Crimes Against Liberty (49 page)

And the apologies kept on coming. He apologized to Latin America for our failure to pursue “sustained engagement with our neighbors.” He repeated in Trinidad that we had been “disengaged” and “dictatorial.”
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Echoing Reverend Wright, he said in Prague America had “a moral responsibility to act” on arms control because we were the only nation that had ever “used a nuclear weapon.”
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Then in May 2010, the administration went so far as to apologize for Arizona’s immigration law to the Communist Chinese, whose civil rights violations are legendary. Assistant Secretary of State Michael Posner reported that during a meeting with Chinese leaders, U.S. representatives, on their own initiative, repeatedly denounced the Arizona law as a “troubling trend in our society, and an indication that we have to deal with issues of discrimination or potential discrimination.”
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Likewise, Obama, in a Rose Garden press conference with Mexican president Felipe Calderón, declined to reply after Calderón blasted Arizona for its immigration law—a reticence widely interpreted as signaling agreement. If anything, Obama should have encouraged Calderón to reform the dismal conditions in Mexico that lead his people to storm our borders. Or perhaps Obama could have addressed Mexico’s brutal treatment of its own illegal aliens, who Amnesty International found are subject to “extortion, beatings, kidnap, rape and murder by officials or criminal gangs that often [operate] with the complicity of local authorities.”
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The Rose Garden event was remarkable, for as one writer noted, this might have been the first time “a foreign head of state who is promoting an ongoing, aggressive, illegal, and often violent invasion of America came to our country, met with our president, and, from the White House itself, received our president’s implicit but obvious public support for that invasion.”
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With such a warped view of America, Obama doesn’t seem familiar with America’s benevolent actions toward other nations, such as fighting the spread of Communism, liberating peoples—including many Muslims—from oppressive governments, helping to defeat the Imperial Japanese and the Nazis in World War II, or rebuilding vanquished nations through the Marshall Plan.

Through abject apologies, Obama aims to rectify the damage President Bush supposedly caused to our image. As he tilts at diplomatic windmills, he believes he is showing the world he is not the unsophisticated rube his predecessor was.

IRAN

The antiwar Left regularly mocked President Bush for viewing Iran as a nuclear threat. They smugly claimed vindication when the now-discredited National Intelligence Estimate reported in 2007, “We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program.”
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Fast forward to 2009 and the Left’s hand-picked president, Barack Obama, was desperately searching for a way to end Iran’s supposedly non-existent nuclear program. He had unleashed his negotiators in Vienna to try to strike a deal with the Iranians that would delay the mullahs’ ability to build a nuclear weapon for about a year, “buying more time for President Obama to search for a diplomatic solution to the Iranian nuclear standoff.”

The proposed deal contemplated Iran sending three-quarters of its uranium fuel, which it claimed it needed for peaceful purposes, to Russia for further enrichment. Russia would return it to Iran in the form of metal fuel rods, which could only be used for nuclear reactors, not for weapons. This depletion of uranium would slow down any Iranian plans to produce a nuclear weapon. The
New York Times
reported that administration officials were cautiously optimistic they could reach a “broader diplomatic accord” with Iran.
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It didn’t take long for Iran to renege and for Obama’s enlightened method of engagement to prove a failure. And as this charade unfolded, Iran bought more time to advance its nuclear program and earned U.S. diplomatic engagement—all for violating UN Security Council declarations and giving nothing in return.
Investors Business Daily’s
editors asked, “How can a theocratic government with a stone-age worldview take the most sophisticated, modern, industrialized nation in the world for a ride, as if we just fell of the turnip truck?” Answer: “Because those who run Iran realize they are engaged in a global war. Those who now run American foreign policy, on the other hand, think ‘war on terror’ is passé.” Obama’s approach sounds nice, “but it is the naïveté of Neville Chamberlain and the piece of paper he waved bearing Hitler’s autograph.”
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Obama added failure on top of failure as he doggedly clung to his engagement strategy. Playing bad cop to his good cop, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had issued Iran an ultimatum in March 2009 to disband its nuclear program by year’s end, warning of “real consequences” unless Iran complied.
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No response. In July she threatened to beef up the military capabilities of our Persian Gulf allies if Iran continued to develop its nuclear program.
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Again, no response. Obama had said in May, in his “diplomatic” way, “The important thing is to make sure there is a clear timetable, at which point we say these talks don’t seem to be making any serious progress. By the end of the year, we should have some sense whether or not these discussions are starting to yield significant benefits, whether we are starting to see serious movement on the part of the Iranians.”
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Iran contemptuously dismissed Obama’s end-of-year deadline. On December 22, 2009, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad asked defiantly, “Who are they to set us a deadline? We set them a deadline that if they do not correct their attitude and behavior and literature we will demand from them the Iranian nation’s historic rights....They must know that the Iranian nation and all the world’s nations will continue resisting until the complete (nuclear) disarmament of America and all arrogant powers.”
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The Obama administration cravenly responded by disavowing its own deadlines. Hillary Clinton said, as if the administration’s previous words meant nothing, “Now, we’ve avoided using the term ‘deadline’ ourselves. That’s not a term that we have used, because we want to keep the door to dialogue open.” Tellingly, she even admitted the administration’s efforts at “engagement” had not succeeded.
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Iran triumphantly acknowledged the administration’s abandonment of its deadline. An Iranian foreign ministry spokesman crowed, “We share the same idea with [Clinton]. Deadlines are meaningless. We hope other countries return to their natural path, too.”
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Obama claimed there was a method to his engagement madness. If his efforts ultimately failed, he argued, countries previously resistant to sanctions—Russia, China, and Germany—would come on board. Secretary Clinton said, “We actually believe that by following the diplomatic path we are on, we gain credibility and influence with a number of nations who would have to participate in order to make the sanctions regime as tight and as crippling as we would want it to be.”

But by all indications, that strategy was not working too well, either. While Germany might have been playing lip service to supporting sanctions, Russia, which has considerable economic interests in Iran and is helping to build Iran’s nuclear reactors, resisted all but the most toothless sanctions. Similarly, with “a rapidly growing stake in Iran’s energy sector,” China had decreed that Iran’s nuclear program did not represent a threat and therefore diplomacy should be given more time. China declined to send a high ranking official to talks among the United States, Britain, France, Russia, and Germany, and it even stopped using the word “sanction.” Without Russia or China’s cooperation, the prospect of meaningful sanctions was negligible because, among other things, both countries have a Security Council veto at the United Nations. Thus, the only sanctions to emerge from the UN—and greeted with mocking contempt by the Iranians—have been largely symbolic measures that Russia and China allow to pass only because of their meaninglessness.

As both prongs of Obama’s Iran strategy—engagement and sanctions—were failing, even some of his defenders, such as an anonymous “Hill Democrat” quoted by
Time
, were asking, “What exactly did your year of engagement get you?” According to Obama-friendly
Time
, “The very fact that the U.S. and its allies are even thinking of going it alone is a sign of just how much trouble Obama’s policy is in.”
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Columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote that Iran’s thuggish president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, didn’t simply reject Obama’s “feckless floating nuclear deadline...he spat on it.” Krauthammer sighed, “So ends 2009, the year of ‘engagement,’ of the extended hand, of the gratuitous apology—and of spinning centrifuges, two-stage rockets and a secret enrichment facility that brought Iran materially closer to becoming a nuclear power.”
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In May, Iran announced it had reached an accord with Turkey and Brazil to exchange a portion of its low enriched uranium to more highly enriched uranium to fuel its medical research reactor in Tehran. It was a clever move on Ahmadinejad’s part: while it wouldn’t satisfy the UN Security Council’s demands to halt Iran’s uranium enrichment processes, but it could further undermine Obama’s efforts to impose sanctions, demonstrating yet again the futility of his engagement efforts.
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As the
Washington Times
editors observed, during the campaign Obama

made light of what he saw as his [Bush’s] lack of diplomatic skills. As Wednesday’s U.N. Security Council vote on sanctions over Iran’s nuclear program showed, Mr. Obama’s team could learn a few things about diplomacy from George W. Bush.... President Obama is losing the international consensus that Mr.

Bush once had.... Talk is cheap, but true diplomacy is difficult.... Perhaps [Obama] should take a trip to Dallas to pick up a few pointers from Mr. Bush about how to rally the world behind the policies that are in America’s best interests.
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MUSLIM OUTREACH

A centerpiece of Obama’s foreign policy and national security policy strategy has been to improve our relationship with the Muslim world. Obama seems obsessed with the idea that Muslims believe we are at war with them instead of with radical Islamists. Perhaps more accurately,
he
believes it—and is intent on rectifying it.

President George W. Bush, on countless occasions, declared we are not at war with Muslims. But Obama’s insistence that he needed to correct the record lent credence to the notion that we are. Obama also seems to believe he has a certain duty to engage on this issue, given his childhood in Indonesia and his lineage from Muslim family members. He can relate to Muslims—and he wanted to tell them so in a forum where the entire world was watching. In his vaunted Cairo speech of June 2009, he apologized for America again, gave legitimacy to Muslim grievances, inflated the number of Muslims in America three-fold, and exaggerated Islamic accomplishments in world history and in American history. He implied the war in Iraq was an unjustified act of aggression by the United States and that we had earned our poor reputation among Arab and Muslim peoples, and assured his audience that we were not at war with Islam.

After all this pandering, what did Obama have to show for it? In November 2009, one Saudi academic in Jeddah who had previously been enamored with Obama said of him, “He talks too much.” Fouad Ajami, a professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, thought the Obama mystique had already worn off. “He has not made the world anew, history did not bend to his will, the Indians and Pakistanis have been told that the matter of Kashmir is theirs to resolve, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the same intractable clash of two irreconcilable nationalisms, and the theocrats in Iran have not ‘unclenched their fist,’ nor have they abandoned their nuclear quest.”

Moreover, Pew polling confirmed that for all his posturing, Obama hadn’t improved our Muslim relations at all. Only 15 percent of those in the Palestinian territories had a favorable view of the United States, while 82 percent had an unfavorable one. In Turkey—after Obama gave a speech in Ankara—14 percent favorable and 69 percent unfavorable. In Egypt, 27 percent favorable, 70 percent unfavorable. In Pakistan things got worse, with unfavorables rising from 63 percent in 2008 to 68 percent in 2009,
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which is an ominous sign given Pakistan’s nuclear capability and the precariousness of Pakistan’s current leadership. “There were a lot of illusions about Obama because he has African and Muslim roots,” said Aya Mahmoud, a Cairo University student. “Turns out the [Cairo] speech was all just hype.”
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Obama’s primary failure here lies not in his inability to cure this region of its endemic anti-Americanism, but in his profoundly naïve assumption that he could, and in wrongly castigating the Bush administration for causing Middle East animus toward the United States, which predated Obama’s presidency by decades, is thriving during his term, and will last long after he vacates the Oval Office.