U.S. President Barack Obama and Lt. Gen. Robert Caslen Jr., superintendent at the U.S. Military Academy, stand for the national anthem during a graduation and commissioning ceremony at the academy on May 28, 2014, in West Point, N.Y. Photo: Mike Groll/The Associated Press/Files WASHINGTON — The holy Muslim fast of Ramadan and the secular American feast of the Fourth of July collide this week in the context of bloodbaths in the Middle East and eastern Ukraine. At the same time, President Barack Obama is embarking on lunch-hour burger-and-burrito spurts from the White House, liberating greenbacks from his wallet, defying the no-reach-zone above the Chipotle condiment bar, and crying “The bear is loose!”
For Barack Obama, the Nobel Peace Prize winner now in his sixth wartime summer as this country’s commander-in-chief, a desire for American engagements to be over overseas seems stronger than ever. This yearning informs his hesitation even as jihadists murder their way across the barren Levant, the Iraqi enchilada slapped together by his war-hungry predecessor falls apart, the Taliban mount an offensive on the eve of the departure from Afghanistan of America’s last G. I., the Israeli-Palestinian “peace process” is abandoned in a renewed cycle of kidnapping, killing and reprisal, Russian chauvinists stream westward to die for the cause of minority-language rights in forlorn Ukrainian towns, and critics from the right deride the president publicly as “The Man Who Broke the Middle East.”
It is not new that Obama displays a stronger craving for rib-sticking repasts at Shake Shack than he does for sending his exhausted soldiery across the ocean yet again. As he told the graduating class at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York, last month, “For the foreseeable future, the most direct threat to America, at home and abroad, remains terrorism, but a strategy that involves invading every country that harbours terrorist networks is naïve and unsustainable.”
Within the White House, twin strains of history haunt this president’s – and every president’s — decisions. On one side is the shadow of Franklin D. Roosevelt proclaiming in January 1939 – months before German Panzer tanks rolled across the Polish frontier — that “God-fearing democracies cannot safely be indifferent to international lawlessness anywhere . . . the world has grown so small and weapons of attack so swift that no nation can be safe in its will to peace so long as any other powerful nation refuses to settle its grievances at the council table.”
On the other is the warning by Herbert Hoover, FDR’s much-less-hallowed predecessor — that this country “not set ourselves up as the oracle of righteousness in age-old quarrels that began before our nation was born.”
Or, as Sen. Robert Taft of Ohio tartly summarized, 75 years ago: “We can’t force milk on people who don’t like milk without making ourselves thoroughly hated.”
Yet Obama is besieged on all fronts by those same intractable enmities: Sunni and Shiite, Russian and Ukrainian, Arab and Israeli, each case demanding that he carefully weigh caution against the impetus to use what Franklin Roosevelt called America’s “righteous might.”
“I believe in American exceptionalism with every fibre of my being,” the president said at West Point. “But what makes us exceptional is not our ability to flout international norms and the rule of law; it is our willingness to affirm them through our actions. I would betray my duty to you, and to the country we love, if I sent you into harm’s way simply because I saw a problem somewhere in the world that needed to be fixed.”
U.S. President Barack Obama presides over a naturalization ceremony for active duty service members and civilians in the East Room of the White House on July 4, 2014 in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Jim Lo Scalzo-Pool/Getty Images)
That, of course, was before the Islamic caliphate’s pickup-truck crusaders slaughtered their way to the fringes of Baghdad, leading Obama to send a total, so far, of a few hundred “advisers,” to Iraq, with the possibility of furnishing jet fighters to the rump regime at some point. Should he decide on air support, he will find the U.S. in third place in a Levantine version of the Reno Air Races, with Vladimir Putin and the wingmen of the Iranian ayatollahs flipping him the finger from their cockpits, having flown on ahead.
“Every moment that the president waits, the more complicated it becomes as new realities consolidate on the ground,” noted Meghan L. O’Sullivan, adjunct senior fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations, in a paper released this week that was headlined “In Iraq, Obama Has Two Terrible Choices.”
Meanwhile, in the wake of the abduction and assassination of three Israeli teens in the occupied territories by Jew-hating gangsters of one or another political sect or stripe, the president, through deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes, would only declare on Tuesday that, “Israel needs to be very careful to not be so heavy-handed in its response that they’re further destabilizing the situation, and they need to respect the dignity of the Palestinian people.” It took less than a day for a reciprocal atrocity to be inflicted on a Jerusalem Arab, despite the administration’s pleas.
At the same hour as Rhodes’s briefing – and as if designed to illustrate the paramount importance to the president of domestic, rather than foreign, policy issues ahead of November’s Congressional elections — Obama was giving a speech about the urgent need to remedy the nation’s crumbling roads and bridges, and deploying four celebrity cooks, including the White House’s own chef-in-chief, to bomb taste buds from Beijing to Canberra.
“How did it happen?” asked former Reagan-Bush diplomat Elliott Abrams in his The Man Who Broke the Middle East op-ed last week. “Begin with hubris: The new president told the world, in his Cairo speech in June 2009, that he had special expertise in understanding the entire world of Islam — knowledge ‘rooted in my own experience’ because ‘I have known Islam on three continents before coming to the region where it was first revealed.’ But President Obama wasn’t speaking that day in an imaginary location called ‘the world of Islam;’ he was in Cairo, in the Arab Middle East, in a place where nothing counted more than power.”
Now, Cairo, too, had spiralled back into a military autocracy eager to string up hundreds of its foes; so much for “Arab Spring.”
For Obama, a sixth Fourth in the Oval Office was being marked by a familiar reluctance to force milk on an intolerant world, lest it engender even more contempt for an over-reaching republic.
“Americans gain new respect” was the Yahoo! News headline on Wednesday, but that related to Team USA’s advancement to the second round of the World Cup, where it was defeated by a Belgian team ungrateful for the freeing of its country from the German Kaiser in 1918 and from Adolf Hitler in 1945.
No comments:
Post a Comment