Read The Roots of Obama's Rage Online
Authors: Dinesh D'Souza
The Roots of Obama's Rage (27 page)
Treating Al Qaeda operatives as criminals who deserve swift and severe punishment is one thing; holding them in military detention camps and interrogating them is quite another. Waterboarding and other forms of coercion quite likely are, to Obama, reminiscent of the tortures employed by the French in Algeria, not to mention the British in Kenya during the Mau Mau revolt. Just a few months after assuming office, Obama ordered the release of several classified memos from the Bush administration detailing terrorist interrogation methods. Predictably the memos produced outrage in the press, because they described in some detail such procedures as sleep deprivation, keeping detainees in cold and dark cells, and in a few cases dunking the suspect under water to give him the idea that he may be drowning. During the controversy, former vice president Dick Cheney pointed out that “the released memos were carefully redacted to leave out references to what our government learned through the methods in question. Other memos, laying out specific terrorist plots that were averted, apparently were not even considered for release.”
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Obama—now in control of what information gets out and what information stays under wraps—selected the facts that would make his case.
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Obama—now in control of what information gets out and what information stays under wraps—selected the facts that would make his case.
Obama has announced his intention to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay and to try terrorists like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in civilian courts. He has been forced to keep postponing the Guantanamo shutdown because, evidently, congressmen and senators are appalled at the idea of Islamic terrorists and militants being housed on U.S. territory. Obama swears that he really will close the base, but he hasn’t yet determined when or how. Obama’s plans for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed are also on hold. When Obama’s attorney general Eric Holder announced plans to have this man, the leading architect of 9/11, tried in New York City, there were a host of objections. Republicans complained about the risk of giving Mohammed a global platform to air his grievances, and even Democrats worried about the cost and security issues of such a high-profile civilian trial. As of this writing, Obama is still trying to figure out how to get Mohammed out of the hands of the military.
While one might expect a president to be mostly concerned with protecting the American people from terrorist attack, Obama’s primary concern seems to be with protecting captured terrorists from the American military. Obama has hired several radical lawyers who have made a reputation providing free assistance to Islamic radicals and terrorists. Now these lawyers can provide those same services at the taxpayer’s expense. All of this is done in the name of constitutional rights. What Obama has never explained, however, is why the rights of the U.S. Constitution extend to people who are not U.S. citizens. The Constitution after all is a social compact. Through mutual consent, citizens give to their government the power to protect certain rights. These rights do not extend to those who stand outside the social contract. Americans have no obligation to extend them to aliens, and they are most certainly inapplicable to those who are apprehended in foreign jihads against America. But Obama does not seem to view things in this way. One of the things that Obama learned in law school is that law can be used as an instrument of politics, and here he has chosen to make it an instrument of anti-colonial resistance, of giving jihadis the full legal protection of United States citizens.
As Americans, we can only hope that Obama’s narrow focus on terrorist protections doesn’t increase America’s vulnerability to future attacks. Already there have been close calls, such as the cases of Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab who attempted to bring down an airliner over Detroit, and Faisal Shahzad, who sought to set off car explosives in Times Square. So far the incompetence of the terrorists has contributed to the safety of Americans. But we may not always be able to count on “stupid terrorism” in the future. Wishful thinking may not seem like a very effective remedy to ensure the safety of America in these dangerous times, but with Obama in the White House this remedy may be all that we have.
The United States at the dawn of the twenty-first century is in approximately the same position that Britain was at the dawn of the twentieth. We are on top of the world, but the view is precarious from up there. The twentieth century has been the American century and, with effective leadership, there is no reason America should not also dominate the twenty-first century. Yet there are many threats on the horizon. Britain’s shining moment did not last, and the sun eventually set on the British empire. Remarkably, America now has a president who seems to want his country to go the way of Britain, one collapsed empire following another, so that we can all recite the somber words of Kipling’s
Recessional
, “Lo, all our pomp of yesterday, is one with Nineveh and Tyre.” And this is indeed one option, for those who are tired of American leadership in the world. But there is a second, for those who are not. We can give up on America or we can give up on this president: we are, it seems, at a time for choosing.
Recessional
, “Lo, all our pomp of yesterday, is one with Nineveh and Tyre.” And this is indeed one option, for those who are tired of American leadership in the world. But there is a second, for those who are not. We can give up on America or we can give up on this president: we are, it seems, at a time for choosing.
CHAPTER 10
THE LAST ANTI-COLONIAL
W
hile soliciting Senator Ted Kennedy to endorse the presidential aspirations of Hillary Clinton rather than Barack Obama, Bill Clinton could not hide his disdain for the man who seemed to be stealing the Democratic nomination. “A few years ago,” he told Kennedy, “this guy would have been getting us coffee.” Kennedy was offended by the remark, and when it was reported in the press, some thought Clinton was being racist. In one respect, I have to agree, but in another, I can see that Clinton’s point was the exact opposite. As Clinton told Kennedy, “Let’s just be clear—the only reason you’re endorsing him is because he’s black.” From Clinton’s point of view, only a perverted sort of affirmative action could explain why people would go for a virtually unknown and for the most part unaccomplished fellow like Obama. Is this the person whose script America was ready to follow? Clinton found the situation frustrating and absolutely incredible.
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hile soliciting Senator Ted Kennedy to endorse the presidential aspirations of Hillary Clinton rather than Barack Obama, Bill Clinton could not hide his disdain for the man who seemed to be stealing the Democratic nomination. “A few years ago,” he told Kennedy, “this guy would have been getting us coffee.” Kennedy was offended by the remark, and when it was reported in the press, some thought Clinton was being racist. In one respect, I have to agree, but in another, I can see that Clinton’s point was the exact opposite. As Clinton told Kennedy, “Let’s just be clear—the only reason you’re endorsing him is because he’s black.” From Clinton’s point of view, only a perverted sort of affirmative action could explain why people would go for a virtually unknown and for the most part unaccomplished fellow like Obama. Is this the person whose script America was ready to follow? Clinton found the situation frustrating and absolutely incredible.
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But the real situation is actually more incredible than Clinton ever imagined. We are today living out the script for America and the world that was dreamt up not by Obama but by Obama’s father. How do I know this? Because Obama says so himself. Reflect for a moment on the title of his book: it’s not
Dreams of My Father
but rather
Dreams from My Father
. In other words, Obama is not writing a book about his father’s dreams; he is writing a book about the dreams that he got from his father.
Dreams of My Father
but rather
Dreams from My Father
. In other words, Obama is not writing a book about his father’s dreams; he is writing a book about the dreams that he got from his father.
Think about what this means. The most powerful country in the world is being governed according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s—a polygamist who abandoned his wives, drank himself into stupors, and bounced around on two iron legs (after his real legs had to be amputated because of a car crash), raging against the world for denying him the realization of his anti-colonial ambitions. This philandering, inebriated African socialist is now setting the nation’s agenda through the reincarnation of his dreams in his son. The son is the one who is making it happen, but the son is, as he candidly admits, only living out his father’s dream. The invisible father provides the inspiration, and the son dutifully gets the job done. America today is being governed by a ghost.
Now we can understand why President Obama seems so distant, detached, and even bored. This is not merely a matter of “acting white.” It is also the result of Obama living in his time machine. Obama inhabits a world of memories that harken back to continents far away and wars long ago. It was a world of marauding colonial armies and guerillas hiding in the Aberdare mountains. It was a world of pageantry and broken dreams. In Obama’s view, great men lived in those days, men who stood athwart the colonial juggernaut crying “Stop.” Sometimes they were crushed, but their bravery lives on in the hearts of those who knew and remember them. Compared to all this, today’s world of global summits and credit card bailouts and ribbon-cutting seems dull and thin. In terms of sheer human drama, nothing today seems to rise to the level of the way things used to be.
This is not to say Obama is ideologically passive, that he lacks an agenda. On the contrary, Obama is a man on a mission, and he is obsessed with executing that mission. He is like the lead character in a movie who has come home to find his whole family wiped out. The incident brings forth an emotional outpouring of grief and of rage, but in time the emotions settle, leaving behind a more controlled anger combined with a steely resolve. From that point, the man’s course is set: the rest of his life is dedicated to a campaign of revenge. In Obama’s case the villains are dead, and so the rage takes a different form and settles on a different target. Rather than focus on the specific people who wronged his family, Obama is on a systematic campaign against the colonial system that destroyed his father’s dreams. With a kind of suppressed fury, he is committed to keep going until he has brought that system down. And according to his father’s anti-colonial ideology, which Obama has internalized for himself, that system is the military and economic power of the United States of America.
For many, it still may seem too fantastic to be true. Yet it is true. The great strength of our anti-colonial theory is not only its psychological plausibility—it is rooted in Obama’s vivid and persuasive self-description—but also its explanatory power. The anti-colonial hypothesis explains both Obama’s economic and his foreign policy. Obama’s domestic and foreign agenda operate in a kind of reverse action: Obama wants to expand government power at home even as he works to contract America’s power abroad. The
Weekly Standard
glibly summarizes this as: omnipotence at home, impotence abroad.
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No other theory accounts for this dual action, but ours does. It also explains lots of little things—like Obama moving the Churchill bust out of the White House—that no rival theory can even begin to do. Can our theory do even better than this? Perhaps it can. If our theory can forecast the future, if it can account for developments that occur after it has been formulated, then it satisfies the scientific criteria of both explanation and prediction. In that case we can not only account for Obama’s actions, but also tell what he is likely to do in the future.
Weekly Standard
glibly summarizes this as: omnipotence at home, impotence abroad.
2
No other theory accounts for this dual action, but ours does. It also explains lots of little things—like Obama moving the Churchill bust out of the White House—that no rival theory can even begin to do. Can our theory do even better than this? Perhaps it can. If our theory can forecast the future, if it can account for developments that occur after it has been formulated, then it satisfies the scientific criteria of both explanation and prediction. In that case we can not only account for Obama’s actions, but also tell what he is likely to do in the future.
As I was completing this book, I saw news reports quoting NASA chief Charles Bolden announcing that from now on the primary mission of America’s space agency would be to improve relations with the Muslim world. Come again? Bolden said he got the word directly from the president. “He wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science and math and engineering.” Bolden added that the International Space Station was a kind of model for NASA’s future, since it was not just a U.S. operation but included the Russians and the Chinese. Bolden, who made these remarks in an interview with Al-Jazeera, timed them to coincide with the one-year anniversary of Obama’s own Cairo address to the Muslim world.
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Bolden’s remarks provoked consternation not only among conservatives but also among famous former astronauts Neil Armstrong and John Glenn and others involved in America’s space programs. No surprise: most people think of NASA’s job as one of landing on the moon and Mars and exploring other faraway destinations. Even some of Obama’s supporters expressed puzzlement. Sure, we are all for Islamic self-esteem, and seven or eight hundred years ago the Muslims did make a couple of important discoveries, but what on earth was Obama up to here?
One of England’s great colonial figures was the mining magnate Cecil Rhodes, one of the few people in history to get a country (Rhodesia) named after him. Rhodes is today remembered for the diamond mining company he founded, De Beers, and also for the Rhodes Scholarship. But in his time he commanded something of a private army, he got mixed up in the Matabele Wars and the Boer War, and his political and economic tentacles reached across most of southern Africa. At the peak of his power, Rhodes was asked by a journalist how far he intended his influence to spread. He replied, “I would annex the planets if I could. I often think of that.”
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This is the colonial mindset carried to the final frontier: even possession of the whole earth is not enough! You can imagine how the anti-colonialists reacted to Rhodes. Rhodes’s comment can help us understand how the anti-colonial mind perceives America’s space program—it is a projection of American power and arrogance into the solar system.
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This is the colonial mindset carried to the final frontier: even possession of the whole earth is not enough! You can imagine how the anti-colonialists reacted to Rhodes. Rhodes’s comment can help us understand how the anti-colonial mind perceives America’s space program—it is a projection of American power and arrogance into the solar system.
Recall the Moon Landing of Apollo 11 in 1969. “One small step for man,” Neil Armstrong said. “One giant leap for mankind.” But that’s not how the rest of the world saw it. I was eight years old at the time and still living in my native India. I remember my grandfather telling me about how there was a great race between America and Russia to put a man on the moon, and America had won. And everybody knew it because Neil Armstrong placed the American flag on the moon. So it wasn’t one giant leap for mankind, but one giant leap for the United States. It was as if that flag signified, “We Americans did this. We Americans now own the moon.” I can understand how many in the Third World might see the Moon landing that way, because I’m from the Third World and that’s the way I saw it.
If Obama shares this view, no wonder he wants to blunt NASA’s space program, to divert it from being a symbol of American greatness to a more modest public relations operation that builds ties with Muslims and other peoples. Even when the Muslims aren’t involved, Obama wants to make sure the Russians and the Chinese share the credit. Space, you see, is for human and not merely American exploration. Plug in our anti-colonial model and what at first seems inexplicable—converting NASA into a community outreach program for Muslims—suddenly makes complete sense. Remove the theory and it is almost impossibly difficult to account for what Obama is doing.
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