Thursday, June 4, 2015

Naivete with an Arrogance Chaser

I thought that Jimmy Carter was a very intelligent and decent man who was nonetheless the most stupefyingly naïve individual who ever blundered the office of President of the United States.  By the Fall of 1977, it was so blatantly obvious that he wasn’t up to the job but by then, it was too late; wearing sweaters on national TV as an answer to the cold winter; installing solar panels at the White House and agonizing over the tennis court schedule; cancelling the B-1 bomber and handing over the Panama Canal were just the beginning of four years’ worth of self-inflicted, delusional failure. Economies can’t grow when the top earners are taxed at a 70% rate and investors lose their capital gains, no matter how hard you believe otherwise.  Russia invades Afghanistan because they see no cost in doing so.  Fanatical Shiite Muslims storm our embassy and hold 52 Americans hostage for 444 days because they think we’re too weak to stop them.  By the time Carter slunk out of Washington in 1981, a beaten, humiliated man, I thought that nobody in their right mind would ever forget his central contribution to U.S. foreign policy (the presumption that using kind words alone is foolish) but of course, liberals being liberals, what’s the point of a failed strategy if you can’t use it again? Bill Clinton hired Carter’s team of proven losers when he came to town because he believed what they believed and they went right to work, kissing up to and in general groveling at the feet of our adversaries rather than using America’s full military and political power to advance our interests, and they really thought that they would make the world a safer place.  Now, we knew that this was a discredited policy in 1993 and it produced the results we expected: Timidity by Les Aspin – denying tanks for urban combat support – led to 18 U.S. deaths in Mogadishu and an humiliating retreat; non-interventionism in Bosnia led to 250,000 deaths until we finally intervened in 1995; non-interventionism in Rwanda led to the worst genocide in Africa since Rome took Carthage; non-interventionism and humiliation in Haiti was followed by full-throated interventionism to return Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power, a demagogue who urged his followers to burn their opponents to death with gasoline-soaked automobile tires around their necks (“What a nice tool! What a nice instrument! What a nice device!”), an intervention so successful that he was deposed again; repeated Al Qaeda attacks in Kenya, Tanzania, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and blown opportunities to arrest and kill Osama bin Laden himself; granting PNTR for China while getting nothing in return; and failure upon failure trying to persuade Yasser Arafat that getting 95% of what he wanted was a good deal.  For eight years, Bill Clinton and his socialist one-worlder colleagues clung to this policy, convinced in the face of mounting evidence otherwise that presenting a weak, preening America groveling for the world’s approval was more effective than projecting overwhelming strength, and which piled upon Jimmy Carter’s legacy of ineptitude – including giving the North Korean two nuclear reactors in 1994, what a savvy negotiator! – left us in a far more dangerous situation, a situation exploited by Al Qaeda on 9/11. 

George W. Bush, for his part, fought back vigorously during his Presidency though up to a point – he refrained from a general mobilization after 9/11 that would have enabled us to fight a truly Global War on Terror, he failed to secure our border with Mexico and throttle illegal immigration once-and-for-all, and he failed to support our ally Georgia when it was invaded by Russia.  Nonetheless, he unapologetically gave U.S. strategic interests top priority during his tenure, enfuriating the Left, but then came the Messiah-in-Chief, Priest-King and Generalissimo of the People’s Revolution, who saw no reason why the embarrassments of 1978 shouldn't be repeated.  With Priest-King, we have a leader who is not only naïve but resolutely so, a leader who believes that the sound of his own voice is enough to change the world, that the United States that won two world wars and through its resolve, prevented a third, the United States that has repeatedly sacrificed its blood and treasure for no other reason than to help other countries in need, is the greatest threat to world peace.  After having criticized George W. Bush for ordering the troop surge in Iraq in 2007 that actually succeeded in stabilizing the country, Priest-King promptly ordered the complete withdrawal of U.S. forces in October 2011, and with the Americans gone, to whom did he think the Iraqis would turn for help? Did he expect Iran not to meddle in its neighbor’s affairs, or Russia not to supplant us as the primary supplier of arms to that embattled nation? Without a strong, proactive American military presence, how did he expect Iraq to protect itself from Al Qaeda and its ISIS cousins, or from the constant probing and thrusting of a greedy Iran? Or is the likeliest explanation for his precipitous decision a belief that the world would simply take care of itself without us? That Iran would confine itself within its own borders, that Russia and jihadists of all stripes would simply ignore the vacuum we created? Based on his approach to other foreign policy issues – the “reset” with Russia that resulted in the invasion of Ukraine and outright annexation of Crimea, China’s annexation of the entire South China Sea, Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons, his wooing of Communist, terrorism-sponsoring Cuba and his outright contempt for Israel – this explanation seems the most plausible.  The damn-the-torpedoes-full-speed-astern attitude toward foreign relations springs from Priest-King’s Leftist philosophy of nonchalant disengagement, leaving the world to burn not because he hates the world but because he wants to concentrate on finishing the destruction of the United States from within, because he wants to cement his legacy as not only the greatest President in American history but the greatest leader who has ever lived, because he believes that without the United States’ assertive leadership, the world will develop answers to their own problems and usher in a new era of peace and prosperity.  When he says that “the United States is the most respected country on earth,” he really believes that, and that he made it happen, that he spoke and it was so, when all see around us is catastrophe.  “The most respected country on earth” is a figment of his imagination, a hallucination, the concoction of a mind divorced from reality and a superheated ego.  Mosul is taken by ISIS and he calls them a “jayvee team,” Ramadi is taken while the Iraqi Army abandons their equipment and flees for their lives and he calls it “a tactical setback” and refuses to consider deploying U.S. maneuver units to confront ISIS directly, blaming the Iraqi government that he abandoned for failing to protect its own territory, all because he places his superstitious faith in a liberal foreign policy that hasn’t worked in a hundred years of trying ahead of American vital interests. 

The primary mission of the President of the United States is to defend the United States.  We have vital national interests in the Middle East and indeed within our own country that ISIS threatens.  If we want to defend those vital interests, then we must take any action within our power to do so, whether or not the American people are tired of war, whether or not Russia or Iran oppose us and whether or not George Clooney stops inviting us to his house in Malibu, and if that means deploying the 1st Armored Division to kill these bastards up front and personal, then that’s what we have to do and no cloud cuckooland delusion should stop us.  At least, that’s how it’s supposed to work.

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