I enjoy the writing of Victor Davis Hanson. One of his recent essays is titled “President Ethelred” and the opening paragraph gets us into his main theme:
“Like old King Ethelred the Unready , who either had no counsel or had no sense or both, and often paid the Danegeld rather than attempt to deter the Norsemen, so Barack Obama and his lieutenants still believe they can both appease radical Islam and convince others that is not what they are doing.”
The recent breakdown of Obama’s (nonexistent) foreign policy in Libya (and other mideastern nations) seems to be pretty convincing evidence of the “Old Ethelred” policies still being tried in our current time…like right now today.
Yesterday Hillary Clinton fell on her sword and said “the buck stops here” meaning at her desk or office in the state department regarding the failure of the United States to protect its ambassador and his staff in Benghazi Libya. Chris Stevens and 4 other Americans were brutally murdered at the embassy in the eastern Libyan city with seemingly no protection available for them.
Another quote from Hanson’s essay:
“Various top ranking U.S. officials ….following the lead of President Obama for many days insisted the murder of the American ambassador to Libya was a spontaneous act of a crowd that got out of control enraged by the release of an anti-Islamic video trailer posted by an illiberal American private citizen. We were to believe that the fault was not millions of medieval Islamists abroad who hate the West but one Coptic American at home who had crude taste and ill intent.”
This storyline was perpetuated when Jay Carney and Susan Rice the US ambassador to the United Nations went public with the same story that turned out to be complete lie just a few days later.
The Administration has yet to apologize for Rice’s lying on about 5 Sunday news shows the week after the murders in Libya. Carney, of course, is famous for repeating what his Puppetmasters in the O. administration tell him to say. One can almost see the strings attached to his upper and lower jaws as he speaks nonsense on most days.
Hanson asks why did that false tale keep being told for far too long when Americans themselves knew it could not be true?
Hanson believes it is the “logical fruitition” of the failed and increasingly dangerous foreign policy in the entire Middle East.
The loud announcements about the date of our troops’ withdrawal from Afghanistan is not helpful either. It is small wonder that many American have been murdered point blank by the Afghan soldiers they are training. It is highly likely that the Taliban will be back in power by 2014 knowing that the American presence will be gone and they will be free to take over once again setting everything that Americans and their allies have accomplished in that brutal barbaric nation bqck to the barbarous days of Taliban “government”.
If anything can be learned from such political disasters of non-effective foreign policies, it might be that American style democracy will never fit in those societies in the Middle East that are tribal rather than national.
The old ways..fostered by Islam…do not go away because foreign troops offer something better to those countries. Those tribal people prefer the old ways that have been part of their culture forever.
I cringe each time I hear of another murder of an American soldier by his Afghan counterpart. Why do we wait in such conditions? Get our Military out of all Middle East nations unless Israel needs our help…Israel is the only true non-tribal democracy to thrive in that area of the world probably because Israel is singularly different from all the other nations of the Middle East.
If America (under Obama) continues to desert Israel as it has already done in many ways in the past 3-4 years America— is sowing the seeds of its own destruction. There are plenty of warnings about what happens to other nations who do harm to Israel—including NOT supporting them.
One conluding quote from the Hanson essay is especially pointed:
“If Obama were a conservative Republican like George W Bush,the media narrative of Libyagate would be one of an asleep, incompetent President, lieutenants who were brazenly mendacious, an incompetent secretary of state, and an administration conspiracy of silence–juxtaposed with a wider story of a disastrous retreat from Afhanistan, and abandonment of any influence in Iraq, a refusal to recognize the situation in Syria and Egypt—-and impotence as a war looms between Iran and Israel.”
What can it be called? THE OSTRICH FOREIGN POLICY in which the example of the large flightless bird buries its head in the sand to avoid situations that may be messy?
The United States is close to more than one “cliff” besides the fiscal one that economists dread, but a foreign policy cliff— that if pushed—could mean the end of the United States as we have known it.
Some think that is what Obama wants.
If his administration continues on the road they have taken, we may see it happen….way sooner than anyone thought possible.
