What is President Obama thinking?
Both supporters and detractors of the president struggle to rationalize his approach to the threat of global jihad. Why can’t he call it what it is? Why does he discount the religious underpinnings of Islamist terror? Why does he lecture the American people about the “root causes” of “violent extremism?”
The answers matter because the West is losing ground in this battle. While the U.S. government fails to orchestrate — or even articulate — a coherent strategy to combat the followers of radical Islam, their population, political power, and capacity to harm us surge.
The simplistic explanation is that President Obama, like President Bush before him, fears alienating the millions of Muslims who forswear violence. He uses politically correct language to avoid adding fuel to the fire. Were this the only rationale, we might take comfort that he understands the crux of the problem. We might assume he is choosing his language as a calculated tactic.
Obama’s choice of language is more than rhetoric, however. He really seems to believe what he is saying. And initially, at least, we might have attributed such naiveté to his personal history. After all, the president can claim little “real-world” experience outside of politics. A community organizer and college professor before entering public life, he never had to manage a large organization or meet a payroll, let alone address matters of national security.
The record reflects as much. Since he came into office, Obama has presided over geopolitical disasters across the Middle East and elsewhere around the globe. Yet none of these failures appears to have chastened him. Surrounding himself with loyalists, the president presses on with a doctrine of vague declarations and non-intervention, unbothered by the diminished credibility of America among both allies and adversaries. So something deeper must be at play in the president’s political philosophy.
It comes down to ideology. Barack Obama is a product of the progressive movement and its champions in liberal academia. This community embraces a rigid view of the human condition, where race, wealth, and power engender social divisions and perpetuate oppression of the weak. In its paradigm, most conflict, poverty, and social dislocation result from avaricious capitalist and corporate interests. Only enlightened governments and intergovernmental institutions can restrain these interests and rectify the imbalance.
There’s no room in the progressive model for baser pathologies such as tribal enmity or the medieval barbarism of the Islamic State. Progressive thinkers simply deny or overlook historic events and present-day behaviors which fail to align with the patterns of race and class warfare they deem universal. For this reason, activists in the 1980’s raged over the racial injustice of Apartheid South Africa while completely ignoring the vicious brutality of the African National Congress and of black-ruled regimes in neighboring Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and Angola. It’s why the supposedly liberal advocates for Palestinian independence today pay no mind to the illiberal treatment of journalists, Christians, women, and gays in the Palestinian territories.
Viewed in this light, it’s not surprising to hear President Obama and his team focus on the economic deprivation across Muslim societies, as if a jobs program would stem the tide of radical Islam. President Obama may not “blame America first” as his most ardent critics assert, but he eschews the notion of American exceptionalism. At the National Prayer Breakfast last month, he admonished Americans and Christians, “lest we get on our high horse… remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ.” As far as he is concerned, the moral deficiencies of Muslim and Arab societies are not materially different from the imperfections of Western societies.
If we are all one imperfect world laboring under universal burdens of sin, then of course there is no point in singling out radical Islam. To combat our enemies, we must combat ourselves and do penance for our own failures. In Obama’s warped alternative reality, NATO defense of Eastern Europe is the source of resurgent Russian aggression, global warming is the most urgent threat to humanity, high unemployment in French suburbs is the “root cause” of anti-Semitic rampages, and Jewish settlements in the West Bank are the obstacle to Middle East peace.
President Obama never truly concealed this radical mindset during his pursuit of the White House. He was mentored by the likes of Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright. Their ideas were on clear display for anyone who chose to look closely. With two years left on the president’s term and critical military and security policies still in flux, the public should wisen up to a fearful reality. The man charged with leadership of the free world is not equipped to address the clear and present dangers to our civilization.
rubenthoughts 
And what is your suggestion??…. Should we go to war ? By all means lets bomb and/or invade Iran…. If not what is your recommendation.? It s the same crap we heard from Bush and your fellow necons which, after removing Sadaam, left Iran in a pre-eminem position in the Persian Gulf. So trying to halt and /or terminate Iran`s nuclear weapons ambitions by negotiations with sanctions and inspections is wrong ? Then you have the absolute “chutzpah” ” to suggest that Obama`s “liberal/socialist ” past is indicative of his desire to avoid a world confligration..Will you join in the coming war ?? What about volunteering your children ? Have we not heard this garbage before ? We won`t have the support of our tradtionial allies. Should we go it alone.? You then equated Obama`s criticism of Isis religiious fanatcism and it`s association of past religious wars of a thousand years ago as if somehow he was excusing it .. The first victims of the crusades and inquisitions were us Jews. Do you not understand what he was saying.?? We need to enlist our allies and any moderate Muslims we can find to isolate and combat Islamist fanaticism.. Your blaming Obama for Putin`s adventures in the Ukraine is equally ridiculious..
LikeLike
Is it not possible that Obama is acting not out of ideology but out of a belief that the best strategic option over a multi-decade period is to avoid the trap of escalating tensions? I wish people would give Obama more credit, just as I wish those who thought Bush wanted to go to war over oil would have given Bush more credit. I believe that both Obama and Bush have had more nuanced views of things.
LikeLike
This is amazing on how AIPAC controls the US Congress. Our tax dollar at work to start another war after million of people are dead in Syria, Lybia and Iraq with millions of refuges. The HAWKs are not making middle east or planet safer but creating many crazy ISIS. ISIS was syrian opposition at first.
AIPAC Marching Orders
The more serious problem with focusing on the Logan Act, however, is that what Cotton and his Republican colleagues were doing was not negotiating with a foreign government but trying to influence the outcome of negotiations in the interest of a foreign government. The premise of the Senate Republican reflected in the letter – that Iran must not be allowed to have any enrichment capacity whatever – did not appear spontaneously. The views that Cotton and the other Republicans have espoused on Iran were the product of assiduous lobbying by Israeli agents of influence using the inducement of promises of election funding and the threat of support for the members’ opponents in future elections.
Those members of Congress don’t arrive at their positions on issues related to Iran through discussion and debate among themselves. They are given their marching orders by AIPAC lobbyists, and time after time, they sign the letters and vote for legislation or resolution that they are given, as former AIPAC lobbyist MJ Rosenberg has recalled. This Israeli exercise of control over Congress on Iran and issues of concern to Israel resembles the Soviet direction of its satellite regimes and loyal Communist parties more than any democratic process, but with campaign contributions replacing the inducements that kept its bloc allies in line.
Cotton’s Loyalty to Israel
Rosenberg has reasoned that AIPAC must have drafted the letter and handed it to Senator Cotton. “Nothing happens on Capitol Hill related to Israel,” he tweets, “unless and until Howard Kohr (AIPAC chief) wants it to happen. Nothing.” AIPAC apparently supported the letter, but there may be more to the story. Senator Cotton just happens to be a protégé of neoconservative political kingpin Bill Kristol, whose Emergency Committee on Israel gave him nearly a million dollars late in his 2014 Senate campaign and guaranteed that Cotton would have the support of the four biggest funders of major anti-Iran organizations.
Cotton proved his absolute fealty to Likudist policy on Iran by sponsoring an amendment to the Nuclear Iran Prevention Act of 2013 that would have punished violators of the sanctions against Iran with prison sentences of up to 20 years and extended the punishment to “a spouse and any relative, to the third degree” of the sanctions violator. In presenting the amendment in the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Cotton provided the useful clarification that it would have included “parents, children, aunts, uncles, nephews, nieces, grandparents, great grandparents, grandkids, great grandkids”.
That amendment, which he apparently believed would best reflect his adoption of the Israeli view of how to cut Iran down to size, was unsuccessful, but it established his reliability in the eyes of the Republican Likudist kingmakers. Now Kristol is grooming him to be the vice-presidential nominee in 2016.
So the real story behind the letter from Cotton and his Republican colleagues is how the enforcers of Likudist policy on Iran used an ambitious young Republican politician to try to provoke a breakdown in the Iran nuclear negotiations. The issue it raises is a far more serious issue than the Logan Act, but thus far major news organizations have steered clear of that story.
LikeLike