Thursday, July 23, 2015

What Obama says today will be either rendered irrelevant or denied tomorrow.

Victor Davis Hanson writes at The Hoover Institution,
President Obama has a habit of asserting strategic nonsense with such certainty that it is at times embarrassing and frightening. Nowhere is that more evident than in his rhetoric about the Middle East.

Not long ago, Obama reassured the world that, despite evidence of the use of chemical weapons in Syria, “Chlorine itself is not listed as a chemical weapon.”

...Nothing could be further from the truth.

...Here is what the president had earlier stated on August 20, 2012, in threatening Assad: “We have been very clear to the Assad regime, but also to other players on the ground, that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. That would change my calculus. That would change my equation.”

...In the summer of 2014, Obama had dismissed the emergence of ISIS with colorful language about its inability to project terrorism much beyond its local Iraqi embryo: “I think the analogy we use around here sometimes, and I think is accurate, is if a JV team puts on Lakers uniforms, that doesn’t make them Kobe Bryant. I think there is a distinction between the capacity and reach of a bin Laden and a network that is actively planning major terrorist plots against the homeland versus jihadists who are engaged in various local power struggles and disputes, often sectarian.”

ISIS, remember, had already conducted terrorist operations across the Mediterranean. Both organized and lone-wolf terrorists, with claims of ISIS ties or inspiration, would go on to attack Westerners from France to Texas.

...More recently, in July 2015, Obama claimed that the now growing ISIS threat could not be addressed through force of arms, assuring the world that “Ideologies are not defeated with guns, they are defeated by better ideas.”

Such a generic assertion seems historically preposterous. The defeat of German Nazism, Italian fascism, and Japanese militarism was not accomplished by Anglo-American rhetoric on freedom. What stopped the growth of Soviet-style global communism during the Cold War were both armed interventions such as the Korean War and real threats to use force such as during the Berlin Airlift and Cuban Missile Crisis— along with Ronald Reagan’s resoluteness backed by a military buildup that restored credible Western military deterrence.

In contrast, Obama apparently believes that strategic threats are not checked with tough diplomacy backed by military alliances, balances of power, and military deterrence, much less by speaking softly and carrying a big stick. Rather, crises are resolved by ironing out mostly Western-inspired misunderstandings and going back on heat-of-the moment, ad hoc issued deadlines, red lines, and step-over lines, whether to the Iranian theocracy, Vladimir Putin, or Bashar Assad.

...Vladimir Putin’s Russia has added Crimea and Eastern Ukraine to his earlier acquisitions in Georgia. He is most likely eyeing the Baltic States next. China is creating new strategic realities in the Pacific, in which Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and the Philippines will eventually either be forced to acquiesce or to seek their own nuclear deterrent. The Middle East has imploded. Much of North Africa is becoming a Mogadishu-like wasteland.

...Both friends and enemies assume that what Obama or his administration says today will be either rendered irrelevant or denied tomorrow.

...Yanking all Americans out of Iraq in 2011 was solely a short-term political decision designed as a 2012 reelection talking point. The American departure had nothing to do with a disinterested assessment of the long-term security of the still shaky Iraqi consensual government. When Senator Obama damned the invasion of Iraq in 2003; when he claimed in 2004 that he had no policy differences with the Bush administration on Iraq; when he declared in 2007 that the surge would fail; when he said in 2008 as a presidential candidate that he wanted all U.S. troops brought home; when he opined as President in 2011 that the country was stable and self-reliant; when he assured the world in 2014 that it was not threatened by ISIS; and when in 2015 he sent troops back into an imploding Iraq—all of these decisions hinged on perceived public opinion, not empirical assessments of the state of Iraq itself. The near destruction of Iraq and the rise of ISIS were the logical dividends of a decade of politicized ambiguity.

...The world is going to become an even scarier place in the next two years. The problem is not just that our enemies do not believe our President, but rather that they no longer even listen to him.
Read more here.

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