by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
National Review Online<\/em><\/p>\n Almost every promise, almost every reset proclamation from Barack Obama about the struggles against, and those within, the radical Muslim world has either been withdrawn or proven bankrupt.<\/p>\n On the day the president announced his reelection bid, his administration renounced its loud promises to try Khalid Sheik Mohammed in a New York civilian court. While blaming Congress for the flipflop, Team Obama conceded that it had no public support for such a sensational courtroom drama \u2014 and knew that the trial of the mastermind of 9\/11, a few blocks from the site of his mass murdering, might have endangered the president\u2019s reelection.<\/p>\n Consider the rest of the Bush-Cheney anti-terrorism protocols, all of which Senator Obama demagogued and promised to overturn, or at least curtail, if he was elected president. Yet Obama has now embraced military tribunals, kept Guantanamo open (and will probably put new prisoners in it), left the Patriot Act largely untouched, vastly expanded the Predator targeted-assassination program, continued renditions, declared preventive detention and the suspension of habeas corpus legal and necessary in the case of terrorists, surged in Afghanistan, and kept to the Bush-Petraeus-Maliki agreements on scheduled troop withdrawals from Iraq. President Obama assumes two facts: Such policies are critical in keeping us safe; and they can be embraced without worry over demagogic attacks by the likes of Senator Obama.<\/p>\n Candidate Obama\u2019s campaign opposition to all of the above, except the war in Afghanistan, weakened American credibility at a critical juncture in the war in Iraq, and helped propel him to victory over Hillary Clinton as a more passionate and leftward critic of George Bush. That he has now simply copied Bush\u2019s anti-terrorism agenda, gussied it up with some ridiculous euphemisms, and banned descriptive terms like \u201cwar on terror\u201d and \u201cradical Islam\u201d exposes him as hypocritical, na\u00efve, and weak. Hypocritical: If these measures were bad in 2008, why are they good in 2011? Na\u00efve: Did Obama really believe that campaign rhetoric was synonymous with the responsibility of governance? Weak: Why boast about ending Bush\u2019s protocols only to give up on repealing them at the first sign of political pushback?<\/p>\n For most of 2009\u20132011 the two countries receiving most of Obama\u2019s rhetorical distaste were democratic Israel and democratic Iraq \u2014 the region\u2019s only constitutional states. The former is often portrayed as a rogue aggressor at the heart of all unrest among hundreds of millions of Muslims in the Middle East, the latter, a mistake not worth the cost of its founding in American blood and treasure. Yet despite all the Obama administration\u2019s outreach to the region\u2019s autocracies, only Israel and Iraq have largely avoided mass demonstrations calling for transparent and representative government. Arabs are killing each other from Syria to Libya, from Bahrain to Tunisia, without much worry over the ethnic makeup of the Jerusalem suburbs.<\/p>\n Almost immediately upon taking office, Barack Obama made two controversial moves in reaching out to Iran and Syria. He gave serial deadlines to Iran to cease its effort to acquire nuclear weapons (stop it by the UN summit in New York, stop it by the G-20 summit, stop it by the preliminary meetings of envoys).\u00a0All<\/em>\u00a0were ignored. Obama turned his back on a million protesters in the streets of Tehran, with bizarre promises not to \u201cmeddle,\u201d coupled with vague apologies about American behavior more than a half-century ago. A golden opportunity to help topple a vicious anti-American theocracy was turned into a buffoonish effort to appear multiculturally sensitive.<\/p>\n Over the last thirty years, every administration has sought to woo the Assad family dictatorship \u2014 and all have failed, some, like the Clinton diplomatic team, in humiliating fashion. Syria has one goal: to reclaim from Israel the strategically important Golan Heights without giving up its various agendas of destroying an independent Lebanon, aiding anti-Israeli terrorists, and stockpiling a vast arsenal in preparation for the next Middle East war. For only a brief moment in the last three decades was it willing to engage the United States: in the spring of 2003, when the brilliant three-week victory over Saddam Hussein left Bashar Assad worried that he might share a similar fate. The chances of normalizing relations with Syria are near zero \u2014 given that it is a terrorist state, with assassination and the sponsorship of Hezbollah embraced as national policy. Obama\u2019s unusually persistent outreach to Damascus has proven, like Clinton\u2019s, to be a humiliating failure \u2014 emphasized most recently when, in the midst of violent demonstrations against Assad\u2019s authoritarian rule, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton claimed that Assad had been considered a \u201creformer.\u201d We are in the surreal position of reaching out to the Syrian autocracy with new initiatives at the very time Syrians are trying to overthrow it.<\/p>\n As for Afghanistan, the newly inaugurated President Obama avoided meeting with the senior American general there for months. He simultaneously sent in thousands of additional troops while setting specific withdrawal dates. Commander-in-Chief Obama is now on his third ground commander, after one removal and one resignation. Those assigned responsibility for the war since 2009 \u2014 former national security advisor Gen. James Jones, Amb. Richard Holbrooke, former CentCom commander Gen. David Petraeus, and Amb. Karl Eikenberry \u2014 have fought with each other at times over spheres of influence. Jones is now retired, and Holbrooke is deceased.<\/p>\n We have intervened in Libya on \u201chumanitarian grounds,\u201d but have not argued that more were likely to die in Libya than in the Ivory Coast or the Congo. We wish to help the \u201crebels,\u201d but we do not know who or what they are. Apparently we came to their aid simply because they seemed both likable and Westernized on CNN and because for a moment they seemed likely to win and remove Qaddafi \u2014 and on the initiative of the Europeans, who have sizable oil interests in Libya. The president has both demanded that Qaddafi leave and asserted that regime change is not our aim; he has both promised to enforce a no-fly zone only and often gone beyond such patrolling by bombing ground targets and inserting American agents. He has sought the sanction of the UN and the Arab League, and then\u00a0de facto<\/em>\u00a0ignored their resolutions by occasionally calling for regime change and bombing Qaddafi\u2019s bunkers, while not asking Congress for similar authorization to intervene. We are told Qaddafi is doing terrible things (and he is), but we were also told up until a few weeks ago that he was in diplomatic rehab and was now more an ally than a mad-dog enemy.<\/p>\n Then, after two weeks of confused \u201ckinetic military action,\u201d the United States abruptly quit fighting and outsourced further direct military operations to European NATO members \u2014 apparently in the hope that either the Europeans or the rebels can oust Qaddafi. In any case, Libya may be the first war in American history in which the United States directly attacked another nation-state, in an act of war, then abruptly quit the preemptive assault with the enemy still very much in power. If Qaddafi survives, do we say we\u2019re sorry, pay reparations, take in rebel refugees, patrol a protected enclave for years, bisect the country, or play golf and let the Europeans deal with the mess?<\/p>\n The Obama administration, in finger-in-the-wind fashion, urged pro-American authoritarians in Egypt and Tunisia to leave \u2014 but only belatedly and only when it appeared that the protesters would probably win. In the aftermath, the Obama administration still has little notion who the successors will be, or what their agenda is, or whether they will be better than what they replaced. Most likely, the United States now suffers the worst of both worlds: looking weak and opportunistic in withdrawing support from former American allies, while not receiving much credit from the protesters because of the absence of early principled support. If the Muslim Brotherhood assumes\u00a0de facto<\/em>\u00a0power in Egypt, opens another front against Israel, and serves as the Sunni bookend to Shiite theocratic Iran, then we may witness the worst geopolitical calamity since the fall of pro-American Iran, or indeed the Communist takeover of China.<\/p>\n In fact, the entire American response to unrest in the Muslim world is\u00a0ad hoc<\/em>, reactionary, and often contradictory \u2014 apparently favoring government repression of rebels in the Gulf while intervening to stop such crackdowns in Libya but not elsewhere; pressuring pro-American tyrants in Tunisia and Egypt, while carefully not antagonizing anti-American tyrants in Iran and Syria; declaring support for human rights and transparency in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya, while ignoring these values altogether in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen. In eerie fashion, the less the Obama administration seems to know about the complexities of the serial unrest, the more it jumps in with blunderbuss sermonizing. We treat restraint from our allies with contempt, and excess from our enemies with an odd sort of deference. One sees the Carter world of 1979 and awaits only the oil crisis \u2014 and then shrugs that $5-a-gallon gas may be on the way to finish the parallel.<\/p>\n While Obama, the anti-war Nobel Peace laureate, was inaugurating a new war in the Middle East \u2014 simultaneously with not one but two other conflicts \u2014 back on the home front, the US is running a $1.6 trillion budget deficit. Politically, Obama has retrospectively exposed the anti-war movement between 2003 and 2009 as partisan rather than principled. The Left is now as quiet about Barack Obama\u2019s preemptive war without congressional approval \u2014 against an Arab Muslim oil-exporting nation run by a madman who was at the time being courted by intellectuals, academics, and sympathetic American politicians \u2014 as it was not long ago incensed about George Bush\u2019s preemptive war\u00a0with<\/em>\u00a0congressional approval \u2014 against an Arab Muslim oil-exporting nation run by a madman who was at the time ostracized by the world and condemned by several UN resolutions.<\/p>\n No one knows what the Middle East will look like in two years. We know only that Barack Obama seems to be scrambling to adopt many of the policies of his predecessor against whom he used to define his own entire reset diplomacy. And yet when he is not copying his predecessor, the ensuing chaos earns him a far worse charge than hypocrisy.<\/p>\n \u00a92011 Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online Almost every promise, almost every reset proclamation from Barack Obama about the struggles against, and those within, the radical Muslim world has either been withdrawn or proven bankrupt.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[196],"tags":[1051,12,51,1055,293,1053,30,250,1041,162,458,1016,1037],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-Sc","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":121,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/hagel-brennan-and-the-obama-view-of-the-middle-east\/","url_meta":{"origin":3360,"position":0},"title":"Hagel, Brennan, and the Obama View of the Middle East","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 13, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson NRO's\u00a0The Corner The Meaning of Hagel and Brennan Chuck Hagel and John Brennan, given their long public service, will probably be confirmed. Their appointments will have a force-multiplying effect on our new foreign policy as it pertains to the Middle East. If one were to collate\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "The Middle East"","block_context":{"text":"The Middle East","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":7724,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-cost-of-american-indifference\/","url_meta":{"origin":3360,"position":1},"title":"The Cost of American Indifference","author":"victorhanson","date":"July 31, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"By continually taking the path of least short-term trouble, the U.S. ensures long-term hardship. by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review Online The Obama administration often either denies any responsibility for the current global chaos or claims that it erupted spontaneously. Yet most of the mess was caused by, or\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "The World"","block_context":{"text":"The World","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":7627,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/how-obama-lost-the-middle-east\/","url_meta":{"origin":3360,"position":2},"title":"How Obama Lost the Middle East","author":"victorhanson","date":"July 3, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"The president put politics and ideology ahead of preserving hard-won gains in the region.\u00a0 by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review Online In his first term, Barack Obama all but declared victory in America\u2019s Middle East struggles. As he precipitously pulled out all U.S. peacekeepers from Iraq, the president had\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "The Middle East"","block_context":{"text":"The Middle East","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":9231,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/how-america-lost-its-groove\/","url_meta":{"origin":3360,"position":3},"title":"How America Lost Its Groove","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 8, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"President Obama, Vice President Biden, and Secretary of State Clinton all had a hand in it. By Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review Online Deterrence is lost through lax foreign policy, an erosion of military readiness, and failed supreme command \u2014 often insidiously, over time, rather than dramatically, at once.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Europe"","block_context":{"text":"Europe","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/europe\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":7922,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ruins-of-the-middle-east\/","url_meta":{"origin":3360,"position":4},"title":"Ruins of the Middle East","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 14, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"Obama shuns our friends and courts our enemies. by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review Online Obama\u2019s unfortunate Middle East legacy was predicated on six flawed assumptions: (1) a special relationship with Turkey; (2) distancing the U.S. from Israel; (3) empathy for Islamist governments as exemplified by the Muslim Brotherhood\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "The Middle East"","block_context":{"text":"The Middle East","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"(Win McNamee\/Getty Images)","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/10\/pic_giant_101414_SM_Barack-Obama-G-500x291.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":885,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/obamas-virtual-rose-garden\/","url_meta":{"origin":3360,"position":5},"title":"Obama’s Virtual Rose Garden","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 22, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online When Barack Obama went into hibernation in December and vacationed in Hawaii, we noted that his poll numbers edged back up some. 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