Post-American Presidency (25 page)

He did not, however, disappoint those who were counting on him to subject America to the governance of international bodies, and had awarded him the Nobel Peace Prize in furtherance of that hope. “I—like any head of state—reserve the right to act unilaterally if necessary
to defend my nation,” said Obama. However, no sooner had he stated this than he undercut it: “America cannot act alone.”

Not
should not
. “Cannot.”

“If we want a lasting peace,” Obama asserted, “then the words of the international community must mean something.” The world, he said, must stand “together as one.” And of course, he was careful to note that “the world must come together to confront climate change.”
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John Bolton observed that the speech “followed the standard international leftist line. He played to the crowd and filled the speech with clichés from the American and international left by saying ‘America cannot act alone’ and that he ‘prohibited torture.’ The speech was also typical of Obama in its self-centeredness and ‘something for everybody’ approach.”
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ALINSKY DOES AFGHANISTAN

Andrew McCarthy in
National Review
dubbed Obama’s speech on troop escalation in Afghanistan “Alinsky Does Afghanistan,” and remarked: “If there is one word that captures President Obama’s much-anticipated Afghanistan speech, it is ‘cynical.’ Yes, the speech was also internally contradictory, counter-historical, and premised on fatally flawed assumptions about Islam and the Afghan people.”

The post-American president’s cynicism in his Afghanistan speech primarily manifested itself in his attempt to co-opt his conservative opposition by appearing to act in favor of America’s interests and boosting the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan. “He also frames national security,” McCarthy observed, “as a distraction from his more important work socializing our economy. He knows that as long as he is tepidly supportive of a military mission—even one that neither aims to achieve nor can possibly achieve victory over America’s enemies—conservatives
will not only overlook the slights; they will anxiously commend him and help the
New York Times
take the lash to those who won’t.”
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Yet given that during his campaign Obama used Afghanistan to criticize the American presence in Iraq, he couldn’t back out now. But his hard-left internationalism and socialism made him unwilling to fight a real war in Afghanistan, either. So after his long months of dithering, Obama hit on the solution: he would commit enough troops to Afghanistan to keep up the appearance that he was defending America there, while never explaining in any precise terms what would constitute a successful mission—“success” being all that Americans could reasonably hope for, since the post-American president had already ruled out “victory.” In June 2009, General McChrystal on video link from Kabul joined a meeting in the White House Situation Room. In the course of the meeting, he presented a slide containing a pithy “mission statement”: “Defeat the Taliban. Secure the Population.”

One of the Obama aides in the Situation Room took exception to the idea that American troops were in Afghanistan to defeat the Taliban, asking the general: “Is that really what you think your mission is?” Another Obama adviser said that the meeting really began making progress when the import of this question sunk in with everyone in the Situation Room: “The big moment when the mission became a narrower one was when we realized we’re not going to kill every last member of the Taliban.”
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Speaking of military victory as an endeavor to “kill every last member” of the opposition seemed to be a peculiarly leftist caricature, spoken of by someone who was sure that military men were bloodthirsty hoodlums who delighted in mayhem. In any case, the troops, freed from the obligation of actually trying to defeat the Taliban—particularly
while Obama searched for “moderates” among them—could occupy themselves building schools and roads until they began to leave in July 2011.

Would they even be able to defeat the Taliban if they wanted to? Only if they could do it by that deadline. By setting deadlines in both Iraq and Afghanistan, Obama had ensured that the American troops would not be able to make any meaningful progress toward neutralizing the jihadist and anti-American forces in either nation; all they had to do was hold out for eighteen months, and the field would be theirs.

Military analyst Max Boot remarked that there was “plenty of reason to doubt Obama’s resolve in Afghanistan.
On the plus side, he committed to sending more troops than some White House aides wanted.… But then he undercut some of the urgency he conveyed by pledging ‘to begin the transfer of our forces out of Afghanistan in July of 2011.’ If this is such a vital national interest—and it is—why is our commitment so limited? How can he be so confident that the extra 30,000 troops—who will be lucky to arrive in their entirety by next summer—can accomplish their ambitious mission in just a year?”
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Obama’s contempt for the military was palpable. Since he took office, American forces had been experiencing the highest U.S. troop casualty rate ever in Afghanistan, month after month. Why, then, did Obama keep our finest young Americans there when victory was not the objective? Obama’s aimless, useless operation in Afghanistan was a death trap. British journalist Melanie Phillips observed trenchantly: “The American President is cynically offering up American soldiers’ lives as a fig leaf to disguise the fact that he is giving up and getting out. Obama has now compromised the safety of every single American and British soldier, given not just the Taleban but every watching jihadi a terrific shot in the arm and undermined the very difficult mission in Afghanistan.”
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Obama is not a wartime president, and certainly no commander in chief. He was sending thousands to their death in Afghanistan for no purpose, no objective, other than to disarm his domestic opposition.

It was the post-American president’s way of waging war.

Ayn Rand once said, “When a country doesn’t recognize the individual rights of their own citizens, it cannot claim any national or international rights. Therefore, anyone who wants to invade a dictatorship or semi-dictatorship is morally justified in doing so, because he is doing no worse than what that country has accepted as its social system.”
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With any totalitarian ideology—fascism, communism, or Islam—you must attack the root cause. You can’t wish it away or pretend it doesn’t exist. We don’t send precious lives into war
not to win
. That is not, or should not be, an option. We have the power to fight and win. Not to use this power, while squandering American lives, is monstrous. The idea that America cannot defeat the Taliban is absurd and the entire world knows it. Why are we not allowed to use our power? It is morally bankrupt—this absence of the courage of our convictions. The rules of engagement forced upon our troops are morally repugnant.

Rand said this of our capitulation to leftist thuggery in American politics during the Vietnam era: “Since the world knows we are not physically weak, it would be an admission of moral corruption that we do not possess a primitive dignity that any nation should have—to its own dead, if nothing else—that if it is involved in a war, it should finish it. It must win or be defeated.”
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We must win.

We either live under the light of Islam or we die with dignity… brace yourselves for a long war against the world’s infidels and their agents.

—Osama bin Laden, June 3, 2009
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America is not—and never will be—at war with Islam.

—Barack Obama, Cairo, June 4, 2009

OBAMA’S OVERTURES TO THE ISLAMIC
WORLD WERE A HIGH PRIORITY FOR HIM FROM
THE MOMENT HE BECAME PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED
States. Before he was inaugurated, he announced his intention to move with deliberate speed. “Very early in the administration,” he said in an interview four days before he took office, “I will announce a team and an approach that allows us to get engaged in the Middle East on Day One. And when we do that we’ll be naming, you know, the people who are going to be leading that effort.… Here’s my commitment:
Very early on, the American people, but also the players in the region, are going to know that we are serious about dealing with the Middle East, dealing with Iran, dealing with Afghanistan and Pakistan on the diplomatic front and not just on the military front. We’ve got a regional set of problems. They’re not going to be solved in isolation.”
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Then in his Inaugural Address, he addressed Muslims worldwide: “To the Muslim world,” he said, “we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect.”
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“Mutual respect” became a watchword of his appeals to the Islamic world. In his first interview as president, which he gave, with a careful eye for symbolism, to Dubai’s Al-Arabiya News Channel on January 26, 2009, he used the phrase again: “And what I’ve said, and I think Hillary Clinton has expressed this in her confirmation, is that if we are looking at the region as a whole and communicating a message to the Arab world and the Muslim world, that we are ready to initiate a new partnership based on mutual respect and mutual interest, then I think that we can make significant progress.”
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Appealing to Iran in March 2009, Obama said: “We have serious differences that have grown over time. My administration is now committed to diplomacy that addresses the full range of issues before us, and to pursuing constructive ties among the United States, Iran and the international community. This process will not be advanced by threats. We seek, instead, engagement that is honest and grounded in mutual respect.”
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It was an ongoing preoccupation. In his principal appeal to the Islamic world, his Cairo address on June 4, 2009, he declared: “I’ve come here to Cairo to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world, one based on mutual interest and mutual respect, and one based upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive and need not be in competition.”
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On November 4, 2009, the thirtieth anniversary of the takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and the beginning of the Iranian hostage crisis, Obama again issued his increasingly plaintive plea for respect: “This event helped set the United States and Iran on a path of sustained suspicion, mistrust and confrontation. I have made it clear that the United States of America wants to move beyond this past, and seeks a relationship with the Islamic Republic of Iran based upon mutual interests and mutual respect.”
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And a month later, when he announced his intention to send thirty thousand troops to Afghanistan, he declared: “And we will seek a partnership with Afghanistan grounded in mutual respect—to isolate those who destroy; to strengthen those who build; to hasten the day when our troops will leave; and to forge a lasting friendship in which America is your partner, and never your patron.”
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With his continual repetition of this phrase, Obama seemed anxious to reassure Islamic nations that the United States—or at least the post-American president—would respect them. Everything his hard-left mentors had told him about American history would have reinforced in him the idea that the respect was lacking on the American side, not on the Muslim side. Indications of this presupposition showed up in several of the speeches in which he mentioned this need to establish “mutual respect.”

In Cairo in June 2009, he listed three causes for the tensions between the West and the Islamic world: “Tension has been fed by colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims, and a Cold War in which Muslim-majority countries were too often treated as proxies without regard to their own aspirations. Moreover, the sweeping change brought by modernity and globalization led many Muslims to view the West as hostile to the traditions of Islam.”

Each of these was the fault of the West, not of the Islamic world.
The respect was lacking from the West toward Muslims, not the other way around. Obama listed only ways in which the West has, in his view, mistreated the Islamic world. Not a word about the jihad doctrine, not a word about Islamic supremacism and the imperative to make war against and subjugate non-Muslims as dhimmis. Not a word about the culture of hatred and contempt for non-Muslims that existed long before the spread of American culture (“modernity and globalization”) around the world, which Obama suggested was responsible for the hostility Muslims have for the West.

In a similar vein, at West Point in December 2009, he offered what Andrew McCarthy of
National Review
called “a laughable history of the Afghan people. They’re a peaceful bunch who were just minding their own business when, out of the blue, they were ‘ravaged by Soviet occupation.’ (Actually, the Soviets intervened when the country disintegrated into chaos after Afghan Marxists tried to remake Afghanistan’s tribal Muslim society.) Then, Obama’s story goes, they somehow became the passive victims of their own civil war. In Obama’s telling, the Taliban is ‘a ruthless, repressive, and radical movement’ that emerged, seemingly out of nowhere, because America—who else?—was inattentive. In fact, the Taliban is an Afghan movement, sprung quite naturally from the Islamic fundamentalism rampant in Pashtun society. It was strategically nurtured by Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, our supposed allies against what Obama can’t bring himself to call jihadist terrorism.”
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In short, the chaos and violence in Afghanistan had nothing to do with the beliefs or actions of the Afghans themselves. It was all due to interference from or bungling by big bad neocolonial powers, including the United States.

Seeking a new accord with the Islamic world, this new way forward had long been one of the chief items on the post-American president’s to-do list—as he himself put it shortly before his inauguration,
he wanted to “reboot America’s image in the world and also in the Muslim world in particular.”
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