Archive for the ‘Foreign Relations’ Category
Obama The Great?
Jan21
By John Feehery
Historians will rate President Barack Obama as one our nation’s greatest Presidents.
The question is: Was he any good?
That the history profession is dominated by a liberal elite comes as no surprise. Robert Dallek, Arthur Schleschinger, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Michael Beschloss would all rank both Jack Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson towards the top of the list and Ronald Reagan towards the bottom. George W. Bush will never ever get his due for how he handled 9/11 attacks as he passed landmark education and Medicare legislation or for his remarkable commitment to fighting AIDS in Africa.
Mr. Obama broke the Presidential color-line, which is an impressive and historic feat. He did it by building a world-class campaign apparatus, one that will forever be a model for political campaigns to come. Historians will note that Mr. Obama came to office amid a financial crisis, and will bend over backwards to give him credit for the fact that the nation survived it. They will say that he successfully bailed out the struggling auto industry. They will call him a war-time President and give him credit for killing Osama Bin Laden.
All of that is true. But any historian worth his (or her) salt, should analyze the entire record.
It was George Bush who got the Congress to pass TARP, a controversial but indispensable government program that kept the financial industry solvent. The auto bailout, also controversial, was also initiated by Bush in the last days of his Presidency.
Obama took the Bush programs in both cases and perverted them, making them less effective. He took the TARP program and made it a government spending program. He took the auto bailout and made sure the unions were bailed out.
When it comes to the wars, Obama made exactly the wrong call. He went all in on Afghanistan and pulled critical support for the Iraq regime. We have wasted billions in a never-ending effort to bring the Afghani people into the 19th century, while opening the door for greater Iranian influence in Iraq.
The President has taken a small Bush drone program and made it the chief way to we battle terrorists, all over the world. Liberal historians who supposedly care about the big moral questions surrounding state-sanctioned assassination should not let Obama off the hook on this one, but my guess is that they will.
On the domestic front, Obama’s spending policies should go down as the most irresponsible in our nation’s history, but my guess is that the historians themselves will give the President a pass. He created a brand new health care entitlement by raiding from another entitlement, knowing that the Medicare cuts would in all likelihood not be enacted. His initial spending program, dubbed a stimulus by the White House, was a trillion dollar pork-fest, which included every single spending hope and aspiration of every Democrat that had gotten elected to the Congress in the last decade. The efficacy of that spending was best demonstrated by Solndra going bankrupt.
As the first African American President, Obama has done precious little to help that beleaguered community increase its chances of advancing into the middle class. Black unemployment is worse than it was during the Bush or Reagan Administrations. Black on black violence in Chicago, the President’s home town, is reaching catastrophic numbers. Thankfully, for those who live in Washington D.C., the murder rate is down significantly, but the unemployment rate is still much worse than for every other ethnic group.
It is hard to say that racial polarization has improved during the Obama years, and you can make the case it is much worse. That’s not Obama’s fault, but he hasn’t done much to make it better.
A President usually makes his bones internationally. Obama is more popular than George W. Bush in places outside the Untied States. But does that mean he is more effective? How is he pushing our national agenda forward?
Well, let’s see.
The Middle East is a complete mess. We have exchanged a pro-American regime for a pro-Islamist regime in Egypt. We pushed out a secular regime in Libya, and now an Islamist regime that may or may not have been complicit in the murder of our Ambassador is in power. We are pushing out another secular regime in Syria, and will likely have another Islamist Republic on our hands.
In Asia, we owe the Chinese a shit load more money than we did at the start of the Obama years, and that limits our options. The North Koreans now have a nuclear weapon and a missile capable of reaching the United States. They have a new dictator there, a younger, pudgier version, but it is not clear how he will use his weaponry. The Japanese has elected the most nationalistic Prime Minister in the last 50 years, and tensions between Japan and China are as high as they have been in decades.
Now, this is not Obama’s fault. I get that. But the President has been absent when it comes to the region, and, as I pointed out, we owe the Chinese a shit load more money than we did four years ago. That limits our options about what we can realistically do there.
The President likes to compare himself to a combination of the Franklin Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower. Ike left us a highway system and a budget surplus. FDR left us Social Security and a vanquished Nazi regime.
Obama is going to leave us with a huge national debt, a more fractured political landscape and a confusing mess called Obamacare. That’s not much of a legacy, in my view.
Love and Respect
Sep14
By John Feehery
The Muslim world was supposed to love Barack Obama.
Obama supposedly understood Islam better than any Republican because his father was Muslim. Obama had a more balanced view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
He gave his first big international speech in Egypt, remember?
He constructed the strategy of leading from behind during the Arab Spring. In fact, that is now the new Obama doctrine in Middle East politics. Lead from behind.
Now granted, under Mr. Obama, the assassination policies of the United States have not deviated one iota from the Bush Administration. In fact, President Obama has been pretty darn successful at killing terrorists, one at a time.
And that has its advantages, but not nearly as many as you might think.
Drone strikes strike fear and loathing and they are useful in taking out dangerous characters. But they don’t change minds or make people begin to like us.
Only consistent policies that reassure the local citizenry that we will be for them for the long-haul in providing security and a better way of life can change attitudes. There is no evidence that the Obama policy of cut and run is working to provide that sense of security, especially in Afghanistan.
One of the worst jobs in the world is to be the number 2 guy in Al Qaeda. It usually lasts only about three months and the job is terminated when you are terminated.
But despite the rather final nature of the position, Al Qaeda never seems to lack for finding replacements.
Obama was supposed to change all of that. He was supposed to give Muslims a reason to love America.
Instead, he has given them plenty of reasons to not respect us.
Sure, he is taking credit for killing Osama Bin Laden. But he has also given the Taliban and its allies a clearly broadcast exit date for our troops. The Taliban expects us to leave soon, so they don’t respect our power. They are just waiting for us to go so they can rush back into power.
In Iraq, because we left too early, thanks to Obama, the political institutions never had a chance to fully congeal. That country is ready to collapse.
In Iran, they know Obama is doing everything in his power to keep the Israelis from attacking. So, they continue to build their nuclear weapons as fast as they can with as much borrowed time as possible.
Obama undercut Mubarak in Egypt, and now the Muslim Brotherhood, a terrorist organization, is running the joint.
In Libya, as soon as Muammar Qaddafi become our ally, Obama threw him under the bus, and now we have complete chaos there, which of course gives Al Qaeda all kinds of opportunities to sow mischief.
By leading from behind, Mr. Obama has created uncertainty. He thinks he is being clever, but as the drummer from Spinal Tap once said, there is a fine line between clever and stupid. Things are getting stupid out there.
When a superpower doesn’t make it exactly clear what it is going to do in just about every situation, chaos ensues. We are the only superpower in the world, and President Obama is our leader.
Do you have any idea what he will do if the Israelis decide to take out Iran’s nuclear facilities? I don’t.
Mr. Obama may be loved in some quarters of the Islamic world, but it is hard to make the case that he is universally respected.
Leading from behind just doesn’t work.
