Category Archives: General Interest

This morning I posted a comment using “mhere” on a piece, “Reckless Abandonment”, by Mario Loyola at National Review Online.   The gist of his argument is that Obama’s missteps, like failing to arm the moderate Syrian resistance, led to the formation of IS and he also writes a stinging indictment of the lack of a coherent Obama foreign policy.  I disagreed with  a good bit of his assessment.  Loyola explains the Bush approach:

“The Bush administration recognized the danger of failed and failing states, and put in place a preventive doctrine of “partnership capacity building” to shore up the governance capability of threatened states. The idea was to prevent the sort of lawless safe haven from which al-Qaeda organized the 9/11 attacks on America. The first task was to make sure that sovereign states could control the whole of their territory.”

JK and I jabbered back and forth a bit via email about this situation and he, of course, provided some very good links to expand on this subject of “moderate” Syrian resistance fighters.  Hillary tried latching onto those “moderates” too and insisting she, the queen of soft power and smart diplomacy, would have armed these  “moderates” while Obama waffled. Loyola explains the Obama approach:

“Obama, by contrast, seems utterly unconcerned with failing states and terrorist safe havens. “I’ve been careful to resist calls to turn time and again to our military,” explained Obama, “because America has other tools in our arsenal than our military. We can also lead with the power of our diplomacy, our economy, and our ideals.” How that soft power is supposed to protect us from terror networks operating with impunity in safe havens across the Middle East has yet to be explained.”

My inexpert take in the comment section goes:

“Certainly Obama’s whimsical strategic vacuum provided the conditions for power vacuums across the ME to develop, but the Bush foreign policy had huge gaping flaws that boded poorly for long-term success. So, partisan politics aside, we went from bad foreign policy under Bush to no foreign policy under Obama (or at least no coherent foreign policy).

To say, “if Obama had armed the moderate Syrians things would be different”, might have altered the fate of Assad, but there was no stomach among those calling for throwing more arms into the mix to stay the course and ensure a “better” Syria emerged at the end. The arming the rebels rests as a simplistic tactical move, without a fully thought out long-term strategy. We hadn’t considered all the various scenarios that could ensue from arming “moderate” rebels and how we would respond to various outcomes. We didn’t have any clue as to who possible “moderate” political factions are in Syria, whom we hoped would emerge and build this better-than-Assad-Syria.

We so often throw ourselves into well-meaning foreign policy initiatives that blindly ignore the political/cultural realities of the people we are trying to “help” and as long as we refuse to acknowledge the pall Islam and more ominously Islamism casts over any reforms directed at dragging these cultures into modernity, our efforts will meet with failure and defeat.

In both Iraq and Afghanistan we spent billions of dollars with shaky accountability and little to show for the amount we squandered. Standing up a credible Afghan Army or Iraqi Army proved futile – these people want our money, not our democratic values. Obama’s mercurial foreign policy bodes much worse than Bush’s, but as Americans we should demand and expect a grand strategy that rests on reality, not wishful thinking and delusions, like “Islam means peace”.”

Parsing 101: say what you think people want to hear, but make sure you counter all those things with careful parsing. Let’s dissect President Obama’s weekly address, the talking out of both sides of your mouth technique.

“We have Americans serving across Iraq, including our embassy in Baghdad, and we’ll do whatever is needed to protect our people.

“But when there’s a situation like the one on this mountain—when countless innocent people are facing a massacre, and when we have the ability to help prevent it—the United States can’t just look away. That’s not who we are. We’re Americans.  We act.  We lead.  And that’s what we’re going to do on that mountain.  As one American who wrote to me yesterday said, “it is the right thing to do.””

then he follows these with:

“As Commander-in-Chief, I will not allow the United States to be dragged into fighting another war in Iraq.  American combat troops will not be returning to fight in Iraq, because there’s no American military solution to the larger crisis there.”

So, in paragraph 5, he completely makes a mockery of his statements that:  “we’ll do whatever is needed to protect our people.”

He rambles on a bit more about our broader strategy in Iraq, but alas, there is no broader strategy , only a repeat of his “zero footprint” strategy that led to weapons being funneled to ” Syrian freedom fighters”, who turned out to be Islamist zealots (aka the ISIS/ISIL he’s now bombing) – just don’t fly low, because they probably have the manpads you allowed to flow from your previous Libyan/Syrian debacles (funneling weapons).  In light, of this leader-from-behind’s track record, one can only believe that his assurances that “we’ll do whatever is needed to protect our people” ring a bit hollow.

They say actions speak louder than words, so he followed this speech to let our enemies know he means business, really he does, by going on vacation for two weeks.

In recent days, Jake Tapper asked  WH Deputy National Security Advisor, Tony Blinken, about the President’s total misunderstanding of the threat ISIS poses, when earlier this year when he compared ISIS to a JV basketball team.  More parsing and spinning, with Blinken blabbering on about how ISIS doesn’t pose a threat to us, here in America.

This is the President who orchestrated this border crisis, where illegals and our enemies stampede across our southern border and this President doesn’t even want the border agents to stop them.  Yes, this President’s assurances that he will protect you here at home are about as truthful as the ones he uttered about protecting Americans serving in Iraq.  His DHS is more concerned about the threat from law-abiding, conservative Americans than they are about Al Qaeda, ISIS, criminal gangs /thugs from Central America, or any other foreign enemies.   And once the strawmen defenses go up in flames, never fear, because with this administration, at the end of the day, everything is still GWB’s fault.

PS:  JK fact-checked the Zero Footprint piece from The Last Refuge blog yesterday and he offers this additional bit of information:

Pretty exhaustive LB (name changed, because I prefer LB here). And, in the wider scope of things I won’t be making any wide disagreements.

But. And “I think” it was in part three – I’m going on memory so – about where that pic of McCain standing next to the known ISIL kidnapper/terrorist there was a paragraph/sentence the gist of was this:

“Nobody could have possibly foreseen how fucked up this Libyan adventure would become.”
_______________

If it’s convenient for you, read from page 7 through page eleven. If pressed for time, just read the final sentence on page eleven.

http://tarpley.net/docs/CTCForeignFighter.19.Dec07.pdf

Now – abit of background first – twenty-three Libyans were taken off the field in the vicinity of Kirkuk (Iraq 04) and transferred to Gitmo where they remained in US custody until Condi Rice and Buddy Muammar had their lovefest in 2006. Perhaps by pure dumb luck, McCain and Senator Graham visited Tripoli a week later then, when they got back to DC they proceeded with the genius idea to “as a gesture of goodwill” convince GW to release the Libyan detainees into Sa’id Gaddafy’s tender care.

The first five or so paragraphs should be sufficient.

https://www.ctc.usma.edu/posts/lifg-revisions-posing-critical-challenge-to-al-qaida