Tag Archives: foreign policy

The Defeat of al Qaeda

Posted on by
Reply

…Orwell style.

[President Barack] Obama said in a speech to the National Defense University May 23 that because of the death of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and most of his top aides, “we are safer.”

While terrorist threats still exist, “the core of al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan is on the path to defeat,” the president said.

Because, you see,

…focus on Pakistan and Afghanistan resulted in a lack of targeted counterterrorism efforts in other locations…. …counterterrorism efforts have been weakened by the administration’s policy of dissociating Islam from al Qaeda and other Islamist terrorism.  The policy was a key effort of John Brennan, White House counterterrorism chief during the first Obama administration.  As CIA director, Brennan has expanded the policy of limiting links between Islam and terrorism at the agency.

The result is that Islamist terror groups are flourishing, posing direct threats to the United States and to US interests outside the country[.]

And a report from Lignet, a private intelligence group run by ex-CIA officials, had this on the matter in a report published last Tuesday:

…the U.S. government’s overreliance on sanctions and surveillance has limited the war on terror.

The result is “a decentralized al Qaeda structure—and a much greater threat….

“Al Qaeda has transitioned from a hierarchical cell structure to a franchise organization that is now responsible for four times as many terrorist attacks a year as it was before 9/11….

“Al Qaeda training camps are now being established on the Arabian Peninsula, in Africa, countries of the former Soviet Union, and Southeast Asia.”

Indeed, the al Qaeda empire is rapidly spreading, and with more than just training camps.

Truly, a defeat of Orwellian proportions….

A Thought on American Foreign Policy

Posted on by
Reply

The following thought was quoted by David Feith, in a recent The Wall Street Journal op-ed, from a 1975 Daniel Patrick Moynihan essay called “The United States in Opposition.”  Moynihan’s essay was published just before the Democrat became the US Ambassador to the UN.

It is time, that is, that the American spokesman came to be feared in international forums for the truths he might tel.   The point is to differentiate, and to turn their own standards against regimes for the moment too much preoccupied with causing difficulties for others, mainly the United States….  Such a reversal of roles would be painful to American spokesmen, but it could be liberating also.  It is past time we ceased to apologize for an imperfect democracy.  Find its equal.”

It seems that, over the last five years, President Barack Obama has…differentiated…significantly from his Better.

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.