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 that
they can both appease radical Islam and convince others that is not what
they are doing.Various top-ranking U.S. officials, for instance, following the lead
of President Obama himself, for days insisted that 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 private American resident. 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. U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice and White House Press Secretary Jay Carney
both insisted that the killings of our people in Libya had nothing to
do with anti-Americanism, much less anger at or disdain for the White
House or administration policy — leaving their audiences wondering at
what point in the future they would simply retract or ignore all the
untrue things they were now asserting.
Of course, no one believed
that narrative — not when the video had been in the public domain for
months without incident (is there even a film that follows the
trailer?), not when some diplomatic personnel in the Middle East had
been put on higher alert in response to Islamist promises of violence,
not when it was the iconic eleventh anniversary of the 9/11 killings,
not when “protesters” brought in heavy weaponry to assault our
facilities, not when there was a long history of radical Islamists using
trivial affronts — from Danish cartoons to papal communiqués — as
catalysts for preplanned violence.
So why those unusual efforts to downplay the circumstances around the gruesome death of an American ambassador?
The murdering of Americans in Libya is, embarrassingly so, the
logical fruition of a failed — and increasingly dangerous — foreign
policy in the Middle East. We missed out on siding with the Iranians who
went out in the streets in 2009 to protest their country’s theocracy.
Instead President Obama warned us about our own past culpable
interference in the internal affairs of Iran. But note that Iranian
reformers were far more likely to oppose fundamentalist, anti-American
theocrats than were the more favored protesters in Egypt two years
later. There is now no real obstacle to Iran’s acquisition of the bomb,
and administration surrogates in the media instead talk of containment,
as if Iran were a Pakistan with an archenemy, 1 billion–strong nuclear
India next door.
Our loud announcements of withdrawal from Afghanistan have left us
unable even to accompany the allied Afghan army on patrol. We just
suffered our worst loss in planes since Vietnam, without press attention
or a comment from the commander-in-chief. Few believe that the Taliban
will not be in power in 2014. Iraq was once secure and open to
discussions over a vestigial American base; now snubbed, it is left
intriguing with Iran, the assumed regional hegemon.
The Obama administration was confused about the Egyptian revolution —
mum on the old allied authoritarian Hosni Mubarak until it was clear
that he would lose power, then rushing in to embrace the dissidents,
then declaring the Muslim Brotherhood to be “secular,” when it was clear
that the Google crowd would not assume power, as if Cairo was supposed
to have been a pre–Palo Alto. Now Morsi, the former Egyptian dissident,
who found freedom, employment, and security only in America, lectures us
on what we must do to win his friendship, and the conditions under
which he is willing to accept nearly $2 billion in American aid.
No one knows what we were doing in Libya — either strategically or
tactically — other than offering up the cute phrase “leading from
behind,” which was supposed to denote a new hybrid soft/hard-power
protocol. Apparently when the crowds appeared to go 51 percent against
Qaddafi, the new monster — thought to be in rehabilitation — became once
more the old monster worthy of being bombed.
Syria’s Bashar al-Assad went from being a “reformer,” to a thug who
had to go, to someone better left out of sight, out of mind. The more
the administration declares our relationship with Israel unchanged, the
more we know it has deteriorated to the lowest point in the history of
the Jewish state — largely because Benjamin Netanyahu has been demonized
as a right-wing trouble-maker who on any given day might do something
to embarrass the Obama administration in the Arab world during the
election campaign. If only he were as smarmy as David Letterman or
Whoopi Goldberg, he might have earned an audience with the president.
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