President Cliche

By Alan Caruba

“Peace is more than just the absence of war.”

“So let there be no doubt…”

“We stand at a crossroads of history.”

“There is no excuse for inaction.”

Fewer people at home and around the world are paying any attention when Barack Obama speaks. He has become President Cliché. We were all told what a great speech-maker he was and now nobody wants to listen anymore.

Ironically, in his speech to the United Nations on Wednesday, September 21, he actually said some interesting things. Too bad none of the other leaders of nations care what he has to say. At home, his popularity and approval ratings in the polls continue to plummet to new depths and to set new records for the lack thereof.

In truth, this is not good for the world or the nation. The job of President is all about leadership coupled to effective policies that address problems. In fairness, Obama arrived in the Oval Office with some of the worst problems any president has faced in the modern era. Like his predecessor, on whom he blamed everything, he continued to throw money at the financial crisis, managing to run up the nation’s debt to a historic level. Obama's economic advisors dusted off the failed policies of the New Deal and tried again. They have not worked.

The problems not only did not go away, they got worse.

The Middle East has seen the “Arab spring” in which a number of dictators were overthrown and that seems hopeful except for the fact that radical Islam is the solution that many of those same nations are likely to embrace. It doesn’t help that the U.S. President has famously demonstrated a “tilt” toward Islam as it continues to foment conflict.

The United Nations speech was a long wish list, pasted together with a lot of platitudes about how the UN has played a role in warding off World War Three. That was largely avoided because the U.S. has a couple of warehouses full of nuclear weapons and had maintained the greatest military the world had ever seen. We’re still here. The Soviet Union isn’t. Most U.S. presidents since the end of World War Two wanted to see the world abandon nuclear weapons. It didn’t. The club just kept getting bigger with China, North Korea, Pakistan, and India. Now Iran wants them as well.

The Soviet leaders weren't crazy. The Iranian ayatollahs and mullahs are.

Obama cited the UN founding Charter that called on nations to “unite our strength to maintain international peace and security.” In reality, it has always been the United States who did the heavy lifting. We fought the North Koreans and Chinese to protect South Korea. We sent arms to Israel when it was repeatedly attacked. We detoured into Vietnam and took a shellacking. After 9/11 we drove the Taliban and al Qaeda out of Afghanistan and we organized allies to remove Iraq’s dictator, Saddam Hussein. Most recently, we got NATO to put an end to Gaddaffi’s reign of terror.

The problem Obama has discovered is that the United Nations is composed of many of the worst dictatorships and oppressive regimes on Earth. It is an utterly corrupt institution. It will not prevent World War Three if the U.S. leaves and a large number of Americans want us to leave.

“Peace is hard. Peace is hard. Progress can be reversed. Prosperity comes slowly. Societies can split apart.” Aside from the yawning banality of this pronouncement, the President’s learning curve about the reality of life on planet Earth has been a tough one. Still, he did condemn Syria’s dictator who has been killing that nation’s people, but could not resist showing off his Islamic credentials by saying many of the victims occurred "during the holy time of Ramadan.”

Obama has discovered what presidents since the days of Harry Truman have discovered. That Palestine is not a nation and the Palestinians are a horrid group of people who refuse to live in peace with Israel. “The Palestinian people deserve a state of their own,” said the President. Guess what? The Israelis agree, but cannot get their Mamoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority to actually agree that Israel has a right to exist. Or Hamas to stop lobbing rockets into southern Israel.

In case anyone was actually listening, Obama repeated what every prior President has said, “America’s commitment to Israel’s security is unshakeable. Our friendship with Israel is deep and enduring”. After spending the last two and a half years demonstrating his contempt for Israel, this comes as a real surprise and further proof that Obama will say anything to get reelected.

And then he ruined it all by saying, “To preserve our planet, we must not put off action that climate change demands. We have to tap the power of science to save those resources that are scarce. And together we must continue our work to build on the progress made in Copenhagen and Cancun.”

The major fuels of the modern world are not scarce. We live above an ocean of oil. There is enough coal in America alone to keep the lights on here for centuries. Tapping the sun and wind has proved to be a huge waste of money for two of the least productive ways to provide energy. Copenhagen and Cancun, the site of two UN climate change conferences were total failures.

President Cliché closed out saying—again—“Peace is hard, but we know it is possible. So, together, let us be resolved to see that it is defined by our hopes and not our fears.”

Our fears are what sustain peace. It is why every nation is armed to the teeth.

Obama is a national embarrassment. And he wants four more years in office.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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The Syrian Horror Show

By Alan Caruba

Name me a country where funeral processions get fired upon and more people die on the way to burying the latest martyrs for peace and freedom? It’s just about any country in the Middle East and on July 19 it was Syria where ten people died in Homs, a place where some fifty have died in the past week protesting the second generation of the Assad dictatorship.

A week earlier an alleged "pro-Assad mob" attacked the U.S. embassy in Damascus after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said of Basher Assad that he as “not indispensable” and that the U.S. has “absolutely nothing invested in him remaining in power.” So far this has been the position of the U.S. on Egypt’s Hosni Mubarack, Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi, and just about everyone else in the Middle East short of Abdullah, the King of Saudi Arabia.

It was not the first time the Damascus embassy had been attacked. In December 2006, al Qaeda was credited with blowing up a car bomb outside as a gang of armed men tried to break in. The attack, though, has all the earmarks of an Iranian operation.

Let’s see, when was the last time a U.S. embassy was attacked? It was 1979 in Tehran when the Iranians took its staff hostage and held them for 444 days. The Iranians were behind the 1983 suicide attack on the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut that killed 241. These days they all but own Syria as they patiently work their way toward possessing nuclear-tipped missiles with which to threaten the Middle East and everywhere else.

After World War I, Syria was carved out of the former Ottoman Empire and ceded to French colonial control. In 1946, the French granted it independence. It then passed through a series of military coups until Basher’s father, Hafez Assad, took control of Syria.

Upon his death, it passed to his son, Bashar in 2000. In May 2007, Bashar was “elected” to his second term.This is not exactly a definition of a democracy, but neither is any nation in the Middle East and never was.

In the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, Hafez joined with Egypt and, in the process, lost the Golan Heights, a strategic victory for the Israelis who have shown no intention of returning it or the ancient Israeli provinces of Samaria and Judea, won from Jordan, and now commonly but mistakenly called the West Bank. The Israelis do not “occupy” it. They lived there three thousand years ago.

The Egyptians lost the Gaza at that time, but the Israelis have since ceded it to the Palestinians in the hope they might establish a state, but they have never shown the slightest inclination of establishing one except as a base from which to attack the Israelis.

From 1976 until April 2005, the Syrians had occupied Lebanon which is now a base for Hezbollah, a Palestinian terrorist group that has successfully taken control. They take their orders from Iran.

Syria has been a classic police state. Reportedly, Iran has deployed 10,000 troops to Syria to protect the Assad regime and are in effective control of the nation. Iranian troops have been in Syria since 2008 and, not surprisingly, their northern headquarters have been in Homs, the site of the latest killings.

In February 2009, it was reported that President Obama had decided to send a new U.S. ambassador to Syria and lift sanctions against a nation believed to have aided al Qaeda in Iraq and of secretly building a nuclear reactor. The Israelis, as they had done earlier with a reactor Saddam Hussein was building, bombed it to rubble in 2009.

So far, President Obama’s philosophy of talking nicely to our enemies in the Middle East has not worked and anyone with the slightest knowledge of the history of the region could have told him that.

President Bush’s decision to eliminate Saddam Hussein was based on the fact that Saddam was a constant destabilizing factor, having waged war against Iran for eight years in the 1980s, used poison gas to kill thousands of Kurds, and in 1990 attacked Kuwait to seize its oil fields.

The current U.S. policy is to withdraw troops from Iraq and Afghanistan. Expecting the Middle East to act in any civilized fashion or thinking it can be taken over and reformed by sheer military force is clearly a fool’s dream.

Afghanistan has resisted control since the days of Alexander the Great. The Ottoman Empire, run by the Turks from the 1300s until the early 1920s did a fairly good job of maintaining the peace until it collapsed of its own dead weight

As nations such as Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Jordan did little other than accept various dictators, the prospect of expecting anything but turmoil is utterly futile. What the West wants is access to and through the Suez Canal, along with the oil of the Middle East. The template of Western influence disappeared with both World War One and Two.

Just because those in the Middle East have the outward appearance of modernity, it is an illusion. This is a region of the world dominated by a warrior cult called Islam. As such it will remain an enemy of the West and of each other. It is a huge horror show.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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Obama's Global Incompetence

By Alan Caruba

All Presidents have had to deal with events around the world that seemed to call for a military response, but it was President Eisenhower who laid down the doctrine to avoid what he called “brushfire wars”, outbreaks such as we have seen in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Yemen, and, in particular, Libya.

Eisenhower had directed the defeat of Germany in World War Two as the Supreme Allied Commander before being urged to run for president. He would serve two terms and was doubtless the right man at the right time in the nascent years of the Cold War.

President Obama seems to lack any kind of a doctrine or plan to deal with a Middle East where many are fed up with its dictators, combined with the realization of how far behind the rest of the world the region is.

It is an irony of history that, after Eisenhower squelched the British, French and Israeli plans to retake the Suez Canal following Nasser’s nationalization in 1956, in rather rapid succession, Nasser died, was replaced by Sadat who was assassinated, and a 28-year-old Mubarack then ruled Egypt until the Maghreb and Middle East exploded with turmoil this year.

Why did Obama feel compelled to say anything? Earlier he was reluctant to support the Iranians protesting the ayatollahs in Tehran, but he rushed to the Tele-Prompter to tell, not ask, Egyptian President Mubarak to step aside.

Curently, the Egyptian decision to open its borders with Gaza and Hamas bodes ill for Israel, but just about everything in the Middle East right now fits that description. And, of course, Obama took the opportunity to launch a verbal attack on our only real ally in the region with an overt mention of “1967 borders”.

The payback was a joint session of Congress in which Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu delivered a speech to which both Democrats and Republicans repeatedly gave standing ovations. It made Obama look lame, but just about everything does these days.

Will there be a surge of democracy in Egypt? No. The military will find a way to retain power, most likely coalescing behind a new president/dictator. After that, large numbers of the Muslim Brotherhood will be jailed and killed until they crawl back into their holes.

In Libya, Obama could have simply let the resistance succeed or fail. There was no compelling reason to demand Gadhafi step aside and the embrace of “humanitarian concerns” rings hollow given events in Syria. So far the only thing that Libya has demonstrated is that NATO is ill prepared to wage a war.

Reports have it that Obama and the Russians have decided Gadhafi must go, but Assad of Syria can stay despite the fact that he is currently killing that nation’s people by the score.

Obama has returned from a European tour in which he exhorted them to give the emerging Arab states billions in aid to facilitate democracy, but Obama does not seem to grasp the fact that the only state in the Middle East that is a real democracy is Israel. The rest are controlled by dominant tribal groups in one fashion or another. They always have been and they always will be.

It has apparently escaped Obama’s notice that neither the U.S., nor any of the European nations have any money to throw at a bunch of unhappy Arabs. The Saudis have lots of money, but they are too concerned about the threat that Iran poses and too smart to get involved in the shifting sands of Middle Eastern power struggles.

The U.S. has a little problem called “a debt ceiling” to resolve so it can continue to borrow money just to pay interest on the money it already has borrowed.

Unlike Eisenhower, Obama is the wrong man at the wrong time. He is poorly advised by a pack of anti-Semites and lacks any experience, military or otherwise, to make decisions about the Middle East. His knowledge of that region’s history appears to come from brief quotes off the back of a cereal box.

In over two years in office, Obama has become a massive embarrassment to America whenever he goes abroad, whether it is to prattle about global warming in Copenhagen or to insult the Queen of England.

The result is a serious deterioration of confidence that America can be relied upon to support allies. In Eastern Europe, Poland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Hungary are creating a regional framework for their mutual defense, fearing that neither NATO, nor the European Union, will be of much use to them if Russia gets frisky.

And you might recall that Obama denied Poland (and Europe) a missile shield, thus sending a signal to Russia that he actually trusted them. Nobody, but nobody, trusts the Russians. And it should be noted that Iran has missles that can hit Europe.

All of this invites trouble in a dangerous world because, more and more, nobody trusts America so long as Obama is in the Oval Office.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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