Posted on 19 Jan 2010 at 8:38pm By GavinoBritish Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, who appeased Adolf Hitler before being replaced by Neville Chamberlain, famously said: “I would rather be an opportunist and float than go to the bottom with my principles round my neck.” One year into his presidency, Barack Obama might like to take note.
As Baldwin stumbled in his response to Nazi expansionism, Obama has fumbled his way on the biggest security issue of our times. The President’s initial conviction was that closing the Guantanamo detention center and reaching out to the Arab world would, in turn, pacify European angst and Middle Eastern militancy. But Guantanamo was a symbolic rather than a material issue, where prisoners were detained for good reason and treated properly. As such, closing it could never do much more than paper over the underlying grievances relating to the distribution of world power and institutionalized hatred in the Middle East. These political challenges remain in place, as does Guantanamo itself despite the President’s overhyped decree.
Worse, the President has undermined the Central Intelligence Agency by allowing dubious prosecutions to proceed against personnel who were performing their duty of protecting the United States. This strikes at the heart of the culture of the agencies that Americans depend on for their security. And it goes some way to explaining the systemic failure that allowed the Christmas Day underwear bomber to carry out his attack on board flight 253. Operatives now have been put into a position where they have every incentive not to raise red flags. As in any large organization, the culture is set by the man at the top. At least Prime Minister Baldwin did not find a reason to prosecute Royal Air Force fighter pilots before World War 2. They subsequently successfully defended Britain from the Luftwaffe.
Today, the greatest destabilizing regime in the world is Iran with its material and financial support for international terrorism and its determination to build nuclear weapons. Against a background of suppressing internal dissent and deploying violence against pro-democracy protesters, President Obama has stood about as firm as the British and French governments when Hitler marched into the Rhineland. The President has raised barely a whimper. This weakness nourishes and sustains the Iranian leadership and does nothing to promote the type of peaceful world that the President envisioned when he addressed the United Nations.
Empty dreams...?...
It took the President months of internal discussion preceded by a public disagreement with his leading general before a military strategy was unveiled for Afghanistan. Despite the planned deployment of 30,000 troops, the preemptive withdrawal approach – predicated as it is on the supposedly superior wisdom and intellect of the President’s political advisers and lawyers in Washington, DC – seems doomed to join the ranks of great military failures. History tells us that military strategies usually work better when they have been conceived by experienced military commanders rather than by political groupthink. Announcing a withdrawal prior to a build-up hasn’t been tried before for good reason.
In the face of Hitler’s militarism, Stanley Baldwin did belatedly allow rearmament to proceed. After three acts of domestic terrorism in his first year in office, Barack Obama’s response to terrorism is looking increasingly inadequate. His Homeland Security Secretary, Janet Napolitano, remained in post after claiming that the “system worked” once the latest terrorist incident occurred, glossing over the failure to stop the underwear bomber from boarding his flight to Detroit in the first place.
Some commentators are now speculating that a fourth attack could fatally wound Barack Obama’s presidency. The President would be wise to urgently rethink his security strategy and, as Mr. Baldwin might have suggested, jettison some of his pacifist principles.
I was just reading an article from Reuters (http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE60K3XK20100121) about the restarting of the Middle East peace talks. In the article it quotes President Obama’s recent interview with Time magazine regarding his failed Middle East peace efforts “This is just really hard … and if we had anticipated some of these political problems on both sides earlier, we might not have raised expectations as high.”
Come on, this issue hasn’t lingered on for more than 40 years because it’s easy! I certainly don’t fault the President for his efforts. However, I think this quote sums up the naive approach his administration has taken to national security. Coming into office, President Obama’s core belief was that everybody hated us because we are arrogant and that if he apologized for the US, closed Gitmo and promised to play nice then all the seemingly intractable problems we are facing would be off the table. Based on the results it turns out those core beliefs are misguided. Perhaps the President has learned a couple basic things in his first year in office that will help him shape our future national security policy: Bad people hate the US because of what we are and the US isn’t the only country in the world who puts its national interests first. Hopefully he has gained some insight into the world as it is and he can use it to shape the world to benefit us and our allies.
It’s funny, Joe, because liberals claim to be the only ones who really grasp all the complexities of foreign affairs. Yet here is someone that the liberal elites placed on an intellectual pedestal, claiming he was the most intellectual American leader ever, and yet he has just discovered that the Middle East is, as he so ineloquently puts it, “really hard”. Perhaps the liberal media should have asked him some of those tough questions during the campaign that they like to ask Republicans, like “Do you know who is the President of Kazakstan?” But that might have exposed him as something other than intellectual…
Johnson, Carter, Clinton and Obama. What do these individuals have in common besides leading our country? They left a mess for the rest of the country to clean up which cost our nation many lives and a diminished security mechanisms. To protect our nation we need a strong Intelligence organization to protect us and to prevent us from going to war. Once this nation security mechanisms have failed then we are left with no other recourse but to go to war. I guess these men have never read “The Art of War” by Sun Tzu.