Almost every element of Barack Obama’s once-heralded new “reset” foreign policy of a year ago has either been reset or likely soon will be.
Consider Obama’s approach to the 8-year-old war on terror. Plans made more than a year ago to shut down the detention center at Guantanamo Bay by January 2010 have stalled. Despite loud proclamations about trying Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the architect of 9/11, in a civilian court in New York, such an absurd pledge will probably never be kept.
Talk of trying our own former CIA interrogators for being too tough on terrorist suspects has also come to nothing. And why not put an end to the second-guessing of anti-terrorism protocols since the Obama administration, in a single year, has quadrupled the number of assassinations by Predator drones of suspected Taliban and al-Qaida operatives in Pakistan? After all, the targeted killing of hundreds of suspects is far more questionable than waterboarding three confessed killers.
The Obama administration seems to have embraced the once widely criticized Bush-Petraeus strategy in Iraq of gradual withdrawal in concert with Iraqi benchmarks. Indeed, Vice President Joe Biden in Orwellian fashion claims that our victory in Iraq may be one of the administration’s “greatest achievements.” Was it not a defeatist Biden who not long ago advocated the trisection of Iraq into separate nations?
And after months of waiting, Obama finally sent more troops to Afghanistan, adopting a surge strategy that looks a lot like Bush’s 2007 escalation in Iraq — this after he once assured the country that Bush’s surge, in a tactical sense, “wasn’t working.”
Almost all of the once derided Bush anti-terrorism protocols are still in place — wiretaps, intercepts, tribunals, and renditions. And given that there were more foiled radical Islamic terrorist plots in 2009 than in any year since 2001, President Obama will probably stop his outreach speeches to the Islamic world and his serial recitations of American sins.
Our efforts to reach out and negotiate directly with Iran failed. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton effectively acknowledged the impasse, citing the unexpected de facto military coup by the Revolutionary Guard. In any case, does anyone believe that more Obama speeches, videos, new diplomacy and imposed deadlines will halt an Iranian nuclear bomb?
President Obama was once a fierce critic of the former administration’s Mideast policies. A year ago, he thought new outreach to the Palestinians and rebuke to the Israelis might lead to a breakthrough. It did not. In a Time magazine interview with Joe Klein, Obama confesses of the 70-year struggle: “I’ll be honest with you. This is just really hard.”
Obama assumed we could borrow a trillion dollars from the communist Chinese and then turn around and lecture them on Tibet, human rights, and international trade and currency — sort of like a debtor admonishing his lender about his bank’s shortcomings. Now the Chinese claim that their relations with America are “seriously disrupted,” as they seek to dethrone the dollar as the global currency.
I don’t think there will be anymore grand deals with the Russians either, the sort that saw the United States withdraw anti-missile defense accords with Poland and the Czech Republic in hopes of halting the Iranian nuclear program. Instead, Russia and China are blocking American efforts to impose tougher sanctions on Iran.
For all the outreach to Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan strongman is still causing trouble in Latin America. Continued…
Bureaucratic Shenanigans
As we’ve previously noted, there is a powerful element within the State Department that is averse to security and does its best to thwart security programs. DSS special agents refer to these people as Black Dragons. Even when Congress provides clear guidance to the State Department regarding issues of security (e.g., the Omnibus Diplomatic Security and Antiterrorism Act of 1986), the Black Dragons do their best to strangle the programs, and this constant struggle produces discernable boom-and-bust cycles, as Congress provides money for new security programs and the Black Dragons, who consider security counterproductive for diplomacy and armed State Department special agents undiplomatic, use their bureaucratic power to cut off those programs.
Compounding this perennial battle over security funding has been the incredible increase in protective responsibilities that the DSS has had to shoulder since 9/11. The bureau has had to provide a large number of agents to protect U.S. diplomats in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan and even staffed and supervised the protective detail for Afghan President Hamid Karzai for a few years. Two DSS special agents were also killed while protecting the huge number of U.S diplomats assigned to reconstruction efforts in Iraq. One agent was killed in a rocket attack on the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad and the other by a suicide car-bomb attack in Mosul.
The demands of protection and bureaucratic strangulation by the Black Dragons, who have not embraced the concept of the ARSO-I program, has resulted in the OCI program being deployed very slowly. This means that of the 200 positions envisioned and internally programmed by Bureau of Consular Affairs and DSS in 2004, only 50 ARSO-I agents have been assigned to posts abroad as of this writing, and a total of 123 ARSO-I agents are supposed to be deployed by the end of 2011. The other 77 ARSO-I positions were taken away from the OCI program by the department and used to provide more secretarial positions.
In the wake of State Department heel-dragging, other agencies are now seeking to fill the void.
President Obama’s decision to skip the annual U.S.-EU summit in Europe, May 24-25, has not endeared him to some Europeans; many of whom once again feel spurned by the man they have so greatly admired, and whose election they so ardently wished for. As reported by The New York Times, “In addition to the palpable sense of insult among European officials, there is a growing concern that Europe is being taken for granted and losing importance in American eyes compared with the rise of a newly truculent China.” The problem here is twofold: It is indeed problematic on a global scale if the transatlantic alliance has been thus downgraded by the Obama administration. Yet, Europeans bear some of the responsibility in this: their reluctance to support the United States in Afghanistan and their creation of ineffectual and tangled EU institutions have become impediments to relations with the United States.
Particularly aggrieved was Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, who was to host the summit in Madrid as the head of the country holding the rotating presidency of the European Council. Like other Europeans leaders, Zapatero, who faces reelection next year, would like to enhance his stature and bask in the Obama glow, and this opportunity was denied him by the presidential non-appearance. In addition, Zapatero arrived in Washington yesterday for high level meetings that interestingly do not include a one-on-one sit down with Obama in the White House. Continue reading…
The Christmas underwear bomber was trained and equipped by al Qaeda in Yemen. We fought them in Afghanistan and still are. They are in Indonesian, Iraq and the Phillipines. Now this:
Al-Qaeda’s strength in Africa is expanding. Cells in northern Africa are spreading southwards to Nigeria, eager to recruit impressionable Muslims to join their international terror network. In the wake of January’s violent clash between Christians and Muslims in the diverse city of Jos, al-Qaeda’s immediate reaction was to equip and train young Muslims for jihad. According to the Washington Post, Abdelmalek Droukdel, leader of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) announced that al-Qaeda is prepared to provide training, manpower, munitions, and various other resources to push Nigeria’s young men into jihad.
Considering the high levels of poverty and limited governance throughout the country, many Nigerians are left susceptible to extremist activity. While roughly 40 percent of Nigeria’s 149 million citizens are Christian and 50 percent are Muslim, the two religions are geographically divided with the Muslims residing in the northern part of the country and the Christians in the south. The violence last January killing 326 people has left the Muslim population vulnerable to terrorist recruitment. Nigeria’s government has done very little to curb this threat. Its own president Umaru Yar’adua has been out of the country, seeking medical care in Saudi Arabia and unable to run the country. In a town hall meeting Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, decried the Nigerian government as failing to respond to the legitimate needs of its youth. She acknowledged that young people are finding other options and are often recruited by terrorist organizations as the Christmas Day bomber was.
Terrorist organizations in Africa, such as Al-Shabab in Somalia and Boko Haram in Nigeria, aspire foremost to local or national influence rather than international terrorism. While they generally harbor extremist sentiments towards the Western world, they lack the resources and the network needed to conduct operations against Europe or the United States. Al-Qaeda, on the other hand has waged attacks on American soil and possesses the capabilities to attack again. Therefore, when al-Qaeda provides smaller terrorist groups with sophisticated support to young men who would otherwise yield machetes and small arms, these terrorist groups immediately become a direct threat to national security. In dealing with Nigeria, the U.S. needs to tackle the al-Qaeda challenge intelligently. It must be careful not to radicalize a comparatively moderate Muslim population with heavy-handed treatment and public shaming, yet it needs keep steady pressure on a confused and distracted regime to cooperate in isolating and neutralizing the penetration of al-Qaeda into Nigeria and Western Africa.
AL Qaeda does one thing extremely well: killing Muslims. Between 2006 and 2008, only 2 percent of the terror multinational’s victims were Westerners.
The rest were citizens of Muslim countries. Even as al Qaeda claims to be their defender.
I’ve long complained that we fail to capitalize on al Qaeda’s blood thirst in our information operations. Al Qaeda (as well as the Taliban and other insurgent groups) slaughters Muslims — yet we let the media flip the blame to us.
Last weekend, a Pentagon insider passed me a no-nonsense study recently released by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point. “Deadly Vanguards: A Study of al Qaeda’s Violence Against Muslims” is exactly the kind of work our analysts should produce — but rarely do.
Bin Laden: 98 percent of those slaughtered by his group are citizens of Muslim nations.
Using exclusively Arabic-language media reports and including only those incidents for which al Qaeda proudly claimed responsibility, this scrupulously documented study explodes the myth of al Qaeda as a champion of Muslims:
* Between 2004 and 2008, only 15 percent of al Qaeda’s victims were Westerners, and that number skewed upward because of the Madrid and London attacks.
* Between 2006 and 2008, a non-Westerner was 54 times likelier to die in an al Qaeda attack than a Westerner.
* “Outside of the war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq, 99 percent of al Qaeda’s victims were non-Western in 2007 and 96 percent were non-Western in 2008.”
Bravo to Scott Helfstein, Nassir Abdullah and Muhammad al-Obaidi for producing this supremely useful report. Now the question is: Will we use it?
The propaganda skills of our enemies eclipse our timid, lawyer-ridden information operations. In the Muslim world, we get blamed even for al Qaeda’s proudest massacres of Muslims — while Pakistanis blame us for Taliban suicide bombings.
As this report documents, we possess facts that could be wielded as weapons. But we’re no more willing to fight an aggressive information war than we are to wage a serious ground war against our enemies.
Personally, I was astonished — and delighted — that this hard-headed report came out of West Point, the most politically correct major institution in the US Army, now dedicated to the proposition that killing our nation’s enemies is so yesterday. Is there new hope for the stumbling Long Gray Line?
Back to al Qaeda: Our porcine intelligence system doesn’t bother to ask the basic question of why al Qaeda kills Muslims so avidly. (Even conservative Muslim scholars are questioning al Qaeda’s practices.)
The answer’s as clear as a sunny day in the desert: Al Qaeda fully reflects its Saudi parentage. Neither the Saudis nor al Qaeda cares a whit about individual Muslims. They only care about Islam.
I’ve seen, in country after country, how the Saudis sacrifice the well-being and human potential of countless Muslims in order to prevent them from integrating into local societies and to promote the dour Wahhabi cult that has deformed Islam so horribly: purity matters, people don’t.
Likewise, al Qaeda is happy to sacrifice any number of Muslims to promote its neo-Wahhabi death cult. The al Qaeda serpent may have turned on the Saudi royals, but their differences are a matter of degree.
Meanwhile, we imagine that our passivity and “tolerance” are virtues. We fail to capitalize on al Qaeda’s horrendous record, while our government protects the Saudi-funded extremists who poison American mosques.
(Our leaders blather about “freedom of religion,” ignoring the fact that there’s no freedom of religion in Saudi Arabia. Can’t we prohibit religious funding from states that don’t themselves exercise tolerance? We’re being idiotic, not virtuous.)
We continue to hear endless nonsense from Washington about how “soft power” is so much more effective than military force. OK, show us. Three good men at West Point have given us a powerful information weapon against al Qaeda.
Will our leaders have the sense to use it?
Ralph Peters’ latest book is “The War After Armageddon.”
One year into the Obama Presidency it’s hard to believe how far he’s fallen. This President, we were told, would be a game-changer. He would take on the entrenched powers-that-be and change the way things are done in Washington. He was supposed to change the very way that politics is perceived. He was supposed to enact sweeping legislation that would forever alter public policy.
One year later, the only thing the President has to show for his work is a mountain of debt to be paid by future generations. The economy is still in the doldrums, economists are fretting about permanent structural unemployment and a lost generation, and America’s standing and influence internationally have declined further.
One year ago, the President said he would repair America’s reputation internationally, and strengthen its influence. The President’s policy of snubbing America’s friends and groveling to our enemies has done neither. Poland was left high and dry by Obama’s reversal of missile defense, England was miffed by his return of a Churchill bust that had been in the oval office for decades, Columbia has been denied a free trade pact, and the President offered Israel no support in its battle with Gaza terrorists. Meanwhile, the President has practically begged to talk with North Korea, Iran and Russia and has been unceremoniously snubbed by each.
Even on the President’s signature issue—healthcare—he has shown an almost total lack of leadership. Hoping to avoid conflict, the President handed the Congress a set of vague guidelines with which to design a healthcare bill. When both Houses of Congress came up with separate bills which skirted these guidelines, the President did nothing to advocate his original objectives. Now, with the House and Senate deadlocked, and just two days after a Republican Senate takeover, the President is calling for the healthcare bill to be scaled back dramatically to facilitate passage. Apparently having one of the largest legislative majorities in history isn’t enough to win on an issue that the President has staked such a great deal of political capital.
Even the left is giving up on the President. Paul Krugman said as much yesterday, and despair has been the prevailing mood among the liberal netroots for months. One year in, its hard to imagine a Presidency that has fallen so short of expectations.
WASHINGTON — What went wrong? - A year ago, he was king of the world. Now President Obama’s approval rating, according to CBS, has dropped to 46 percent — and his disapproval rating is the highest ever recorded by Gallup at the beginning of an (elected) president’s second year.
A year ago, he was leader of a liberal ascendancy that would last 40 years (James Carville). A year ago, conservatism was dead (Sam Tanenhaus). Now the race to fill Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat in bluest of blue Massachusetts is surprisingly close, with a virtually unknown state senator bursting on the scene by turning the election into a mini-referendum on Obama and his agenda, most particularly health care reform.
A year ago, Obama was the most charismatic politician on earth. Today the thrill is gone, the doubts growing — even among erstwhile believers.
Liberals try to attribute Obama’s political decline to matters of style. He’s too cool, detached, uninvolved. He’s not tough, angry or aggressive enough with opponents. He’s contracted out too much of his agenda to Congress.
These stylistic and tactical complaints may be true, but they miss the major point: The reason for today’s vast discontent, presaged by spontaneous national Tea Party opposition, is not that Obama is too cool or compliant but that he’s too left.
It’s not about style; it’s about substance. About which Obama has been admirably candid. This out-of-nowhere, least-known of presidents dropped the veil most dramatically in the single most important political event of 2009, his Feb. 24 first address to Congress. With remarkable political honesty and courage, Obama unveiled the most radical (in American terms) ideological agenda since the New Deal: the fundamental restructuring of three pillars of American society — health care, education and energy.
Then began the descent — when, more amazingly still, Obama devoted himself to turning these statist visions into legislative reality. First energy, with cap-and-trade, an unprecedented federal intrusion into American industry and commerce. It got through the House, with its Democratic majority and Supreme Soviet-style rules. But it will never get out of the Senate.
Then, the keystone: a health care revolution in which the federal government will regulate in crushing detail one-sixth of the U.S. economy. By essentially abolishing medical underwriting (actuarially based risk assessment) and replacing it with government fiat, Obamacare turns the health insurance companies into utilities, their every significant move dictated by government regulators. The public option was a sideshow. As many on the right have long been arguing, and as the more astute on the left (such as The New Yorker’s James Surowiecki) understand, Obamacare is government health care by proxy, single-payer through a facade of nominally “private” insurers.
At first, health care reform was sustained politically by Obama’s own popularity. But then gravity took hold, and Obamacare’s profound unpopularity dragged him down with it. After 29 speeches and a fortune in squandered political capital, it still will not sell. Continued…
A major earthquake rocked Haiti, killing possibly thousands of people as it toppled the presidential palace and hillside shanties alike and leaving the poor Caribbean nation appealing for international help. A five-story U.N. building was also brought down Tuesday by the 7.0 magnitude quake, the most powerful to hit Haiti in more than 200 years according to the U.S. Geological Survey. – Reuters
Violence in Mexico has spiraled to unprecedented levels as the country’s drug war claimed a record 69 lives in one day…A total of 283 people are believed to have died in drug-related violence in Mexico in the first 10 days of this year, which is more than double the number during the same period in 2009. – Telegraph
When it comes to gore, Mexico’s drug traffickers seem to compete among themselves for the title of most depraved. One will chop off the heads of victims. Another will string dead rivals from bridges or burn their genitals. Recently, hit men removed the face from a dead man and sewed it onto a soccer ball. On Tuesday, Mexican authorities announced the capture of one of those who they said had been active in this game of one upsmanship, Teodoro Eduardo Garcia Simental, described as a ruthless drug lord based just south of the American border in Tijuana. Mr. García’s trademark, when not trafficking marijuana and methamphetamine to the United States, was boiling rivals in barrels of lye in what has become known as pozole, for the Mexican stew, the authorities said. – New York Times
Venezuelans mobbed stores this week to buy imported electronic goods after the government’s sharp devaluation of the currency heightened fears that prices would soon skyrocket. President Hugo Chávez’s decision, announced Friday, comes as Venezuela’s sputtering economy grapples with energy and water shortages. Now in his 12th year in power, Chávez has the support of half of the country’s 28 million people, polls show, but rising inflation would most hurt the lower classes that are the pillar of his movement…”The typical Venezuelan is saying, ‘My savings are going to be worthless,’ ” said Robert Bottome, editor of the business newsletter Veneconomia in Caracas, the capital. “The store shelves are pretty much empty right now.” – Washington Post
[The first time I read Mychal Massie, about 10 years ago, I was impressed with his vocabulary. I have always liked fancy words that make you think. I once had a boss who would use "big words" in meetings. I would write them down and look them up later. I could never remember them though. I've been reading Mychal ever since and follow him on Twitter.]
Obama’s “the buck stops here” speech is yet another one of his classics. It is a classic contrivance of duplicity, confliction and display of his narcissism.
Three days after the Christmas Day terrorist attack, he claimed that he had ordered an immediate review of “our watch-list system, which our government has had in place for many years.” The day after that he said, “It’s becoming clear that the system that has been in place for years now is not sufficiently up to date.”
His comments were intended as an unambiguous stab at his predecessor President George W. Bush. After all, since taking office, he managed to blame former President Bush for everything but water being wet. Then, just days after those comments, he attempts to become Trumanesque by saying, “The buck stops with me.” And so continues the transmogrification of the Chicago hustler, i.e., community organizer.
Adding to this tawdry melodrama, National Security Council Chief of Staff Denis McDonough said, “Not only did the president accept responsibility for it, but the president also wanted to do this as transparently as possible.”
Excuse the heck out of me, but I don’t equate reading from teleprompters and telling those citizenry who possess the intestinal stamina to listen to and/or watch this act that it was his fault, as freeing him from honoring his repeated promises to have C-Span cover the health-care proceedings. The latter would be transparency – Obama’s comments that day were conspicuous in their attempt to cast himself as something he is not – a leader.
The Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab terrorist attack may have been an elucidating moment for Obama, but Americans didn’t need him to tell us, “We are at war against … a far reaching network of violence and hatred that attacked us on Sept. 11 – that killed nearly 3,000 innocent people and that is plotting to strike us again.”
We get it – but we have serious concern pursuant to the extent this truly registers in him. For the families of those murdered by terrorists – what part of it escapes them? Ask the Gold Star families whom Obama has tried to use as backdrops for his photo-ops – what part of what America is up against escapes them? America needs to be confident that when the liberal anti-war president makes a speech and claims that “[he] will do whatever it takes to defeat [the enemy]” he refuses to even identify as terrorists, it’s not just another Chicago charade.
Obama and his minions were quick to label the attack as a “failed attempt,” but I beg to differ. A failed attempt would have meant Abdulmutallab never boarded the plane in Amsterdam. It is Obama’s flatulent narcissism that allows him to make claims of successfully keeping us safe here at home.
I don’t intend to diminish law enforcement, but the apprehension of Medunjanin and Ahmedzay Zazi and the arrest of Lashkar-e-Taiba operative David Headley are more consistent with the adage that even a blind squirrel finds an acorn once in a while.
Where were the Herculean efforts to kill or arrest Nidal Malik Hasan before he murdered and wounded 43 people at Fort Hood? If Obama is truly committed to fighting terrorists, why not call it a “war on terror”? If Obama is committed to protecting our families, why is he so concerned with offending the sensitivities of terrorists? If he is committed to Americans, why is he closing Gitmo? Why is he bringing terrorists within our communities? Why is he treating Abdulmutallab and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed like rock stars guilty of little more than drug dealing and battery?
I’m tired of hearing Obama pontificate and tell us how great he is and what a superb job he is doing. I want a president and homeland security chief that don’t equate conservatives and veterans with those who are consumed with our destruction. I want a president who, along with his staff, will admit that these people are maniacal heathens who should be handled with extreme prejudice in the field, and when they are taken into custody not given civilian trials after they’ve murdered my fellow Americans.
THE six countries trying to talk Iran out of its dangerous nuclear ambitions—America, Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China—face an unappetising choice. Iran continues to produce stocks of enriched uranium that it claims are intended for a civilian nuclear programme (although it has no nuclear-powered reactor that could use the stuff), but which could make a bomb.
Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was offered a deal by which Russia and France would have taken much of his stock of low-enriched uranium and turned it—safely outside the country—into special higher-enriched fuel for a Tehran-based research reactor. By diminishing Iran’s stockpile, if only for a few months, the deal could have opened the door a crack to confidence-building talks with the six. But the deadline for taking up that offer was the end of 2009, and the hand that Barack Obama has extended to the regime has therefore been spurned.
The stakes are all the higher because this issue is a severe test of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). That grand bargain enables countries to make electricity, but not weapons, with nuclear fission. It is up for review this year. If the months tick by with Iran demonstrating to all the world just how easy it is to break the treaty’s rules with impunity, the NPT will finally be done for. The time has therefore come for harsher measures. There are only two options for the six countries: tougher sanctions or military action.
No government—not even that in Israel, whose security is most directly threatened by Mr Ahmadinejad—wants to use force (see article). Military strikes could interrupt Iran’s nuclear effort, but the gains are as uncertain as the costs. They might take out officially declared sites, but intelligence agencies know that there are others too, like the weapons-sized uranium-enrichment plant being built secretly in a mountainside on a well-guarded compound near Qom whose existence was revealed only four months ago. And even if an attack succeeded in penetrating all of Iran’s underground sites—a big if—it could do no more than set back Iran’s ambitions temporarily. After Israel bombed Iraq’s Osirak reactor in 1981, Saddam Hussein redoubled his efforts to get a bomb. Military strikes would also risk provoking a wider conflict in a region that is already worryingly unstable.
More painful sanctions, then, are the only sensible alternative to leaving Iran to enrich its way to the dangerous point where it can declare it has a bomb. But Russia and China—especially China, which has piled money into Iran’s oil and gas industries as Western companies have withdrawn—are reluctant to get tough.
Self-interest is not the only reason to oppose sanctions. Those who favour military strikes and those who would do nothing both complain that sanctions won’t work. Others believe that they would work, but would do more harm than good by encouraging Iranians to rally around the government at a time when the protest movement looks as though it might just bring about change.
Ralph Peters
