—one might almost call it a fisking—courtesy of Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch. I’m not going to try to excerpt it (not only is it long, but the comments are interspersed with the text of the President’s speech, making it less friendly to excerpting), but I encourage you to go read it; Spencer exposes a lot of the West’s naïve misconceptions about Islam—misconceptions which, alas, Barack Obama seems to share. Taken all in all, having looked at the speech, I agree with Spencer, Michelle Malkin, and to a remarkable degree, even HuffPo’s Peter Daou (whose article title, “Let Women Wear the Hijab: The Emptiness of Obama’s Cairo Speech,” captures my point of agreement with him beautifully): we have good reason to be concerned.
Category Archives: International relations
Obama administration ticks off Brits . . . again
. . . Wait, wasn’t this supposed to be the administration that was so in tune with the international community that they’d make us popular around the world again? So far, it doesn’t seem to be working, at least where the UK is concerned; Barack Obama has been doing a good job of ticking off our (historically) closest and most reliable ally since his second month in office, and now his (overmatched) press secretary, Robert Gibbs, has just made matters worse. Apparently Gibbs didn’t know that deliberately antagonizing Fleet Street is a bad idea, or he wouldn’t have said this:
“I want to speak generally about some of reports I’ve witnessed over the past few years in the British media and in some ways I’m surprised it filtered down,” Gibbs said.
“Let’s just say that if I wanted to look up, if I wanted to read a writeup today of how Manchester United fared last night in the Champions League Cup, I might open up a British newspaper,” he continued.
“If I was looking for something that bordered on truthful news, I’m not sure that would be the first stack of clips I picked up.”
Mind you, that arrogant, petulant little tantrum was in response to a single article in theTelegraph. One article, and he can’t take the heat. I hate to see what Gibbs would do if his boss ever had to take the volume of abuse, calumny, and slander that Sarah Palin gets.
Not only does this not speak well about Gibbs’ emotional maturity and ability to deal with criticism (and perhaps that of his boss, for that matter), it says very bad things about his judgment. Actually, what it suggests is that he’s gotten so accustomed to the craven, supine submission of the OSM that he takes that as his due, and thinks everyone should cower before him likewise. He reminds me rather of Prince Rabadash, actually:
Then Rabadash rolled his eyes and spread out his mouth into a horrible, long mirthless grin like a shark, and wagged his ears up and down (anyone can learn how to do this if they take the trouble). He had always found this very effective in Calormen. The bravest had trembled when he made these faces, and ordinary people had fallen to the floor, and sensitive people had often fainted. But what Rabadash hadn’t realized is that it is very easy to frighten people who know you can have them boiled alive the moment you give the word. The grimaces didn’t look at all alarming in Archenland; indeed Lucy only thought Rabadash was going to be sick.
Unfortunately for Rabadash Gibbs, the British press are the Archenlanders in this scenario, and they aren’t about to be cowed, as the Telegraph‘s James Delingpole made abundantly clear with this response to Gibbs’ comments:
Your treatment not just of the British media but of Britain generally smacks of a risible ineptitude. First, you let President Obama send back the Winston Churchill bust. Then, you insult our visiting prime minister with a dismally low-key reception (worthy of a minor African head of state, not your closest and most loyal ally) and shoddy gifts (those DVDs). Then you compound the insult by having one of your monkeys declare, Chicago-politics-style, “There’s nothing special about Britain. You’re just the same as the other 190 countries in the world. You shouldn’t expect special treatment.” OK so we know Obama’s not much interested in foreign affairs and has a special loathing for Britain because it roughed up his Kenyan granddad during the Mau Mau insurrection. But don’t you realise, that one of your jobs as his press secretary is to make out like he loves us so much even his underpants have a union flag on them? . . .
We know we’re not angels. We know we can go over the top sometimes. But unfortunately that’s a much bigger problem for you than it is for us. You see, while a lot of your mainstream media will hold fire on stories which they think may reflect poorly on your wondrous Obamamessiah—what his half-brother has been up to, say—we have fewer qualms about telling it like it is. So far, you’ve had a pretty easy ride. . . . But just you wait till we start showing our teeth. . . .
A lot of Americans know this. They appreciate our irreverence. They enjoy our frank criticisms of all the myriad areas where Obama is getting it so badly wrong—everything from his disastrous cap and trade measures, to his brutal treatment of Chrysler dealerships which didn’t support him, to his pork barrelling, to his failure to do anything that looks remotely like rescuing the US economy. That’s why they come to read us online: because they can and there’s nothing you can do to stop them.
If Delingpole opted to hit the press secretary and his administration low, Nile Gardiner decided to swing high:
Can you imagine Gibbs making these remarks about The New York Times or The Washington Post, or NBC, ABC or CBS? This would never happen. The British press, especially the Telegraph, has been singled out because they frequently publish articles critical of the Obama administration and are not afraid to take on the status quo in Washington. Increasingly, millions of Americans are turning to online UK news websites for cutting edge reports on American politics and U.S. foreign policy that the mainstream media refuses to cover in the States, especially if it is unflattering to the Obama White House.
Robert Gibbs’ completely unwarranted rant against the British press is an absolute disgrace, and the President should disown his views. An unreserved apology by Gibbs is also in order.
For all its talk of “raising America’s standing” in the world after the Bush years, the Obama administration is doing a spectacularly bad job of reaching out to its allies. Unfortunately this is the new face of America’s public diplomacy, which will only serve to alienate public opinion across the Atlantic. Congratulations Gibbs—you’ve just made an enemy out of the entire British media, quite an achievement for the man in charge of selling the President’s message.
Even given Gibbs’ previously established (low) standard of competence, this is a most remarkable fiasco; but the most remarkable thing is that no one at the White House seems to recognize it as such. Barring a groveling apology from the administration to the British media (and Britain more generally), I think we’ll have to conclude that the solipsism and self-absorption of this administration is so great that they really honestly don’t see the harm in antagonizing the Brits. If that’s in fact the case, it’s going to come back and bite them in the end. Badly.
Front-line leadership vs. rear-echelon dithering
So North Korea is testing nuclear warheads and long-range missiles—and announcing that they will no longer abide by the armistice that ended the Korean War—and so far, Sarah Palin is sounding more presidential about it than Barack Obama. Maybe back during the campaign when she stressed the significance of Alaska’s position on the front line of America’s defenses as support for her readiness to deal with foreign policy, she wasn’t just talking through her hat; whether it’s the fact that Alaska is now in range of a North Korean nuke or not, she certainly seems to have more of a grasp of the strategic realities here than the president does, even when limited to 140 characters:
More N Korea nuke tests: why consider US missile program cuts now? AK military program helps secure US. Now is NOT time to cut our defense.
Check out this good read on N. Korea that sheds light on need for strong US defense tools & economic sanctions. http://tinyurl.com/oaf2rm
Must Read: Here’s link to article concerning N.Korea’s missile range & progress.http://tinyurl.com/kre9lh
Yet as North Korea accelerates its pattern of provocations, the governor of Alaska may be standing firm, but the Obama administration can’t even make up its mind whether Kim Jong-Il is a threat; they may declare that “The United States will not accept North Korea as a nuclear-armed state,” but they don’t seem willing to do anything more than “respond to the threat with ‘the strongest possible adjectives.’” The situation is critical, but the White House seems to want nothing more than for North Korea to recede back below the threshold of public consciousness so they can get back to more important things (like rescinding some of the restrictions on lobbyists that President Obama announced with such self-righteous, self-aggrandizing fanfare back in January). “Speak softly and carry a big teleprompter,” indeed.
Turning prisons into spring training for terrorists
So the president tried to one-up Dick Cheney’s speech at the American Enterprise Institute, but it seems he failed to do so.
What conclusions one draws from these speeches will depend to a great degree on what assumptions one brings to the viewing. To my way of thinking, the contrast with VP Cheney’s serious, unemotional defense of his position exposes the hollowness of much of Barack Obama’s language. Your mileage may well vary, but given that President Obama has now essentially given his imprimatur to all those things that he denounces as “violating our core values,” as Victor Davis Hanson points out, I don’t see how one would avoid that conclusion; all that liberal angst looks an awful lot like just the same old cynical political calculation anymore. I will also admit to wondering why the president is so concerned about the legal rights of terrorists in Guantanamo when he doesn’t seem to care at all about the legal rights of Dodge dealers in Florida, but I digress.
Of greater concern is his ridiculously foolish suggestion that we move Guantanamo detainees to US prisons. That might make sense were it not for the fact that we already have significant jihadist cells operating in our prisons now, as Michelle Malkin notes:
U.S. Bureau of Prison reports have warned for years that our civilian detention facilities are major breeding grounds for Islamic terrorists. There are still not enough legitimately trained and screened Muslim religious leaders to counsel an estimated 9,000 U.S. prison inmates who demand Islamic services. Under the Bush administration, the federal prison bureaucracy had no policy in place to screen out extremist, violence-advocating Islamic chaplains; failed to properly screen the many contractors and volunteers who help provide religious services to Islamic inmates; and shied away from religious profiling. . . .
[President Obama’s] push to transfer violent Muslim warmongers into our civilian prisons—where they have proselytized and plotted with impunity—will only make the problem worse.
The danger here is succinctly summarized by a commenter on one of Jennifer Rubin’s posts on Contentions:
I wonder how long before people (besides, to his credit, Robert Muller of the FBI) figure out that having celebrity terrorists in any U.S. prison—even a super-duper max—will inevitably radicalize the prison population. We are injecting ourselves with a lethal virus, and fooling ourselves that it won’t hurt us. Like putting Napoleon on the Isle of Elba or keeping Lenin on the infamous “sealed train” through Germany, you have to keep ideological foes far at bay. Ideology seeps out. Even if no other prisoner ever comes into direct contact with one of these celebrity terrorists, their mere presence in the same facility will inspire, influence and over time radicalize the population, just like Africanized Honeybees always take over European Honeybee colonies. Obama is scoring a goal in his (our) own net. This is folly in the extreme.
We need to realize that we have a significant home-grown jihadi threat in this country already, and these people recruit in our prisons. The last thing we need is to hook up wannabe terrorists who’ve been recruited on the inside with experienced terrorists who’ve carried out attacks on the outside; that would be nothing less than turning our maximum-security prisons into a training camp for al’Qaeda. It’s hard to imagine anything much more unwise than that.
For those frightened by the Mexican flu outbreak
here are some words of wisdom that should allay your concern. This comes from my uncle, a longtime specialist in infectious diseases who’s seen a lot of things come and go over the years; he knows what he’s talking about.
To family, friends and others:
Because of the widespread disinformation being perpetrated by the MSM, I feel obliged to share with my family and friends an accurate perception of the current H1N1 influenza outbreak. As many of you know, I am an acknowledged infectious disease specialist. What many do not know is that I have served as a subject-matter expert to both CDC and WHO over the years, and have an accurate assessment of their politics and capabilities. Therefore, I can presume to offer some opinions on this problem.
Seriously, it is somewhat of a problem, but mainly in perception. The MSM has blown it all out of proportion, showing street scenes of people wearing masks, etc, etc. This morning the Today show was all a-gog about “the first US death”, which wasn’t. It was a Mexican kid who was a few yards over the border in Brownsville, and got taken to Houston (where he exposed dozens of other people). But it was a Mexican case, not a US case.
All the US cases have been mild. The NYC outbreak is directly traceable to Mexico; a bunch of seniors had just returned from spring break in Mexico. The fact that the strain in NYC came from Mexico, but the cases are not so severe suggests that it is the Mexican health care system (or lack of same) that is contributing to the high fatality rates there (CDC acknowledged the same idea late today). It’s possible that the deaths are due to bacterial superinfection, similar to what happened in 1918. There is some suggestion that “cytokine storm” might be responsible, but, if that is so, why are Mexican immune systems reacting differently that US immune systems?
The acting head of CDC said on TV today that there is no vaccine against H1N1 influenza, which is only partially true. There have been many mixes of flu vaccine over the years which have contained H1N1 strains, just not this PARTICULAR one. Anyone who has had the flu vaccine regularly over the years should have at least partial protection, which might explain the difference between the US and Mexico.
The CDC on-line recommendations are reasonable and non-panicky. Its the media that is the problem. AND whoever the idiot was at WHO who pushed the “global pandemic” panic button. This is nowhere near a pandemic. It probably won’t ever turn into a pandemic. I think the folks at WHO are covering their sixes because of the SARS outbreak a few years ago (which wasn’t a pandemic, either, just a global episode.)
Apparently the bloggers are running wild, too. Some are saying this is a Chinese or Russian biowarfare plot (patent BS!). Others are saying it is a Federal scheme, and to avoid getting the vaccine at all costs (again, BS, but related to the 1970s swine flu immunization fiasco.)
What to do? Don’t panic. Obama has it all under control. His brilliant suggestion today that if a school has one case of swine flu, they shut down for the week is real stupidity. By the time a case is DOCUMENTED as H1N1, the exposure will have already been done. What he should do is close the border with Mexico for a week. The Cubans, and others, have already shut down all flights to and from Mexico.
A modicum of caution; avoiding crowds and enclosed, crowded places when possible; eating well and keeping a sense of proportion are the best means of prevention.
“This, too, shall pass”. We survived the 1918 pandemic; we survived SARS; we will survive this episode.
William O. Harrison, MD, FACP, FACPM, FIDSA
CAPT(MC)USN(ret)
One thumb up, one thumb down
I’ve been meaning to post on the recent pirate attack on the Maersk Alabama and its aftermath, for a couple reasons. First, President Obama deserves credit for giving the go-ahead for military action; I believe the appropriate response to pirates, terrorists, and anyone else who would hold innocent lives in pawn for their own benefit is best illustrated by the Israeli raid on Entebbe: no mercy, no quarter, no hesitation.
But second, that requires one other thing: no negotiation. Here, in my opinion, is a major black mark on this administration; to first offer to negotiate and then strike was a deeply problematic move, for reasons that Cornell’s William Jacobson lays out:
There are two choices when negotiating with hostage takers/pirates. One is the Israeli model of no negotiation. The only thing to be negotiated is the life of the hostage taker. Money, free passage, and other benefits are not on the table. The purpose of this approach is to deter further hostage takers, even if it means the death of the hostage.
The other model is the model of negotiating over almost any benefit, as long as the hostage is freed safely. This is the model Obama initially appeared to follow with the pirates. But if one believes the spin coming out of the White House, then negotiation was a ruse to buy time.
The problem is not in this case, which ended successfully, but in the next hostage taking situation. If one is going to follow a negotiation approach, the trust of the hostage takers in the negotiation process is key. If hostage takers believe negotiation is a ruse, then the hostage is in more danger. Words cannot be just words in a negotiation.
So negotiating as a ruse is the worst of all alternatives. It does not have the deterrent effect of the Israeli approach, or the hostage-safety effect of the negotiation approach.
This point was actually illustrated quite nicely on last Friday’s episode of NUMB3RS, for those who follow that show. The likely result of this approach by the administration will be what the pirates are already threatening: escalation. This tactic worked, this time, but it won’t work again—and as a consequence of its use, the pirates are much more likely to preemptively kill any Americans they take.
The ironic thing about this is that, all in all, the pirates are probably the best allies we have in the Horn of Africa.
Piracy is not a strategic threat to the US, it is a big problem for Europe and Asia but not for us. It wasn’t until Asia and Europe realized we weren’t going to solve this problem for them that they stepped up themselves.
Terrorism in Somalia has long driven Navy operations off that coast. On one side, we have a high visibility piracy problem that does not threaten the interests of the United States directly, at all, and our only current national interest regarding the piracy issue is one man with 4 guys in an orange boat 200 yards off the bow of the USS Bainbridge (DDG 96). There is a national economic interest, but the impact to date has not risen to a level that has created a serious concern among global leaders to the point they are willing to commit serious resources toward solving the problem.
On the other side of the Somalia problem, we have the terror problem no one else in the world is interested in doing anything about. And in the middle is the reality that while both the pirates and terrorists are operating in the same black market space, the pirates and terror groups don’t like each other.
Then there is another problem. What if we support a government strong enough to remove piracy, but too weak to do anything about the terrorism cells? Piracy is what has the international community involved in the problems of Somalia right now, if that goes away, we are left with the bigger threat to our national interests and no one internationally to help.
In other words, the pirates aren’t hurting us that much, but they are hurting the Somali terrorists that are a much bigger threat to us. I don’t like the idea that we might be better off working with them than fighting them—allying ourselves with thugs has never worked out all that well in the past—but from a Realpolitik point of view, it actually makes a lot of sense. Really, who else is there? That being the case, even if we leave that aside (as, morally, I believe we should), it does still suggest that our focus in Somalia should continue to be where it has been: not on fighting pirates, but on stopping terrorists.
HT (for the last article quoted): Smitty
Is the Obama administration leading us to . . . fascism?
It sounds startling, especially with all the voices calling him a socialist—but in one way, at least, that’s actually correct, as Thomas Sowell points out:
Socialists believe in government ownership of the means of production. Fascists believed in government control of privately owned businesses, which is much more the style of this government. That way, politicians can intervene whenever they feel like it and then, when their interventions turn out badly, summon executives from the private sector before Congress and denounce them on nationwide television.
It’s a great piece; Dr. Sowell covers a number of topics in his inimitable way, putting his own spin on the standard “notes” column, and it’s well worth your time to read the whole thing. Here’s another excerpt to encourage you to do so:
Barack Obama seems determined to repeat every disastrous mistake of the 1930s, at home and abroad. He has already repeated Herbert Hoover’s policy of raising taxes on high income earners, FDR’s policy of trying to micro-manage the economy and Neville Chamberlain’s policy of seeking dialogues with hostile nations while downplaying the dangers they represent. . . .
Barack Obama’s favorable reception during his tour in Europe may be the most enthusiastic international acclaim for a democratic government leader since Neville Chamberlain returned from Munich in 1938, proclaiming “peace in our time.”
Frightening thought, that.
This is what a political cannonization looks like
and no, that’s not a misspelling; British MEP Daniel Hannan definitely broke out the rhetorical cannons for this one, and his aim was unerring. The Aged P called this a “very polite and beautifully enunciated assassination,” and he’s right; to his description I would only add “devastating,” because it’s that, too. Here in the U.S., Republicans like Aaron Schock ought to be taking notes, because most of what MEP Hannan said to PM Gordon Brown could be said with equal point to Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Majority Leader Harry Reid, and others in the Obama/Pelosi administration.
Word of the day: “Overcharged”
Is it just me, or does this tell us way too much about this administration?
When Secretary of State Hillary Clinton greeted Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in Geneva on Friday before sitting down to their working dinner, she presented him a small green box with a ribbon. Inside was a red button with the Russian word “peregruzka” printed on it.”I would like to present you with a little gift that represents what President Obama and Vice President Biden and I have been saying and that is: ‘We want to reset our relationship and so we will do it together.'”Clinton, laughing, added, “We worked hard to get the right Russian word. Do you think we got it?” she asked Lavrov.”You got it wrong,” Lavrov said.” Both diplomats laughed. “It should be “perezagruzka” (the Russian word for reset), Lavrov said. “This says ‘peregruzka,’ which means ‘overcharged.'”
While they’re at it, maybe they should give the American people one of those buttons.HT: Monique Stuart, via R. S. McCain
Remember the subtler costs
Negotiation may cost far less than war, or infinitely more:
for war cannot cost more than one’s life.—Klingon proverb; from The Final Reflection, John M. Ford