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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