Tag Archives: foreign policy

Laughingstock

Posted on by
1

That’s putting it mildly.  “Futile” also applies.  I’ve written earlier how President Barack Obama reduced himself to a laughingstock and is reducing the United States as a whole to a laughingstock.

Now those in Syria who’ve been begging us for help speak derisively about us as a result of Obama’s…behavior.  On the heels of Obama’s belated acknowledgment that his bright red bunting strewn upon the beach sands had been stepped on and over; followed by his decision to send small arms to Syrian rebels (which all of Arabia already is providing them) with which to fight al Assad’s helicopter, artillery, and tank assaults (supported by Hezbollah fighters and Iranian soldiers); coupled with Obama’s continued refusal to send the rebels the weapons with which to defeat those helicopters and, artillery tubes, and tanks; and his continued refusal to suppress al Assad’s air force in any way, the rebel beneficiaries of the Obama Munificence had this to say:

It’s all talk.  Until we see weapons in our hands here in Syria, they are just words floating in the air.

Obama’s team is cited at the WSJ link just above in this way:

While US officials acknowledge that Hezbollah and regime forces are closing in on Aleppo, they believe there is time to train rebels and improve their defenses—with or without a no-fly zone, officials say—underscoring their belief the conflict is nowhere near a conclusion.

Umm, maybe not.  This isn’t the mid-19th century, when a two week holdout at the Alamo was enough for Sam Houston to train his forces to effectively resist Santa Ana.  More importantly, whose fault is it that the conflict “is nowhere near a conclusion?”  It’s not the rebels’.

And those…officials…had this:

US officials question whether US and European arms alone will make a decisive difference in a country already awash in weapons.

What a breathtaking, willful ignorance.  Of what use to these persons think small arms—rifles and pistols, and the occasional light machine gun—are against helicopters, artillery, and tanks?

And where is Obama anyway on this seeming change of position concerning chemical attacks and arming the rebels?  Why is he sending out low-level functionaries to tell us, in vague terms, about this?

Of what is Obama so terrified that he can’t talk to us—in detail—personally?

Red Lines and Retreat

Posted on by
Reply

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.

A Whistleblower

Posted on by
Reply

I offered this first as a comment to a Spiegel Online article.  Here it is with slight modifications to support its stand-alone status here.

Edward Snowden, of Verizon metadata and PRISM outing fame, thinks of himself as a whistleblower, and so do many who agree with him that the US’ PRISM program and its program for collecting metadata from cellphone providers are terribly wrong programs.

I agree that the programs are anathema to individual liberty.  However, the programs are legal under US law.  The only question here is whether the programs’ limits and checks are being honored–and that’s a matter of trust, since the programs and its procedures are secret.  That secrecy and the need for that blind trust in Government (not just the Obama administration, but any Government) form a large part of my dismay over the programs.

However, the programs’ legality mean Snowden cannot be a whistleblower; he’s simply a man who has illegally revealed classified data to the public.

What about civil disobedience, then?  Is he practicing this honorable means of protest of a government behavior to which he objects?

There are many legal avenues of calling legitimate attention to these flawed programs, including, for instance, any of the several formal whistleblower and Inspector General facilities to which he could have taken his case.  Given the damage already done by these programs (stipulating arguendo that damage to individual liberty has been done) any additional damage done through the delays of going through these legitimate programs would have been quite trivial.  Yet Snowden eschewed these programs and went directly public.  From within a foreign country.

Were this an act of civil disobedience, it would have had to satisfy two criteria: he would have had first to exhaust his legal remedies.  As I noted, he chose not to do so.

Secondly, he would have to have been willing to face the consequences of his actions.  It is, after all, those consequences and their absurdity in the face of the disobedience and the thing over which the disobedience is occurring that give force and credibility to the disobedience.  Snowden’s reason for being in Hong Kong, as stated by him, is to avoid facing those consequences.

If Snowden truly believes that what he has done is just, he must return to the US and face the outcomes of his actions in open court.  Let him make his case in front of the American people (where he’ll find no small measure of support) and convince our representatives in that court case–the jury of his peers–that his act was justified.

Of course he risks not being supported by our representatives, that jury, as there also are a large number of Americans who disagree with what he has done.

Snowden’s flight and so far refusal to return indicates he’s unwilling to take that risk, that he does not have the courage of his convictions.  In that case, Snowden did not commit an act of civil disobedience; he is simply a small man who is placing his ego above justice.

Immigration and Integration

Posted on by
Reply

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

Posted on by
Reply

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.