Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Thoughts by Aggie

Kissinger discusses what needs to be accomplished in order to succeed in negotiations with N. Korea and Iran. A goal is ineffective without a plan and concensus of the parties (the EU, US & China). Obama cannot do this alone.

Next are multiple views on the impact of releasing details of US interrogation tecquines. Now our enemies know exactly what to expect and how to prepare for it. Is this supposed to send a message to our enemies what a good guy he is or just another act that causes him to be viewed as foolish, if not weak.

This was a foolish, naive and dangerous step taken by our president whose function is to protect us. Aggie
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/21/AR2009042102967.html?wpisrc=newsletter&wpisrc=newsletter
Obama's Foreign Policy Challenge

By Henry A. Kissinger
Wednesday, April 22, 2009

The vast diplomatic agenda that the Obama administration has adopted will test its ability to harmonize national priorities such as relations with Iran and North Korea with global and multilateral concerns. President Obama has come into office at a moment of unique opportunity. The economic crisis absorbs the energies of all the major powers; whatever their differences, all need a respite from international confrontation. Overriding challenges such as energy, the environment and proliferation concern them to a considerable degree and in an increasingly parallel way. The possibility of comprehensive solutions is unprecedented Obama has launched negotiations on an extraordinary range of subjects. Each has a political as well as a strategic component. Each deals with issues peculiar to itself. Each runs the risk that inherent obstacles could obscure ultimate objectives or that negotiating tactics could warp substance. But the challenges are also closely related. For example, arms control negotiations with Russia will affect Russia's role in the nonproliferation effort with Iran. The strategic dialogue with China will help shape the Korean negotiations. The negotiations will also be affected by perceptions of regional balances -- of the key participants, for Russia, this applies especially to the former Soviet space in Central Asia; for China and the United States, to the political structure of Northeast Asia and the Pacific Rim.

This reality needs to be translated into some operational concept of world order. The administration's approach seems to be pointing toward a sort of concert diplomacy, which existed for some two decades after the Napoleonic Wars, in which groupings of great powers work together to enforce international norms. In that view, American leadership results from the willingness to listen and to provide inspirational affirmations. Common action grows out of shared convictions. Power emerges from a sense of community and is exercised by an allocation of responsibilities related to a country's resources. It is a kind of world order either without a dominating power or in which the potentially dominating power leads through self-restraint.

The economic crisis favors this approach even though there are few examples of sustained operation of such a concert. Typically, members of any grouping reflect an unequal distribution of willingness to run risks, leading to an unequal willingness to allocate efforts on behalf of international order, and hence to the potential veto by the most irresolute. The Obama administration need not choose yet whether to ultimately rely on consensus or equilibrium. But it must fine-tune its national security structure to judge the environment it faces and calibrate its strategy accordingly.

The administration's task, particularly with regard to North Korea and Iran, will be to keep the far-flung negotiations led by energetic personalities heading toward an agreed goal. In the process, it must navigate between two kinds of public pressures toward diplomacy endemic in American attitudes. Both seek to transcend diplomacy's traditional give-and-take. The first reflects an aversion to negotiating with societies that do not share our values and general outlook. It rejects the effort to alter the other side's behavior through negotiations. It treats compromise as appeasement and seeks the conversion or overthrow of the adversary. Critics of this approach, who represent the second sort of pressure, emphasize psychology. They consider the opening of negotiations an inherent transformation. For them, symbolism and gestures represent substance.

Proliferation is perhaps the most immediate illustration of the relationship between world order and diplomacy. If North Korea and Iran succeed in establishing nuclear arsenals in the face of the stated opposition of all the major powers in the U.N. Security Council and outside of it, the prospects for a homogeneous international order will be severely damaged. In a world of multiplying nuclear weapons states, it would be unreasonable to expect that those arsenals will never be used or never fall into the hands of rogue organizations. A new, less universal approach to world order would be needed. The next (literally) few years will be the last opportunity to achieve an enforceable restraint. If the United States, China, Japan, South Korea and Russia cannot achieve this vis-à-vis a country with next to no impact on international trade and no resources needed by anyone, the phrase "world community" will become empty.

North Korea has recently voided all concessions it made in six years of talks. It cannot be permitted to sell the same concessions over and over again. The six-power talks should be resumed only if Pyongyang restores the circumstances to which it has already agreed, mothballing its plutonium reactor and returning international inspectors to the site. When those talks resume, the ultimate quid pro quo must be the abandonment of the Korean nuclear weapons program and the destruction of the existing stockpile in return for normalization of relations at the end of the process. Since the outcome affects all neighbors of North Korea, and since the Korean nuclear program threatens them more than it does the United States, calls to place the emphasis on bilateral Korean-U.S. talks amount to a call for isolating the United States.

Iran is, of course, a far more complex country with a greater direct impact on its region. The diplomatic process with Iran is just beginning. Its outcome will depend on whether it is possible to establish a geostrategic balance in the region in which all countries, including Iran, find security without any country dominating. To that goal, bilateral U.S.-Iranian talks are indispensable. Any negotiations with Iran will be heavily influenced by whether progress toward stability in Iraq continues or whether an emerging vacuum tempts Iranian adventurism.

I have generally found that the best negotiating approach is to put before the other side a full and honest account of one's ultimate objectives. Tactical bargaining -- moving through a series of minimum concessions -- tests endurance via peripheral issues. But it runs the risk of producing misunderstanding about ultimate purposes. Sooner or later, the fundamental issues have to be addressed. This is particularly necessary when dealing with a country with which there has been no effective contact for three decades.

By contrast, the issue of proliferation is intrinsically multilateral. Heretofore, Britain, France, Germany, Russia and now the United States have coordinated by consensus. The price they have paid is that key issues have remained unresolved and even unaddressed. Some are factual: how far Iran is from developing sufficient enriched materials for a nuclear warhead and how far it is from building a warhead for a missile; the degree to which international inspections could verify a limited enrichment program declared as peaceful; and how much warning would be available if the declaration were violated.

While the administration seeks to persuade Iran to enter into dialogue (and there must be some point when reiterated requests turn on themselves), it should energetically seek to resolve the factual disputes among our prospective negotiating partners described above. That is the only way to sustain multilateral diplomacy. If no agreement can be reached on these issues, the long-sought negotiations will end in stalemate and wind up, through the veto by the least resolute, legitimizing an Iranian nuclear weapons program.

The administration has launched the country on an important diplomatic enterprise. It now needs to fulfill its vision with a diplomatic plan.

© 2009 Tribune Media Services Inc.
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http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=324863168180705
Inexcusable Lapse

By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Friday, April 17, 2009 4:20 PM PT

War On Terror: Imagine a president of the United States, within his first hundred days, revealing secrets that help terrorists kill. The secret memos on enhanced interrogation, now made public, do exactly that.

We are told by President Obama's senior adviser David Axelrod that the president agonized for four weeks over the "weighty decision" to make public memoranda detailing the specifics of the CIA's tough interrogation of high-value terrorist detainees such as 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammad.

For most other presidents, it would have taken maybe four minutes, required little soul-searching and resulted in the opposite choice.

What on earth could the president have been thinking in revealing the nuts and bolts of how we extract information from al-Qaida operatives to prevent the success of their terrorist operations?

What could have possessed him to make public the steps our interrogators go through, the limits of pain and discomfort they (but not the prisoners) know they will not exceed, and the analytical classification and specific purpose of each of the various techniques?

These top secrets will arm Islamist jihadists with knowledge that will be invaluable to them. Future terrorist detainees will now know, for instance, that their interrogations are under continual video surveillance to make sure no lasting medical or psychological consequences result from the techniques used. Will they now teach themselves to fake such ill effects?

Terrorists will know that when they are placed in a tiny container in "cramped confinement" it will last only "up to two hours," as a declassified memo from the Justice Department to the CIA noted. They will know that "stress positions" are used "only to induce temporary muscle fatigue" not "severe physical pain."

They will now know that when subjected to "water dousing" they need not have the slightest fear of hypothermia, because every precaution is taken to keep the temperature of both the room and the water itself far above freezing.

They will know sleep deprivation inflicted by the interrogators seldom exceeds 96 hours, and they'll know the specifics and purposes behind the relatively mild technique of "dietary manipulation."

What the president has given to our enemies is a treasure chest of defensive weapons. Within the caves of the mountainous Pakistan/Afghanistan border, Islamofascist plotters must wonder how self-destructively corrupt their American adversaries have to be to allow such materials to land in their hands.

The piece of information that may be of most value to terrorists is the government's assessment that waterboarding was "the most traumatic of the enhanced interrogation techniques" and implicitly the most effective.

Terrorist groups around the world will now know that waterboarding was "authorized for, at most, one 30-day period, during which the technique can actually be applied on no more than five days" with "no more than two sessions in any 24-hour period."

Each session lasted no more than two hours, consisting of, at most, six applications of water for 10 seconds each time, for a total of no longer than 12 minutes per each 24-hour period. Presumably the issue is academic since the Obama administration has officially prohibited waterboarding.

There is no more valuable tool for subjects of interrogation than to know what they will be subjected to. How in good conscience could our president have given this gift to those trying to destroy us?

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Need a Real Sponsor here
APRIL 17, 2009
The President Ties His Own Hands on Terror
The point of interrogation is intelligence, not confession.
Article

By MICHAEL HAYDEN and MICHAEL B. MUKASEY

The Obama administration has declassified and released opinions of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) given in 2005 and earlier that analyze the legality of interrogation techniques authorized for use by the CIA. Those techniques were applied only when expressly permitted by the director, and are described in these opinions in detail, along with their limits and the safeguards applied to them.
[Commentary] AP

9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

The release of these opinions was unnecessary as a legal matter, and is unsound as a matter of policy. Its effect will be to invite the kind of institutional timidity and fear of recrimination that weakened intelligence gathering in the past, and that we came sorely to regret on Sept. 11, 2001.

Proponents of the release have argued that the techniques have been abandoned and thus there is no point in keeping them secret any longer; that they were in any event ineffective; that their disclosure was somehow legally compelled; and that they cost us more in the coin of world opinion than they were worth. None of these claims survives scrutiny.

Soon after he was sworn in, President Barack Obama signed an executive order that suspended use of these techniques and confined not only the military but all U.S. agencies -- including the CIA -- to the interrogation limits set in the Army Field Manual. This suspension was accompanied by a commitment to further study the interrogation program, and government personnel were cautioned that they could no longer rely on earlier opinions of the OLC.

Although evidence shows that the Army Field Manual, which is available online, is already used by al Qaeda for training purposes, it was certainly the president's right to suspend use of any technique. However, public disclosure of the OLC opinions, and thus of the techniques themselves, assures that terrorists are now aware of the absolute limit of what the U.S. government could do to extract information from them, and can supplement their training accordingly and thus diminish the effectiveness of these techniques as they have the ones in the Army Field Manual.

Moreover, disclosure of the details of the program pre-empts the study of the president's task force and assures that the suspension imposed by the president's executive order is effectively permanent. There would be little point in the president authorizing measures whose nature and precise limits have already been disclosed in detail to those whose resolve we hope to overcome. This conflicts with the sworn promise of the current director of the CIA, Leon Panetta, who testified in aid of securing Senate confirmation that if he thought he needed additional authority to conduct interrogation to get necessary information, he would seek it from the president. By allowing this disclosure, President Obama has tied not only his own hands but also the hands of any future administration faced with the prospect of attack.

Disclosure of the techniques is likely to be met by faux outrage, and is perfectly packaged for media consumption. It will also incur the utter contempt of our enemies. Somehow, it seems unlikely that the people who beheaded Nicholas Berg and Daniel Pearl, and have tortured and slain other American captives, are likely to be shamed into giving up violence by the news that the U.S. will no longer interrupt the sleep cycle of captured terrorists even to help elicit intelligence that could save the lives of its citizens.

Which brings us to the next of the justifications for disclosing and thus abandoning these measures: that they don't work anyway, and that those who are subjected to them will simply make up information in order to end their ordeal. This ignorant view of how interrogations are conducted is belied by both experience and common sense. If coercive interrogation had been administered to obtain confessions, one might understand the argument. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), who organized the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, among others, and who has boasted of having beheaded Daniel Pearl, could eventually have felt pressed to provide a false confession. But confessions aren't the point. Intelligence is. Interrogation is conducted by using such obvious approaches as asking questions whose correct answers are already known and only when truthful information is provided proceeding to what may not be known. Moreover, intelligence can be verified, correlated and used to get information from other detainees, and has been; none of this information is used in isolation.

The terrorist Abu Zubaydah (sometimes derided as a low-level operative of questionable reliability, but who was in fact close to KSM and other senior al Qaeda leaders) disclosed some information voluntarily. But he was coerced into disclosing information that led to the capture of Ramzi bin al Shibh, another of the planners of Sept. 11, who in turn disclosed information which -- when combined with what was learned from Abu Zubaydah -- helped lead to the capture of KSM and other senior terrorists, and the disruption of follow-on plots aimed at both Europe and the U.S. Details of these successes, and the methods used to obtain them, were disclosed repeatedly in more than 30 congressional briefings and hearings beginning in 2002, and open to all members of the Intelligence Committees of both Houses of Congress beginning in September 2006. Any protestation of ignorance of those details, particularly by members of those committees, is pretense.

The techniques themselves were used selectively against only a small number of hard-core prisoners who successfully resisted other forms of interrogation, and then only with the explicit authorization of the director of the CIA. Of the thousands of unlawful combatants captured by the U.S., fewer than 100 were detained and questioned in the CIA program. Of those, fewer than one-third were subjected to any of the techniques discussed in these opinions. As already disclosed by Director Hayden, as late as 2006, even with the growing success of other intelligence tools, fully half of the government's knowledge about the structure and activities of al Qaeda came from those interrogations.

Nor was there any legal reason compelling such disclosure. To be sure, the American Civil Liberties Union has sued under the Freedom of Information Act to obtain copies of these and other memoranda, but the government until now has successfully resisted such lawsuits. Even when the government disclosed that three members of al Qaeda had been subjected to waterboarding but that the technique was no longer part of the CIA interrogation program, the court sustained the government's argument that the precise details of how it was done, including limits and safeguards, could remain classified against the possibility that some future president may authorize its use. Therefore, notwithstanding the suggestion that disclosure was somehow legally compelled, there was no legal impediment to the Justice Department making the same argument even with respect to any techniques that remained in the CIA program until last January.

There is something of the self-fulfilling prophecy in the claim that our interrogation of some unlawful combatants beyond the limits set in the Army Field Manual has disgraced us before the world. Such a claim often conflates interrogation with the sadism engaged in by some soldiers at Abu Ghraib, an incident that had nothing whatever to do with intelligence gathering. The limits of the Army Field Manual are entirely appropriate for young soldiers, for the conditions in which they operate, for the detainees they routinely question, and for the kinds of tactically relevant information they pursue. Those limits are not appropriate, however, for more experienced people in controlled circumstances with high-value detainees. Indeed, the Army Field Manual was created with awareness that there was an alternative protocol for high-value detainees.

In addition, there were those who believed that the U.S. deserved what it got on Sept. 11, 2001. Such people, and many who purport to speak for world opinion, were resourceful both before and after the Sept. 11 attacks in crafting reasons to resent America's role as a superpower. Recall also that the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, the attacks on our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the punctiliously correct trials of defendants in connection with those incidents, and the bombing of the USS Cole took place long before the advent of CIA interrogations, the invasion of Saddam Hussein's Iraq, or the many other purported grievances asserted over the past eight years.

The effect of this disclosure on the morale and effectiveness of many in the intelligence community is not hard to predict. Those charged with the responsibility of gathering potentially lifesaving information from unwilling captives are now told essentially that any legal opinion they get as to the lawfulness of their activity is only as durable as political fashion permits. Even with a seemingly binding opinion in hand, which future CIA operations personnel would take the risk? There would be no wink, no nod, no handshake that would convince them that legal guidance is durable. Any president who wants to apply such techniques without such a binding and durable legal opinion had better be prepared to apply them himself.

Beyond that, anyone in government who seeks an opinion from the OLC as to the propriety of any action, or who authors an opinion for the OLC, is on notice henceforth that such a request for advice, and the advice itself, is now more likely than before to be subject after the fact to public and partisan criticism. It is hard to see how that will promote candor either from those who should be encouraged to ask for advice before they act, or from those who must give it.

In his book "The Terror Presidency," Jack Goldsmith describes the phenomenon we are now experiencing, and its inevitable effect, referring to what he calls "cycles of timidity and aggression" that have weakened intelligence gathering in the past. Politicians pressure the intelligence community to push to the legal limit, and then cast accusations when aggressiveness goes out of style, thereby encouraging risk aversion, and then, as occurred in the wake of 9/11, criticizing the intelligence community for feckless timidity. He calls these cycles "a terrible problem for our national security." Indeed they are, and the precipitous release of these OLC opinions simply makes the problem worse.

Gen. Hayden was director of the Central Intelligence Agency from 2006 to 2009. Mr. Mukasey was attorney general of the United States from 2007 to 2009.

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http://www.haaretz.co.il/hasite/spages/1078575.html



Obama’s election with bring about a wave of local terror
A confidential document issued by two senior officials of the US Ministry of Defense defines the reasons that can cause a wave of violence in the country.


The economic crisis and the election of Berack Obama to President are part of a list of reasons and causes that, according to the internal security experts, may present a wave of local unrest and violence throughout the USA.


In a confidential document composed by senior security officials in Washington, they are warning that the accumulation of developments and changes that occurred lately in the American arena will provide extreme bodies and racist’s groups’ reasons and encouragement for terror and violence acts to include exhilarating of anti-Semitism incitement.


The document that was published and is circulated these days among law enforcement authorities includes a list of developments the experts claim to be the cause for a real threat to an “era of local terror and violent crimes.”


The list these experts composed include the harsh economic crisis, the rise in unemployment poverty and distress, violent reactions against illegal immigrants, frustrated and disgruntle soldiers who returned from Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as accusing the Jews for the economic crisis.
Though, what the experts define as “embarrassing disclosure” in the report, it is the conclusion that the election of Obama turned to be an elevation of racist propaganda. “Extreme right wing groups oppose the President Administration and are hostile to his outlook on social issues, to include his attitude toward immigrants and the increase in assistance to minorities,” the document states. “At this stage, right wing groups published propaganda and incitement that concentrates on Obama’s rhetoric, expressing concern to his policy but not yet turned to the attacks subject.”
The document warns that extreme right wing groups will begin recruiting into their ranks veteran soldiers who served and were released from their service in Iraq and Afghanistan. “Veteran soldiers are skilful human material that is expected to strengthen the capability of the extremists and create local terror cells.”


The most fatal threat to the local security, of which the experts warn about, will come from what they define as “lonely wolves”—right wing extremists who will act as individuals and will form small terror cells. “The most dangerous are the racists who claim white superiority but keep ‘low profile’ and act independently” the document states.


Lately, on the racist’s groups’ Internet sites there is an increase in incitement against Jews, who are blamed as responsible for the economic crisis and the economic difficulties. The Jews are portrayed as “financial elite” that is involved in “conspiracy” and caused the surge in unemployment. The experts warn that inciting propaganda against the Jews will also allow racist groups to recruit fans and increase their ranks.

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With all his arrogance on one hand, his humiliation of his own country and the people for whom he works, with all his pandering to the European nations, at the NATO summit he just attended Obama achieved nothing at all, and the war in Afghanistan remains overwhelmingly a conflict fought by English-speaking nations—USA, Britain and Canada—who continue to take 85 percent of the casualties in the fight against the Taliban, while most of Europe sits pathetically on the sidelines with cowardly indifference.

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http://www.israpundit.com/2008/?p=12454#more-12454
The Humbling of a Superpower

by Nile Gardiner (more by this author)

It is hard to imagine a bigger slight to the memory of the more than 100,000 American soldiers who died liberating Europe than the image of a U.S. president attacking the “arrogance” of his own country on French soil. President Obama’s speech last week ahead of the NATO summit in Strasbourg, barely 500 miles from the beaches of Normandy, marked a low point in presidential speechmaking on foreign policy.

The largely French and German town hall audience cheered like ancient Romans in a packed Coliseum. This time, however, it was not Christians being fed to the lions but the symbolism of U.S. power, as the president lashed out at America’s “failure to appreciate Europe’s leading role in the world.” Obama bemoaned that “instead of celebrating your dynamic union and seeking to partner with you to meet common challenges, there have been times where America has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive.”

The Franco-German crowd also clapped mightily in approval and bayed for more when the president boasted of closing down the detention center in Guantanamo Bay, declaring that “without equivocation or exception that the United States of America does not and will not torture,” as though his own country had been some sort of brutal tyranny that had suddenly seen the light with his election. It was a thoroughly distasteful attack on the previous administration’s interrogation of extremely dangerous terror suspects, feeding into the very anti-Americanism that Obama had half-heartedly challenged earlier in his address.

This was a humiliating spectacle to behold as the leader of the most powerful nation on earth prostrated his country before a European audience that lapped up his message as though it was manna from heaven. Obama’s actions represented the humbling of a superpower on the world stage, a defining moment for a new administration that is weakening American global leadership and taking every opportunity to engage with its enemies, such as Iran, or its strategic competitors, including Russia and China.

It was an approach that failed to reap any dividends on the president’s European tour. If anything, this trip proved there is little to be gained from bending to the whims of European governments, who simply view it as weakness to be exploited and used to their own advantage. When Obama urged Europeans to play a bigger role in the NATO mission in Afghanistan, his words were met in the Strasbourg amphitheatre with an eerie silence, as though this was a ridiculous request and an affront to their delicate sensibilities.

Behind the scenes at the NATO summit, there was no evidence of goodwill towards the pleas of the rock star-like American president. Obama succeeded only in securing a weak-kneed pledge of 5,000 European trainers and military police to join the NATO-led International Security Force in Afghanistan, most of whom will remain in the country only until the elections in August. Great Britain was the only European nation to offer a significant number of additional combat troop —1,00 to be added to the 8,300 British forces already on the ground.

It is continental European leaders, including French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who should be apologizing for the failure of their own countries to fight in Afghanistan, while American, British and Canadian troops are dying in large numbers on the battlefields. The brutal fact is that Obama achieved nothing at all at the NATO summit, and the war in Afghanistan remains overwhelmingly a conflict fought by a small group of English-speaking nations who continue to take 85 percent of the casualties in the fight against the Taliban, while most of Europe sits pathetically on the sidelines with cowardly indifference.

In world affairs, popularity rarely brings with it concrete results. Ronald Reagan was reviled in Europe but together with Margaret Thatcher brought down the might of the Soviet Empire. President Bush was burnt in effigy in almost every capital city across the European=20 Union but succeeded in liberating sixty million Muslims from tyranny and kept the United States safe from terrorist attack in the years following 9/11.

It wasn’t much better for Obama at the preceding G-20 summit in London, where European leaders made all the running. Obama may have stolen the limelight and the best photo-ops but shaped little of the policy. Eventually the United States signed up to a communiqué that pledged $750 billion for the IMF, a European-dominated highly ineffective organization, as well as laying the foundations of a new global regulatory architecture for the financial industry, that poses a huge threat to American national sovereignty and the freedom of American companies to operate in global markets.

As the Obama administration will gradually begin to realize, world leadership is not a popularity contest. Rather, it is about taking tough decisions and positions that will be met with hostility in many parts of the globe. It is about the assertive projection of American power, both to secure the homeland and to protect the free world. It is often a lonely and unenviable task that at times will require the use of maximum force against America’s enemies and a willingness to face the scorn of countries whose glories are way behind them, or who lack the courage and conviction to do what is right.

Obama faces a world that in many ways is even more dangerous than the one that existed during the Cold War, with an array of rogue regimes close to developing offensive nuclear weapons capability, as well as a global terrorist network that seeks the very destruction of the United States and its allies. This is not the time for flower power speeches repenting for the so-called “arrogance” of the globe’s only superpower, or pointless declarations about creating a “nuclear free world.”

The president must deal with the world as it is now, not as he imagines it. This requires confronting the Mullahs of Tehran and tyrants such as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Kim Jong Il, and standing up to Russian aggression in its ‘Near Abroad.’ It also involves a determination to wage a global war, not an “Overseas Contingency Operation,” against Islamist groups and networks in the form of Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, Hamas, Hezbollah and an array of other terrorist organizations. This will require significantly increased military spending not less, as well as the full implementation of a global missile defense system.

This is not a moment for faint hearts and 60s-style pacifism, but a time for America to project its might on the world stage and defeat its enemies. Europe can mock and jeer on the sidelines all it likes, but will quickly rediscover that its own security ultimately lies in supporting a United States that roars like a lion rather than bleats like a lamb.

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