JOHN C. WOHLSTETTER
What President Obama and too many others miss....
Herewith recent Big Picture viewpoints:
Several
top analysts, Michael Ledeen ("It's War, You Idiots!"), David Goldman
("America's Problems in the Middle East Are Just Beginning"), Roger
Kimball ("Cairo is Burning? Where is President Obama?") shred the
feckless Mideast policies & naive worldview of the Obama
administration.
Ledeen writes:
[T]here's a global war, we're
the main target of the aggressors, and our leaders don't see it and
therefore have no idea how to win it.
Any serious attempt to
understand what's going on has to begin by banning the word "stability,"
much beloved of diplomats and self-proclaimed strategists. If anything
is fairly certain about our world, it's that there is no stability, and
there isn't going to be any. Right now, the driving forces are those
aimed at destroying the old order, and their targets (the old regimes,
very much including the United States) have until recently showed little
taste to engage as if their survival depended on it. But things are
changing, as always.
The war is easily described: there is a
global alliance of radical leftists and radical Islamists, supported by a
group of countries that includes Russia, at least some Chinese leaders,
Iran, Syria, Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua. The
radicals include the Sunni and Shi'ite terrorist organizations and
leftist groups, and they all work seamlessly with the narcotics mafias.
Their objective is the destruction of the West, above all, of the
United States.
What if they win? Some of them want to create a
(Sunni or Shi'ite) caliphate, others want Castro- or Kim-style communist
dictatorships. Like the five Mafia families in The Godfather, they
have made their war plan, but, as with the Corleones and the Barzinis,
they are driven by disagreements, some of which are fundamental.
War is foggy, and alliances are often very unstable, especially at moments when the whole world is up for grabs....
After
charting the mess in Egypt, where a military regime is in a fight to
the finish with the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, with compromise not
realistically possible, Ledeen charts the various shifting
intra-Islamist alliances, country by country, as the Arab Spring utterly
unravels:
Let's get outside these little boxes and look at the
big board. There's an alliance plotting against us, bound together by
two radical views of the world that share a profound, fundamental hatred
of us. If they win, it's hell to pay, because then we will be attacked
directly and often, and we will be faced with only two options, winning
or losing.
That's the bad news. The good news is that they're divided, and
slaughtering each other. And it's not always possible for us to sort
out what "each other" even means. But one thing is quite clear, and I
know it's an unpopular idea, but it's a true fact: they're not an
awesome force. The radical left has failed everywhere, and so have the
radical Islamists. Both claim to have history (and/or the Almighty) on
their side, but they go right on failing. The left is now pretty much
in the garbage bin of history (you can hire Gorbachev for your next
annual meeting if you can afford his speaking fee), and the "Muslim
world"-sorry to be so blunt-is a fossilized remnant of a failed
civilization. Look at the shambles in Iran, look at the colossal mess
the Brothers unleashed on a once-great nation.
ML calls for helping the oppressed inside Iran overthrow their Islamist tryant-masters.
Goldman writes:
It's
2015, and there is a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. The
Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood (Hamas), financed by Iran,
wins an election on a platform demanding the expulsion of the Jews from
Israel. Iran, meanwhile, smuggles shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles
to terrorist cells in Palestine that can take down civilian airlines at
Ben-Gurion Airport. With backing from the Egyptian military, Fatah
throws out the elected Hamas government and kills a large number of
Hamas supporters. What will Washington do? Given the track record of
both the Obama administration and the Republican mainstream, one would
expect America to denounce the use of violence against a democratically
elected government.
Such is the absurdity of both parties' stance
towards Egypt: the Egyptian military is doing America's dirty work,
suppressing a virulently anti-modern, anti-Semitic and anti-Western
Islamist movement whose leader, Mohammed Morsi, famously referred to
Israelis as "apes and pigs." It did so with the enthusiastic support of
tens of millions of Egyptians who rallied in the streets in support of
the military. And the American mainstream reacted with an ideological
knee jerk. America's presence in the Middle East has imploded.
Among
other things, the American response to the events in Egypt shows the
utter pointlessness of American security guarantees in the present
negotiations between Israel and the Palestine Authority. Even in the
extremely unlikely event that Mohammed Abbas chose to make peace with
Israel, he would face a high probability of civil war....
Goldman
warns that the violent youth frequently fight to the death. This
augurs vastly more killing taking place ere the third wave of Islamist
jihad abates.
Kimball sees an "Alfred E. Neumann 'What, me worry?'" presidency, adrift:
On
the links, naturally. Cairo is a long way away. No one there votes in
the U.S. presidential election (not yet, anyway), so why shouldn't the
Leader of the Free World respond to the crisis in Egypt by decamping to
Martha's Vineyard, thus reinforcing his reputation as a latter-day
Alfred E. Neuman? Why should he worry about Egypt, the churches being
burned, the Christians being murdered, the chaos in the streets as the
Egyptian military desperately attempts to deal with the anarchy that the
Obama administration helped midwife with its support of the Muslim
Brotherhood?...
Near the beginning of his first term, Obama, a
bit like Cleopatra on her barge of burnished gold, floated into Cairo
and told the world that he had come "to seek a new beginning between the
United States and Muslims around the world; one based upon mutual
interest and mutual respect; and one based upon the truth that America
and Islam are not exclusive, and need not be in competition. Instead,
they overlap, and share common principles - principles of justice and
progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings."
Tolerance
and dignity for all human beings, except for Jews, Christians, and
other infidels, not to mention women, homosexuals, and those who have
been enslaved by Muslims. Apart from them, there's tolerance and dignity
galore.
RK concludes:
When it comes to Egypt, there is a
lot of blame to spread around. The American people seem to be waking up
to the shocking news that a large part of the blame for what is
happening on the streets of Cairo - and for what happened in Benghazi
and what is about to happen in Syria and Iran - must be laid at the door
of the stupid "smart diplomacy" promulgated by the Obama
administration.
They eagerly embraced the fairy tale of the "Arab
Spring." When that spring turned out to be blood-red instead of
pacifically verdant, their reaction has been one of confusion,
obfuscation, scapegoating, and denial. America's reputation has probably
never been lower in the Middle East than it is now. It turns out that
there is leadership, on the one hand, and "leading from behind," on the
other. Obama explicitly embraced the latter. The ensuing catastrophes
are too multifarious and too profligate of blood and treasure to conceal
for long. In the case of Obama, anyway, incompetence and malevolence
have shaded into each other to form a single toxic confection. The
narcissist-in-chief still moves from playground to playground in the
world's most extravagant caravan. But his distance from the realities he
has foisted upon the world is exceeded only by an arrogance bordering
(on the wrong side of the border) on hubris. Hubris, as the Greeks knew,
is followed reliably by Nemesis. A foreign policy that has sparked
chaos in the Middle East, resentment among our allies, and belligerence
among states like Russia and China, a domestic policy that nurtures the
fiscal madness of "green energy" and the statist innovations of
Obamacare: Nemesis cannot be far off.
Former adviser to Margaret
Thatcher John O'Sullivan sees peril in a "too humble America"--one that
incites our enemies to come after us:
In retrospect, we can see
that the post-Cold War world ended in 2008, as a result of two events:
Russia's unpunished invasion of Georgia and the financial crisis
triggered by the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, Wall Street's
fourth-largest investment bank.
The first marked the end of NATO
expansion and the West's unquestioned dominance: Georgia had recently
been backed by the United States for membership; Germany and France had
effectively vetoed it. Soon afterward, Russia acted to demonstrate that
Georgia, far from joining the West, was still very much in the Russian
sphere of influence. The West acquiesced, France with enthusiasm, the
rest of Western Europe with relief, the U.S. with reluctance, Central
and Eastern Europe under protest.
The financial crisis, almost
willfully misinterpreted as resulting purely from the absence of
regulation, led to a collapse of confidence. Financial institutions,
supranational structures, political leaderships, market theories,
Western civilization itself and, of course, bankers all fell victim to
popular alarmism, skepticism, even hatred. These self-destructive
passions were further magnified by the Euro crisis, which proved even
more damaging and intractable than the subprime mortgage crisis. But the
U.S., as "hegemon" of the post-Cold War international structure,
suffered the greatest loss in power and reputation, if not wealth.
In the United States itself, that loss translated into a desire to retreat from the arena of failure....
All in all, a mess en route to an even worse mess, indeed.
Bottom
Line. An administration bereft of Big Ideas will ignore the counsel
above. But its critics should note carefully, for the next presidential
election cycle.
Mr. Wohlstetter is the author of "Sleepwalking With the Bomb" (Discovery Institute Press, 2012). Follow John on twitter at @JohnWohlstetter
Read more:
Family Security Matters http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-wars-big-ideas-i?f=must_reads#ixzz2hIDt56t8
Under Creative Commons License:
Attribution
No comments:
Post a Comment