The heroic Ayaan Hirsi Ali discusses Obama's campaign pledge to withdraw from Iraq in 16 months. From "Change, but not for better," by Christopher Pearson in The Australian, November 8 (thanks to James):
WHEN Barack Obama began to campaign for the Democratic nomination, his main claim to fame was his extreme, left-liberal voting record in the US Senate. Since defeating Hillary Clinton in the primaries, he predictably gravitated towards more centrist positions. American media have, for the most part, been prepared to take the first plausible African-American candidate for the presidency at face value. So he has been able to maximise his vote by offering himself virtually as a blank slate; all things to all men.
Neither the American public nor the rest of the world know just what to expect. It's possible he will use the US recession to justify departures from Democratic economic policy. In office he may take better advice on foreign affairs than he's done to date. Increased house and Senate majorities may make him want to preserve them by taking a more cautious approach to social policy than his record suggests.
But at this stage we have nothing to go on apart from his record and his rhetoric and what they reveal about his character. On that basis, I think he's likely to be a disastrous president. I'm by no means alone in saying so. Consider this assessment by Thomas Sowell, a leading American columnist who is both conservative and black, in a recent piece posted on the RealClearPolitics website.
"The kind of self-righteous self-confidence that has become Obama's trademark is usually found in sophomores in Ivy League colleges: very bright and articulate students, utterly untempered by experience in the real world. The signs of Obama's self-centred immaturity are painfully obvious, though ignored by true believers who have poured their hopes into him, and by the media who just want the symbolism and the ideology that Obama represents ... 'This is our time!' he proclaims. And 'I will change the world'. But ultimately this election is not about him, but about the fate of this nation, at a time of both domestic and international peril, with a major financial crisis still unresolved and a nuclear Iran looming on the horizon."
One of the ways Obama could live up to his promise to change the world is by implementing his present trade policy. Buying votes in rust-bucket states by promising higher protection for American primary produce and locally made goods and threatening higher tariffs on imports has always been a bad idea. Many local commentators see it as not much more than the price Americans will have to pay for the Democrats' electoral successes.
But an American such as Rupert Murdoch -- who is also a global citizen as well as chairman and chief executive of News Corporation, which publishes The Australian -- has a better grasp of the international ramifications of protectionism.
He says: "For the past three or four years, some Democrats have been threatening to do things like put on extra tariffs (against Chinese imports) if they don't change their currency. If it happened it could set off retaliatory action which would certainly damage the world economy seriously." He thinks that the whole world should "fight like hell" for freer trade and the Doha Round of trade talks, because successes there could help the world economies come out of the recession faster. In his view no one knows yet what might happen under an Obama administration "but his declared policy would see a real setback of globalisation".
By way of contrast, consider this ringing editorial endorsement of Obama in The Australian Financial Review. There was a brief mention in passing that "he has sounded protectionist when it suited him". Then the Fairfax press's bastion of free trade surrendered head-over-heels to the temptations of intellectual schizophrenia and the lure of the zeitgeist. "This newspaper believes that a president Obama would offer the better prospect of an American renaissance abroad and an economic revival at home. There is also the chance of a redemptive moment in American history with the election of the first African-American president. Above all looms the challenge of restoring the US economy."
Whenever leader writers start predicting redemptive moments in a nation's history, it's safe to assume they're talking about symbolic events that pander to the emotional needs of the bien pensant, with scant regard for the feelings of other people, let alone for coherent notions of national honour or enduring national interests.
In the not too distant future it will become painfully obvious that implementing Obama's policy of retreat from Iraq is a terrible blow to US prestige and to the morale of its armed forces.
It will also be a capitulation to terrorism, with potentially catastrophic consequences.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, one of radical Islam's astutest observers, was her persuasive best on the subject last week. "The original impetus of Obama's campaign was his pledge to withdraw from Iraq in 16 months. There is little doubt that if Obama were to implement this pledge, jihadis in Iraq and across the world, who see history in the millennial terms of a long fight against the crusaders, would feel victorious ... The message such a precipitous withdrawal would send to the jihadis is the same message Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero sent when he rapidly withdrew forces from the coalition in Iraq after the Spanish election in March 2004: if you hang on long enough, you can scare the West away."
Whatever one's misgivings about the official justifications for the war in Iraq or the way it has been conducted, there can be little doubt it is still the primary front on which the war on terror is being waged.
Obama claims his troop withdrawal will be responsible, but this seems to be no more than buying himself some wriggle room on the timing of their departure.
The successful surge strategy of General David Petraeus is to be squandered, for no more compelling reason than that the president-elect didn't support it from the outset and his Republican rival did. It came as no surprise, then, that Obama should have been the preferred candidate of a terrorist outfit such as Hamas and that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was so lavish in his congratulations.
Economic necessity and the US's strategic interests may constrain Obama to pursue more pragmatic, centrist approaches than he first envisaged.
The one area where his own ultra-liberal values and those of his congressional majorities are likely to have free rein is social policy. Obama is on record as saying that a Freedom of Choice Act is "the first thing" he hoped to sign into law on taking office.
A FOCA goes a long way beyond the 1973 Roe v Wade decision, which mandated a general right to abortion. It would overturn virtually all the existing limits on abortion, state and federal. These include restrictions on government funding for the procedure and conscience-protection clauses for healthcare providers. FOCA would override laws guaranteeing informed consent and, in the case of under-age pregnancies, parental involvement. It would also require states to sanction late-term procedures, including the contentious "partial-birth" abortion which is widely seen as tantamount to infanticide.
During the campaign, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops made much of the fact that since Roe v Wade there had been nearly 50 million abortions in the US. In marked contrast to their silences and equivocations in previous elections, one-third of the bishops who lead individual dioceses told anyone prepared to listen that, in casting their vote, the right of the unborn to life took precedence over all other ethical considerations. The evangelical churches, which have historically tended to be less beholden to the Democratic Party machine, were even more vocal. It seems, at least for the time being, that all their urgings were in vain.
Recent opinion polls suggest that most Americans have some misgivings about abortion and support greater restrictions on the practice. Even so, they have just elected an extreme pro-choice president who will be able to change the balance of opinion on the Supreme Court, where appointments are for life. He says that support for the decision in Roe v Wade will be a criterion of eligibility for selecting judges to the court and he wants to entrench its principles in legislation. For the many conservatives, both secular and religious, who share the conviction that abortion is the greatest moral evil of our times, Obama's victory has been nothing less than wormwood and gall.
Thanks Jihad Watch
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