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发帖数: 29846 | 1 How Obama Betrayed America
A policy of appeasement and intervention abets our enemies.
By David Horowitz
“If we have to use force, it is because we are America. We are the
indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see farther into the future.”
— Madeleine Albright, secretary of state (1997–2001), Clinton
administration
It is a judgment on Barack Obama’s timorous, apologetic, and irresponsible
conduct of foreign affairs that Madeleine Albright’s words, spoken little
more than 15 years ago, now sound as antique as a pronouncement by Harry
Truman at the onset of the Cold War, the great challenge America confronted
bravely and without equivocation generations ago. Obama has set in motion
policies meant to make America far from indispensable — a diminished nation
that “leads from behind,” if at all; a nation with a downsized military,
chronically uncertain about its meaning and its mission as it skulks in the
wings of the world stage.
Albright made her statement about Iraq when Democrats were still supporting
their country’s confrontation with the sadistic dictator Saddam Hussein,
and before they defected from the war, shortly after its battles were under
way. Obama opposed America’s war with Iraq and then opposed the military
surge that finally brought victory. As president, Obama presided over the
withdrawal of all American forces from Iraq, against the wishes of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, who wanted a continuing military presence — withdrawal
paid for in the blood of thousands of American men and women in arms. Obama
thus turned that benighted nation over to the malign influences of America’
s chief enemy in the Middle East, Iran.
Far from shouldering his responsibility as the commander-in-chief of America
’s global War on Terror and embracing it as this generation’s equivalent
of the Cold War, Obama showed his distaste for the entire enterprise by
dropping the term “War on Terror” and replacing it with an Orwellian
phrase — “overseas contingency operations.” Minimizing the Islamist
threat to the United States is not an oversight of the Obama administration;
that is its policy.
It should not have been difficult for Obama to make the nation’s defense a
priority when he became America’s commander-in-chief in January 2009. The
American homeland had already experienced a devastating attack, which
terrorists have been constantly trying to repeat. The number of foreign
states openly supporting terror has steadily risen during Obama’s tenure.
The most dangerous Islamist regime, Iran, is building nuclear weapons, while
Washington dithers over pointless negotiations. As secular governments give
way to Islamist regimes in Turkey, Egypt, and Iraq, and with the Taliban on
the rise in Afghanistan and an American withdrawal imminent, the parallels
to the early Cold War are eerie, the implications equally dire. Yet instead
of policies that put U.S. national security first and are pursued without
hesitation or apology, Obama’s time in office has been marked by retreat
and accommodation and even support of Islamist foes — most ominously of the
Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, which swept aside an American ally with Obama
’s help and is busily creating a totalitarian state.
Obama’s Foreign-Policy Disasters
In the four years since Obama’s first inauguration, almost three times as
many Americans have been killed in Afghanistan as in the eight years of the
Bush administration. Withdrawal, not victory, has been Obama’s goal from
the outset, and now it is the only outcome possible. During the Obama years,
there have been more than 8,000 Islamic terrorist attacks on “infidels”
across the globe, a 25 percent increase over the number when the fighting in
Iraq was at its height. In the face of this bloody and intensifying
Islamist offensive, Obama has tried to convince the American people that the
war against al-Qaeda has been essentially “won” — by him — and that the
terrorist threat is subsiding. Denial of the war that Islamists have
declared on us, and of the threat it represents, is the heart of the Obama
doctrine and has guided this nation’s policies for more than four years.
Obama’s desire for rapprochement with the Islamist regime in Iran has
prompted the administration to drag its feet on the sanctions designed to
halt Tehran’s nuclear program. For the same reason, the president and his
administration were silent when hundreds of thousands of Iranians poured
into the streets of Tehran to call for an end to the dictatorship and were
met by an orgy of violence from the mullahs’ thugs. Because of the White
House’s moral and political timidity, its denial of the Islamist threat,
and its conviction that America (presumably an even greater predator) has no
right to condemn another nation, Iran reached its tipping point and went
the wrong way.
The administration’s denial was glaring also in its response to the
massacre of 13 unarmed soldiers at Fort Hood by an Islamic fanatic and
terrorist, Nidal Malik Hasan, who three and a half years later still has not
been brought to trial. Hasan infiltrated the American military and, despite
open expressions of hatred for the West, was promoted to the rank of U.S.
Army major. The Obama administration’s Kafkaesque response to an obvious
case of Islamist violence against the U.S. was to classify the terrorist
attack as an incident of “workplace violence,” and thus to hide the fact
that Hasan was a Muslim soldier in a war against the infidels of the West.
This inability to name our enemies was on display again on the eleventh
anniversary of 9/11, as jihadists staged demonstrations and launched attacks
against American embassies in Egypt and other Islamic countries. In Libya,
al-Qaeda terrorists overran an American consular compound and murdered the U
.S. ambassador and three brave staffers. The attack took place in a country
that had recently been destabilized by Obama’s own intervention to oust its
dictator. Again, Obama had denounced a military intervention in Iraq as
senator; that intervention, unlike his Libyan adventure, had been authorized
by both houses of Congress and a unanimous U.N. Security Council resolution
. As president, Obama had invoked the principle of non-intervention to
justify his passivity in the face of atrocities in Syria and Iran. But in
Libya he conducted an unauthorized invasion of a country that posed no
threat to the United States and was not, as Syria is, in alliance with the
mullahs of Iran and the terrorists of Hezbollah. The chaos that followed
Obama’s Libyan intervention led directly to the rise of the local al-Qaeda,
which planted its flag atop the same American outpost in Benghazi it later
destroyed.
The events in Benghazi were a stark revelation of the consequences of a
foreign policy without a moral compass. The battle over the embassy lasted
seven hours. Although the Obama learned about the attack shortly after it
began, and although the embattled Americans inside the compound begged the
White House for help, and although U.S. fighter jets were stationed in Italy
only an hour away, the president, in one of the most shameful acts in the
history of that office, denied help by leaving his post, so that only
silence answered their desperate calls. The president and his administration
then went into cover-up mode, lying to Congress and the American people,
pretending for weeks afterward that the attack was the result of a
spontaneous demonstration over an anti-Mohammed video, whose director they
then threw in jail.
Before his overthrow, the dictator Moammar Qaddafi warned that his demise
would unleash the forces of the Islamic jihad not only in his own country
but throughout North Africa. This was a prophecy quickly realized. In the
aftermath of Obama’s intervention, al-Qaeda in Mali took control of an area
twice the size of Germany. In Tunisia and Egypt, jihadists emerged as the
ruling parties, with the acquiescence and even assistance of the Obama
administration. In Syria, a savage civil war metastasized unimpeded, killing
tens of thousands and eventually pitting a fascist regime allied with Iran
against rebel forces largely aligned with al-Qaeda and the Muslim
Brotherhood.
As these disasters unfolded, the White House not only did not oppose the
Islamists but armed and enabled them. Obama had previously intervened in
Egypt, the largest and most important country in the Middle East, to force
the removal of its pro-American leader, Hosni Mubarak. He then promoted the
Brotherhood’s ascension to power by portraying it as a “moderate” actor
in the democratic process. As the Middle East situation deteriorated, the
Muslim Brotherhood became the chief beneficiary of America’s financial,
diplomatic, and military support. This same Brotherhood was the driving
force behind the Islamist surge, the mentor of Osama bin Laden and the
leaders of al-Qaeda, and the creator of Hamas. Rather than being quarantined
, the Brotherhood-dominated government in Cairo has received hundreds of
millions of dollars in military aid and F-16 bomber jets from the Obama
administration that had facilitated its rise to power.
Appeasement of Islamist Enemies
To allay concerns about the emergence of the Brotherhood, Obama’s secretary
of state, Hillary Clinton, uttered this justification for its acceptance by
the White House: “We believe . . . that it is in the interests of the
United States to engage with all parties that are peaceful and committed to
non-violence, that intend to compete for the parliament and the presidency.
” In these words, Clinton was referring to an organization whose spiritual
leader, Yusef al-Qaradawi, had recently called for a second Holocaust of the
Jews, “Allah willing, at the hands of the believers,” and to a party that
was calling for the establishment of a Muslim caliphate in Jerusalem and
for the destruction of the Jewish state. Soon after Clinton’s endorsement,
the Muslim Brotherhood’s presidential candidate, Mohamed Morsi, was elected
Egypt’s new leader and was referring to Jews as apes and pigs. Secure in
the support of the American administration, he wasted no time in abolishing
the constitution and instituting a dictatorship with no serious protest from
the United States. Senator John Kerry, shortly to be Hillary Clinton’s
successor as secretary of state, had visited the new dictator only months
before this destruction of Egypt’s civic space. Kerry assured the world
that the new Muslim Brotherhood regime was “committed to protecting
fundamental freedoms.”
As in Egypt, so in Syria. Both Clinton and Kerry promoted the ruthless
dictator Assad as a political reformer and friend of democracy just as he
was preparing to launch a war against his own people. (Meeting with Assad,
Kerry called Syria “an essential player in bringing peace and stability to
the region.”) Shortly thereafter, the dictator began a series of massacres
of his own population. Obama ignored the resulting tens of thousands of
fatalities and the international calls for a humanitarian intervention —
just as he had ignored the desperate struggle of the Green Revolution in the
streets of Tehran three years earlier. The chaos in Syria has now led to
the emergence of al-Qaeda as a leading actor among the rebel forces, under
the revealing name “the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant.” The very
name indicates the potential scope of the disaster that the Obama
administration is presiding over in the Middle East.
Republican Retreat On National Security
Until the “new politics” presidency of Jimmy Carter, the Democratic party
during the Cold War would never have tolerated such abject capitulations to
totalitarian forces. And when Carter showed such doubt and denial, the
Republican party could be counted on to defend the morality of American
power and carry the fight to the enemy. The Republicans did so with the
conviction that they were expressing the deepest convictions of the American
people.
In domestic politics, the American people preferred Democratic promoters of
the welfare state to Republican proponents of fiscal restraint. The same
electorate switched its vote, however, when the issue was protecting the
American homeland. While voters made Democrats the majority party in the
people’s House for 38 of the 42 years of America’s Cold War with the
Soviet Union, in 28 of those years they elected a Republican to be their
commander-in-chief. Moreover, three of the four Democrats who did make it to
the White House — Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson — were militant anti-
Communists and military hawks who on national-security issues held views
indistinguishable from those of Republicans.
Given that the most durable lesson of postwar electoral history was that
Democrats win national elections on domestic policy and that Republicans win
on national security, it seems incomprehensible that the Obama
administration has been able to degrade American power virtually without
Republican opposition. At the Republican party’s 2012 convention in Tampa,
its nominee, Mitt Romney, failed to mention the Islamic jihad and devoted
only one sentence to the fact that, in order to appease America’s enemies,
Obama had thrown Israel, America’s only dependable ally in the region, “
under the bus.” Romney did not mention Obama’s role as enabler of the
Muslim Brotherhood or the millions of dollars his administration had given
to the Palestinian jihadists on the West Bank and in Gaza, whose official
goal was the destruction of Israel and its Jews. He did not mention the
calls by the Islamist leaders of Egypt and Iran for the destruction of the
Jewish state and the completion of the job that Hitler started.
Romney devoted exactly two sentences to Obama’s appeasement of the Russians
and his abandonment of America’s Eastern European allies, which were
harmed by the president’s reneging on America’s commitments to their
missile defense. About the Korean peninsula, a flashpoint in national
security and a theater for the current administration’s diplomatic
dithering, Romney said nothing.
While Romney failed to confront a vulnerable Obama on national-security
issues and gave Obama a pass on his shameful betrayal of his embassy in
Benghazi, no other Republican campaign was likely to make the holy war that
Islamists are waging against us, and Obama’s feckless national-security
policies, a focal point of their attack. At one time or another, there were
ten Republican candidates for the nomination that Romney won. Each of them
participated in at least three of 20 public debates; two of the candidates
participated in all of them. There were candidates for social conservatism,
candidates for fiscal responsibility and job creation, candidates for
libertarian principles and moderate values. But there was not one Republican
candidate whose campaign was an aggressive assault on Obama’s disastrous
national-security decisions and how they had imperiled America’s interests
and its basic safety.
The extent of the Republican retreat on national security was dramatized by
an incident that took place a few months before the election. In a letter to
the Justice Department’s inspector general, Representative Michele
Bachmann and four other Republican House members asked him to look into the
possibility of Islamist influence in the Obama administration. The letter
expressed concern about State Department policies that “appear to be a
result of influence operations conducted by individuals and organizations
associated with the Muslim Brotherhood.” The letter then listed five
specific ways in which Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had actively
assisted the Muslim Brotherhood’s ascent to power in Egypt, producing in
the Middle East a decisive shift toward the jihadist enemies of the United
States.
The letter specifically asked for an inquiry into the activities of Huma
Abedin, Hillary Clinton’s deputy chief of staff and principal adviser on
Muslim affairs. It was a reasonable, indeed a necessary, request. Members of
Abedin’s family — her late father, her mother, and her brother — were
all identifiable leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood. For twelve years prior
to being hired by Hillary Clinton, Abedin herself had worked for an
organization founded by Abdullah Omar Naseef — a major Brotherhood figure,
a close associate of Abedin’s mother — one of the three principal
financiers of Osama bin Laden, and a man dedicated to promoting Islamic-
supremacist doctrines. A second figure with Muslim Brotherhood ties
occupying a high place in the Obama administration was Rashad Hussain,
deputy associate White House counsel, who had responsibilities in the areas
of national security and Muslim affairs. And there were others.
In other words, people with high-level Muslim Brotherhood connections occupy
positions of influence in the Obama administration on matters related to
national security and Muslim affairs — at the same time Obama’s policies
have encouraged the dramatic rise of the previously outlawed Muslim
Brotherhood in the Middle East. Yet when the congressional letter surfaced,
Bachmann and her colleagues came under savage attack as McCarthyites and “
Islamophobes,” whose request for an inquiry was itself deemed un-American.
These attacks came not only from the Washington Post, leading Democrats, and
such well-known apologists for Islamists as Georgetown’s John Esposito,
but also from Republicans John McCain and John Boehner. Without bothering to
address the facts the Bachmann letter presented, McCain said, “When anyone
, not least a member of Congress, launches vicious and degrading attacks
against fellow Americans on the basis of nothing more than fear of who they
are, in ignorance of what they stand for, it defames the spirit of our
nation, and we all grow poor because of it.” In other words, Bachmann and
her colleagues were bigots. Said Boehner: “I don’t know Huma, but from
everything that I do know of her she has a sterling character. Accusations
like this being thrown around are pretty dangerous.” In other words, asking
reasonable questions about a woman with undeniable ties to the Muslim
Brotherhood who stands at the center of American policy was more dangerous
than allowing those ties to remain unexamined.
In the hands of today’s leftists, the terms “McCarthyite,” “Islamophobe,
” and their equivalents are not descriptions of a political pathology but
rather bludgeons wielded to shut down inquiry into behavior that may be
harmful to the United States. Instead of rejecting these slurs as they are
used to invoke a brutal cloture on a matter of national security, Republican
leaders participated in the successful effort to suppress the debate.
The Betrayal of Iraq
Why this lack of conviction on a matter combining internal security and
foreign policy, traditional pillars of Republican strength? The answer can
be found in the way the Republicans allowed themselves to be intimidated and
then silenced as the Left put forth its version of “the lessons of Iraq.”
The moment when Republicans lost the national-security narrative — and
abandoned their role as defenders of the homeland — came in June 2003, just
six weeks after the Saddam regime fell. That month, the Democratic party
launched a national television campaign claiming that Bush lied to the
American people to lure them into a war that was “unnecessary,” “immoral,
” and “illegal.”
Until that moment, the war in Iraq had been supported by both parties and
was regarded by both as a strategic necessity in the larger War on Terror.
Removing Saddam’s regime by force, moreover, had been a specific goal of U.
S. policy since October 1998, when Bill Clinton, a Democratic president,
signed the Iraqi Liberation Act.
In his time on center stage, Saddam launched two aggressive wars, murdered
300,000 Iraqis, used chemical weapons on his own citizens, and put in place
an active nuclear-weapons program. He was thwarted only by his defeat in the
first Gulf War. As of 2002, his regime had defied 16 U.N. Security Council
resolutions designed to enforce the Gulf War truce and stop Iraq from
pursuing its ambition to possess weapons of mass destruction. In September
2002, the U.N. Security Council added a new resolution, which gave the
regime until December 17 to comply with its terms or face consequences. When
Iraq failed to comply, Bush made the only decision compatible with the
preservation of international law and the security of the United States: He
prepared an invasion to remove the regime and the weapons of mass
destruction it was reasonably presumed to possess. The Iraqi dictator was
provided the option of leaving the country and averting war. He rejected the
offer and the U.S.-led coalition entered the country on March 19, 2003. (I
recounted the story in Unholy Alliance.)
The use of force in Iraq had been authorized by both houses of Congress,
including a majority of Democrats in the Senate. It was supported in
eloquent speeches by John Kerry, John Edwards, Al Gore, and other Democratic
leaders. But just three months into the war, Democrats turned against an
action that they had authorized and began a five-year campaign to
delegitimize it, casting America as its villain. It was a fundamental break
with the post–World War II bipartisan foreign policy that had survived even
Vietnam.
With the support and protection of Democratic legislators, the New York
Times, the Washington Post, and the major TV networks now undertook a
relentless five-year propaganda campaign against the war, taking relatively
minor incidents like the misbehavior of guards at the Abu Ghraib prison and
blowing them up into international scandals, damaging their country’s
prestige and weakening its morale. Left-leaning news media leaked classified
national-security secrets, destroying three major national-security
programs designed to protect Americans from terrorist attacks. (For more on
this, see my work with Ben Johnson, Party of Defeat, and Douglas Feith’s
War and Decision.) Every day, the New York Times and other left-leaning
media provided front-page coverage of America’s body counts in Iraq and
Afghanistan and helped to fuel a massive “anti-war” movement, which
attacked America’s fundamental purposes along with its conduct of the war.
The goal of these campaigns was to indict America and its leaders as war
criminals who posed a threat to the world.
The principal justification offered by the Democrats for their campaign
against the Iraq War was that “Bush lied” in order to persuade them to
support an invasion that was unnecessary, illegal, and immoral. This claim
was the only way Democrats could explain the otherwise inexplicable and
unconscionable fact that, for domestic political reasons, they turned
against a war they had supported, following the lead of an anti-war primary
candidate, Howard Dean, who appeared to be on his way to winning their
presidential nomination. It was only then that Kerry and Edwards, the
eventual nominees, reversed themselves on the war; they were followed by the
entire party, which saw a partisan advantage in attacking Bush over an
increasingly difficult situation on the battlefield.
The claim that Bush lied was false. Bush could not have lied to Kerry or the
congressional Democrats about WMDs in Iraq, because Kerry and other
Democrats sat on the Senate and House Intelligence Committees and had access
to the same intelligence data that Bush relied on to make his case for the
war. When the Democrats authorized and supported the war, they knew
everything that Bush knew. The claim that he lied to get their support was
itself the biggest lie of the war. Its only purpose was to hide the
Democrats’ own perfidy in abandoning the nation’s mission for partisan
gain, and to discredit the president and turn the country against him, at
whatever cost, in the hope of winning the 2004 election.
Republicans didn’t lose control of the national-security narrative simply
because Democrats betrayed a war they had authorized, however. Republicans
had the option of standing fast, as they had done since the attack on Pearl
Harbor. They lost control of the narrative because they never held the
Democrats accountable for their betrayal. They never suggested that the
Democrats’ attacks on the war were deceitful and unpatriotic, aiding our
enemies and risking the lives of our troops in the field. The Bush White
House failed to defend itself from the attacks, and the Republicans as a
whole failed to expose the Democrats’ lie and to describe their reckless
accusations as the disloyal propaganda it clearly was. “Betrayal” and “
sabotage” — the appropriate terms for Democratic attacks on the motives of
the war — were never employed. Republicans did not accuse Democrats of
conducting a campaign to demoralize America’s troops in the field, even
when Kerry during a presidential debate called it “the wrong war, in the
wrong place, at the wrong time.” (How did that sound to a 19-year-old
Marine facing down Islamic terrorists in Fallujah?)
The Republican Failure and the American Future
The Republicans’ failure to defend their president and the war turned a
good war into a bad one. It turned a disloyal opposition into a patriotic
movement. It crippled America’s ability to protect other people’s freedom
and defend its own. If the war against a dictator like Saddam Hussein was
illegitimate and immoral, then American resistance to any outlaw states
could be portrayed — and opposed — as reckless and unjustifiable
aggression.
In failing to fight the political war over Iraq, Republicans lost their
legitimacy as the party that had always taken the hard, sometimes unpopular
steps to protect national security, as they did in the mid 1980s when they
held the line against Soviet efforts to support Sandinista subversion and
subject El Salvador to a bloody Marxist guerilla war. Losing — and to some
degree failing to fight — the war over the war in Iraq is why Republicans
are mute today in matters of foreign policy and why they have not challenged
Barack Obama’s dangerous course of appeasement and drift, particularly in
the Middle East.
The Joint Chiefs had suggested that a military presence of 20,000 troops in
Iraq was necessary to keep it free of Iran’s control, but the demand for
such a presence became problematic when the Republicans allowed the
Democrats’ narrative of “Bush lied, people died” to succeed. When 2008
presidential candidate John McCain suggested that maintaining troops in a
postwar Iraq was a prudent measure, candidate Obama attacked him as a
warmonger. “You know,” Obama said, “John McCain wants to continue a war
in Iraq perhaps as long as 100 years.” This refrain became a constant theme
of the winning Obama campaign — Republicans are warmongers, and dangerous.
That is why three years later, when Obama withdrew from Iraq, no Republican
dared accuse him of betraying the Americans who gave their lives to make
Iraq independent, even though Iraq as a consequence fell under the sway of
Iran and was providing air space for Iranian weapons headed for Syria..
How far America has fallen since Madeleine Albright called us the
indispensable nation that stands taller and sees farther becomes ever more
apparent with each new international crisis. We are not only losing the war
with enemies whose stated goal is our destruction, we are led by a political
party that constantly finds excuses not to take these enemies seriously,
and never has to account for its disgraceful conduct because its potential
opposition is mute. The only way to reverse this trend is to mount a
campaign to put Obama’s support for the Muslim Brotherhood at the forefront
of the political debate, and to educate Americans about the real dangers we
face. Americans need to become aware of the Islamic-supremacist threat, of
the malignant designs of the Muslim Brotherhood, and of the disasters that
may lie ahead because of the Obama administration’s policies of appeasing
and enabling our enemies’ evil ambitions.
— David Horowitz is author of Radicals: Portaits of a Destructive Passion. |
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