everything he wants.

That’s a powerful alignment.

On the War on Terror

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President Barack Obama said this to the terrorists in his 2009 inaugural address,

We say to you now that our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken; you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you.

Obama had this to say about terrorists in his speech last Thursday concerning his evolving counterterrorism policy:

Neither I, nor any President, can promise the total defeat of terror.

Therefor,

[T]his war, like all wars, must end.  That’s what history advises.  That’s what our democracy demands.

Never mind that wars don’t end because one side wants them to.  Wars end when one side has been clearly crushed or otherwise begs for surrender.

The terrorists haven’t quit.  Obama insists that “core” al Qaeda is “on the run.”  “Core” al Qaeda is a cynical sophistry: al Qaeda has spread its control, through its branches, affiliates, and allies, far beyond the mountains of Afghanistan into Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, throughout the Maghreb, and is gaining influence in Syria and regaining it in Iraq.  The terrorists are not done; Obama has given them no reason to agree to the quitting.

Which side now faces defeat?  Which side now is begging to be let off the field?

The US, Russia, and Syria

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In an article on the related topic of Arab nations asking the US to finally, please, get involved in the Syrian situation instead of hiding out on the sidelines, there appeared this gem:

Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov announced on Tuesday a plan to host a new international conference on Syria, possibly by month-end in Geneva.

Let me see if I understand this.  Lavrov told Kerry, “We’ll talk later.”  Or did Lavrov, instead, tell Kerry, “Let’s talk later?“