Well, Maybe He Can Still Claim, "My Foreign Policy Is Way Better Than My Domestic Policy

When you start trying to figure out why President Obama's foreign policy is so screwed up, this article at Foreign Policy is a good guide.  Particularly when you consider that the author is a former member of Obama's foreign policy team...

Despite some successes large and small, Obama's foreign policy has disappointed many who initially supported him. The Middle East initiatives heralded in his 2009 Cairo speech fizzled or never got started at all, and the Middle East today is more volatile than ever. The administration's response to the escalating violence in Syria has consisted mostly of anxious thumb-twiddling. The Israelis and the Palestinians are both furious at us. In Afghanistan, Obama lost faith in his own strategy: he never fought to fully resource it, and now we're searching for a way to leave without condemning the Afghans to endless civil war. In Pakistan, years of throwing money in the military's direction have bought little cooperation and less love.  

The Russians want to reset the reset, neither the Chinese nor anyone else can figure out what, if anything, the "pivot to Asia" really means, and Latin America and Africa continue to be mostly ignored, along with global issues such as climate change. Meanwhile, the administration's expanding drone campaign suggests a counterterrorism strategy that has completely lost its bearings -- we no longer seem very clear on who we need to kill or why.  

Could Obama have done better?  

In foreign policy as in life, stuff happens -- including bad stuff no one could have predicted. Nonetheless, to a significant extent, President Obama is the author of his own lackluster foreign policy. He was a visionary candidate, but as president, he has presided over an exceptionally dysfunctional and un-visionary national security architecture -- one that appears to drift from crisis to crisis, with little ability to look beyond the next few weeks. His national security staff is squabbling and demoralized, and though senior White House officials are good at making policy announcements, mechanisms to actually implement policies are sadly inadequate.

Brooks goes on to criticize Obama for failures in strategy (he doesn't have one), structure (it's crumbling), process (no comment needed), and personnel. The last is most entertaining, as Brooks notes that many positions in the national security and diplomatic infrastructure have been filled by campaign aides who don't really know what they were doing.  It's telling that so many of the criticisms in her article are ones that tell the story of the Obama Adminsitration as a whole -- a lack of strategy and failures in process and personnel seem to be the hallmarks of this presentation.

The closing section may be my favorite, however, when Brooks recommends that Obama reinstate a rule from his 2008 campaign -- the "no assholes" rule.  I'm stunned to think that the members of Obama's campaign staff may not be the biggest assholes associated with the President. 

The Williams Mess

I'll let other people discuss the firing of Juan Williams in great detail; let's just say that NPR's decision is ridiculous for any number of reasons, including that Williams is anything but a bigot. Let's also note that like most conservatives, I disagree with a lot of Williams says, but I respect the way he makes his arguments, his sincerity, and his intellectual honesty.

But I want to address two arguments in particular.  One is a false analogy -- Will Saletan seems to think this is the equivalent of the Shirley Sherrod controversy.   The analogy may work if you want to say NPR is the equivalent of the Department of Agriculture.  But there are a couple key differences -- Breitbart didn't edit the tape of Sherrod, he got an edited tape, and the point of Breitbart's tape was not to excoriate Sherrod so much as to attack the hypocricy of the NAACP accusing the Tea Party of racism while its members were nodding along and agreeing with Sherrod's initial comments.  At the end of the day, there's actual malice here from the lefties toward Williams; there doesn't appear to be actual malice from Breitbart towad Sherrod so much as the NAACP as a whole.

But the best point about the whole affair comes from Matt Welch at Reason...

Williams' firing is a clarifying moment in media mores. You can be Islamophobic, in the form of refusing to run the most innocuous imaginable political cartoons out of a broad-brush fear of Muslims, but you can't admit it, even when the fear is expressed as a personal feeling and not a group description, winnowed down to the very specific and nightmare-exhuming act of riding on an airplane, and uttered in a context of otherwise repudiating collective guilt and overbroad fearmongering.

In other words, it's okay to allow your preconceived notions of some Muslims as violent to censor your own work, so long as you pretend that's not the reason (the best option being hiding behind sensitivity to other cultures, although these folks would gladly support the right of an artist to dip a crucifix in urine).  And God forbid you actually articulate that fear, or you may be fired... although Williams now got a $2 million contract from Fox.  So he's probably not complaining as much now, seeing as how he'll be able to console himself with all that extra cash.

Bill O'Reilly, American Hero

Bill O'Reilly accomplishes the greatest feat in American history: he gets the two biggest idiots on The View to walk off the set.



As Allahpundit points out, that idiot Joy Behar could stay on set when fellow moron Rosie O'Donnell uttered her stupidity about 9/11 being an inside job. The killers on 9/11 were Muslims -- assholes who misinterpreted their religion, but they were still Muslims. Saying that they were Muslims doesn't slime all Muslims, anymore than calling Tim McVeigh a Christian tars all Christians.  Of course, that's a seperate point entirely -- I'm not sure why Whoopi and others on the left think McVeigh's religious beliefs were important; unlike the 9/11 hijackers, McVeigh did not (as I recall) use a warped view of his own religious beliefs as the basis for a terrorist act.

At the end of the day, though, watch the clip.  During the entire debate about the mosque, neither Behar nor Goldberg nor anyone else ever addresses O'Reilly's basic point about building a mosque at Ground Zero -- that it's not a smart idea.  Maybe that's because it's hard to dispute that point.

Saturday Night In Times Square

I'm late to the party on the Times Square bomber, but it's nice to see the left-wing dishrag refer to him as simply a "suburban father"...

He had obtained citizenship through marriage to a woman who was born in Colorado — the authorities say she and their two young children are still in Pakistan, where they believe he was trained in making bombs last year in Waziristan, a tribal area that is a haven for militants.


On Saturday, the authorities said, Mr. Shahzad drove a Nissan Pathfinder packed with explosives and detonators, leaving it in Times Square.


About 7 p.m., as a robot from the bomb squad was being summoned to the S.U.V., Mr. Shahzad called his landlord from the train to Connecticut and said he had lost his keys; in a criminal complaint filed on Tuesday, the authorities said the keys had been locked inside the Pathfinder.


The landlord met him at the apartment that night to let him in. “He looked nervous,” said the landlord, Stanislaw Chomiak, who had rented him a two-bedroom apartment in Bridgeport since Feb. 15. “But I thought, of course he’s nervous, he just lost his keys.”


In nearly a dozen years in this country, Mr. Shahzad had gone to school, held steady jobs, bought and sold real estate, and kept his immigration status in good order, giving no sign to those he interacted with that he had connections to terrorists in Pakistan. Nor was there any indication that he would try to wreak havoc in one of the world’s most crowded places, Times Square.


His neighbors in Connecticut said the things neighbors always say about someone who suddenly turns up in the headlines — he was quiet, he was polite, he went jogging late at night. Like so many others, he lost a house to foreclosure — a real estate broker who helped him buy the house, in Shelton, Conn., in 2004 remembered that Mr. Shahzad did not like President George W. Bush or the Iraq war.

Hell, based on the last point, he could have qualified for the Times editorial board. But give the Times credit -- at least they're not acting like MSNBC, where one of their anchors was actively disappointed that Shahzad turned out not to be a Tea Party member. What's really ironic is that she cites the case of the Hutaree militia in Michigan, just days before the members of said militia were released on bond by the judge. At times, I'm wondering if the mainstream media has finally given up the false premise that they're objective.

Meanwhile, it appears to be more and more clear that Shahzad was indeed trained by the Taliban. Kudos to our guys for capturing him, even if he almost escaped by suddenly evading surveillance and due to a snafu involving the watch list. These investugations aren't perfect, but this one was done rapidly and concluded with the capture of the bad guy without loss of life. That's pretty good. Then again, I might feel better about all this if Janet Napolitano seemed competent, which doesn't appear to be the case. Of course, in this Administration, she probably qualifies as a superstar because she actually pays her taxes.

Kudos, John Stewart

There's not much we could say about the South Park/Comedy Central censorship imbroglio.  A douchebag who lives in Fairfax, Virginia, blogging an explicit threat against Parker and Stone, gets Comedy Central to change its programming out of fear.  Meanwhile, the American media, which looks for violence everytime someone farts at a Tea Party protest, largely fails to cover the controversy for days.

But Jon Stewart, who actually works for Comedy Central, has the balls to cover the story -- and does it fairly.  Even though he may be a little softer on the Comedy Central execs for whom he works, I'm not going to blast them too harshly.  Parker and Stone can make a stand on their art and take risks, and the execs may even be willing to risk their own skins.  But when other employees and company property may be put at risk, it's not hard to understand why a corporate executive may not be willing to take a stand on principle.  But it says even more when a comedy show has more balls in "speaking truth to power" than alleged real journalists.

Stewart focuses his rage at the end on the appropriate actors -- the douchebags issuing the threat.  As he notes, fuck them.  Hot Air has the story on the "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day" coming up next month, which may blow the roof off the controversy.   In the meantime, here's Stewart, in all his brilliance.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
South Park Death Threats
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

Don't Even Think About It

Okay, now they've gone too far.  The crazed terrorist bastards are going after Parker and Stone.

Yes, I have to agree that this will get little concern compared to the horribly violent Tea Partiers, whose rhetoric has led to, oh, zero violence.  But let's put my sarcasm aside on that point.  There's a lot of crap we let these cavepissing, Osamabuttlicking, goat-molesting, cameldung eaters get away with over the past many years.  But if they attempt to do anything to the creators of South Park?  I'd support nuking everything in sight.

Yes, I'm exaggerating a tad.  But in solidarity with Parker and Stone, here's the latest thing they made that the crazed whackos found offensive.

Start Spreading The News

I'm trying to act surprised...

White House officials sought on Friday to stem mounting criticism of President Barack Obama's handling of terrorism cases, saying they would not rule out using a military court to try accused Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

Both Attorney General Eric Holder and White House spokesman Robert Gibbs did not rule out a military trial when asked about the Obama administration's options.

Trying Mohammed in military court would mark a further political retreat from Holder's announcement last year that the five Sept. 11 suspects now held at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, would be tried in federal court in New York.

The Obama administration is trying to head off a possible vote in the Senate that could stop any terror suspects currently held at Guantanamo from being brought to the United States to face a civilian trial. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., is offering such legislation, after losing a vote last year on the issue.

At stake is the public's perception of the administration's handling of national security, already shaken last year by strong congressional opposition to transferring any Guantanamo detainees to American soil. A Hill defeat over the trial issue could embolden the GOP minority to raise national security concerns in the midterm elections later this year.

The prospect of such a vote could test of how many moderate Democrats have abandoned Obama on the issue.

White House officials said Friday that Obama and his top advisers will play a direct role in ultimately deciding how to prosecute Mohammed. The administration initially decided to try the five terror defendants in New York but have since appeared to backtrack.

The backtrack is effectively an admission that Attorney General Holder and the Justice Department screwed this up royally. The President is seeing bipartisan pressure from Capitol Hill that threatens to cut off funding for the trials, and that's before we consider that NYC politicians like Mayor Bloomberg are vehemently opposed to this decision.

Does this have a parallel to health care? Only in so far as the message sucked, yet again, and the substance was lacking behind it. The message sucked because the rationale never made sense, but also because the rationale being employed seemed to be that New Yorkers should suck it up and be brave. That's hard point to try to assert to people based on what is alleged to be principle, particularly when some people doubt the principle and others doubt your sincereity. The other issue with the message was that the Adminsitration kept saying that KSM would be found guilty and likely executed -- that's perfectly fine, but it seems to be in conflict with the idea that he's going to get a fair trial when they seem pre-ordained to the outcome (in principle, it's okay to have confidence in your case, but selling this as a fair trial politically is a lot tougher if you insist he will be found guilty. If so, why not just do a military tribunal anyway? It's not like there's a danger of convicting an inncoent man, is there?

I don't think anyone in the Administration outlined why KSM needed to be tried in a civilian criminal court, let alone why it needed to happen in NYC. If the military tribunal system in place works (and Holder and Company haven't said that it won't work), then it's hard to understand why KSM, of all people, gets a civilian trial.

Unless, of course, the AG wanted to try the case in civilian court for political reasons, like potentially exposing the methods used to interrogate KSM, which could lead to criminal charges against interrogators and Bush Adminsitration officials. Unfortunately, that looks like the most logical explanation.

On This Basis, Maybe Al Gore Can Take Credit For Inventing The Internet

Joe Biden wants credit for success in Iraq to go to the Obama Admininstrration...

I am very optimistic about -- about Iraq. I mean, this could be one of the great achievements of this administration. You're going to see 90,000 American troops come marching home by the end of the summer. You're going to see a stable government in Iraq that is actually moving toward a representative government.

Good thing he and the President backed all of the measures that resulted in this success. You know, like the surge... I'm sure the videotape will show Obama was a big supporter.



Oops. And lest you think Biden was on board with the surge, you can watch this.



Well, perhaps Obama later acknowledged the surge worked. Right?



Well, I guess we can give them credit for acknowledging that Iraq is now a success. Coming soon, Biden will claim that Obama did a bang up job beating the British at Yorktown.

He Meant To Burn the Family Jewels?

Just when you thought the stupid stuff in the blogosphere was limited to healthcare reform...

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab really mean to blow up Northwest Airlines Flight 253 as it came in for a landing on Christmas Day over Detroit, or was the object of his terrorist plot simply to scare us? As bizarre a question as that seems to be, Atlantic blogger Andrew Sullivan indulgently quotes six paragraphs from one of his readers espousing that exact theory.

The reader’s argument seems to hinge upon the supposition that the goal of Islamic terrorists is terror for the sake of terror, and that if terrorists really wanted to bring down an airliner, Abdulmutallab would not have carried out his attack in the manner that he did.

In the linked article, Bob Owens does a decent job tearing this theory to shreds. But Vodkapundit does a pretty decent job summarizing it well...

A man does not set fire to his penis for a job he expects to botch. Period.

Now there's a sentence that's never been typed before.

Ooh, Goody

Well, I guess this means a lawyer somewhere is making money, so I should probably be happy...

A federal judge has tossed out most of the government's evidence against a tarrorism detainee on grounds his confessions were coerced, allegedly by U.S. forces, before he became a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay.

In a ruling this week, U.S. District Judge Thomas Hogan also said the government failed to establish that 23 statements the detainee made to interrogators at Guantanamo Bay were untainted by the earlier coerced statements made while he was held under harsh conditions in Afghanistan.

However, the judge said statements he made during two military administrative hearings at the U.S. detention center in Cuba, where he was assisted by a personal representative, were reliable and sufficient to justify holding the detainee.

Musa'ab Omar Al Madhwani allegedly engaged in a 2 1/2-hour firefight with Pakistani authorities before his capture in a Karachi apartment in 2002.

The detainee says that after five days in a Pakistani prison, he was handed over to U.S. forces and flown to a pitch-black prison he believes was in Afghanistan. He says he was suspended in his cell by his left hand and that guards blasted his cell with music 24 hours a day.

He said that he confessed to whatever allegations his interrogators made and that harassment and threats continued after he was moved to a different prison in Afghanistan.

Al Madhwani said that interrogators at Guantanamo Bay on multiple occasions threatened him when he tried to retract what he now claims was a false confession.

The judge said he was particularly concerned that interrogators at Guantanamo Bay relied on or had access to the coerced confessions from Afghanistan made by Al Madhwani.

The logical inference from the record, said the judge, is that interrogators at Guantanamo Bay reviewed Al Madhwani's coerced confessions with him and asked him to make identical confessions.

I'm not sure this is a big problem in the case at hand -- as Allahpundit notes, Obama's already acknowledged that we're playing the game with a stacked deck...

When he’s got a bunch of evidence on someone such that the confession is basically unnecessary, they go to federal court so that The One can boast about due process. When he doesn’t have much evidence besides the confession, they go to a military tribunal so that the confession can be admitted into evidence and he can boast about the eventual conviction. It’s a sham, and it’s crowned by the fact that he’s all but promised to keep dangerous detainees imprisoned even if they’re acquitted, but that’s the game he’s decided he wants to play. Frankly, we could use more of these test cases before the KSM trial gets going: If he and Holder miscalculate and end up sending some low-level jihadi to federal court on the assumption that they can get a conviction even if the confession’s thrown out, and then the defendant is freed, the uproar will be such that he’ll have to rethink his whole stupid KSM strategy.

I tend to doubt anything short of catastrophe will get them to re-think the KSM civilian trial -- they've invested too mcuh political capital in it, Holder's enjoying his chance to runa politicized Justice Department, and the Left has probably been told that this is the only way to get to a war crimes trial against the Bush Administration(one that will never occur). But the fact that we're running a system where the Attorney General has guaranteed that we will get the KSM conviction means that the trial is for show anyway -- an expensive one at that. Oh, well... it's not like it's shocking that the Obama Adminstration would spend millions and even billions on something useless.

The Terrorists Are Still Trying to Kill Us

So we take a few days off, and some idiot with low self esteem and an apparent inability to handle explosives sets fire to his crotch while trying to blow up an airliner landing in Detroit on Christmas Day. Of course, this means less convenience when flying for the rest of us, which I would happily exchange if I knew it would make us safer. Bottom line, I tend to agree with Bruce Schneier, who notes that the only real safety improvements since 9/11 are more alert passengers and reinforced cockpit doors (I can't recall if more armed marshals are flying, or if pilots are now permitted to be armed; if either is true, I'd add those to the list).

But the problem isn't the lack of convenience, or this terrorist in particular, or other guys trying the same technique. It's the fact that we came very close to having a massive tragedy in Detroit on Christmas Day, and we're not sure that we have a security protocol that will prevent the tragedy from occurring. What saved us this time was a brave passenger jumping in and the incompetence of the "alleged" terrorist, not some brilliant detective work.

Ann Althouse rips Janet Napolitano appropriately, and it's pretty clear that she's going to be clinging to her job in the New Year. That's entirely correct, because you cannot go on television and claim the system worked when it most emphatically did not; between the CIA's failure to circulate a report about the suspect in question and the fact that the guy's visa renewal was denied, we're looking at a systemic failure of a massive proportion. Hell, even Maureen Dowd has it right here (I can't believe I just wrote that)...

We seemed to still be behind the curve and reactive, patting down grannies and 5-year-olds, confiscating snow globes and lip glosses.

Instead of modernity, we have airports where security is so retro that taking away pillows and blankies and bathroom breaks counts as a great leap forward.

If we can’t catch a Nigerian with a powerful explosive powder in his oddly feminine-looking underpants and a syringe full of acid, a man whose own father had alerted the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria, a traveler whose ticket was paid for in cash and who didn’t check bags, whose visa renewal had been denied by the British, who had studied Arabic in Al Qaeda sanctuary Yemen, whose name was on a counterterrorism watch list, who can we catch?

We are headed toward the moment when screeners will watch watch-listers sashay through while we have to come to the airport in hospital gowns, flapping open in the back.

I don't know about that, although I recall that my initial idea after 9/11 was to have travelers arrive at the airport and strip down to fly naked. Video conferencing would become much more popular, and it would cut down on global warming emissions, don't you think? Megan McArdle is thinking the same way.

The politics of all this are theater to the underlying issue. Napolitano should probably be gone, and Obama's overly cool public statements are probably not what public wants. But the bigger problem may be the mindset of the administration -- it's PR effort/response time can be improved, but the underlying viewpoint informing it may not change...

The attempted bombing occurred at 11:30 a.m. Friday, Christmas. When finally Obama spoke after the weekend, he vowed to hunt down "all who were involved" and promised, as has become standard, to "use every element of our national power to disrupt, dismantle and defeat the violent extremists who threaten us."

Nothing less is required, and there can be no arguing with the stated mission.

Even so, Obama's description of Abdulmutallab as an "isolated extremist" was remarkable and disturbing. This radicalized young Nigerian is nothing of the sort. He operated, in fact, as an Al Qaeda-recruited, Al Qaeda-supplied, Al Qaeda-directed foot soldier - as, to put it directly, an enemy combatant, and not as the criminal "suspect" of Obama's description.

In similarly distant fashion, the President ordered up a "review" of how Abdulmutallab smuggled explosives onto the jet and a "review" of how he slipped through the government's various terror watch lists despite signals of clear and present danger.

Missing then was a statement about those obvious and unacceptable security cracks; the name, rank and serial number of the officials who would conduct the inquiries, and a deadline for completion and a report to the public. Tuesday, Obama filled in those rather basic blanks.

The systemic failure is a huge problem, and can only be solved by a leader who's engaged in the problem and considers it a priority, and also only by a leader who still has the trust and confidence of the public. Jim Geraghty is right on the final point...

In 2008, President Obama was elected with high hopes and very high expectations. He can say that no one, including himself, ever said any of his agenda would be easy, but he obviously didn't mind that so many voters saw him as a larger-than-life, miraculous "Obamessiah" character. This year has been a long series of disappointments as, by many indicators, America's circumstances have gotten worse. The unemployment rate has risen all year, the foreclosure wave has continued, the deficit has exploded, health care has proven much harder to deliver than expected, the cabinet was full of scandals, pork and earmarks continue with no hesitation, the stimulus web site is full of false data, cap-and-trade is dead, the Gitmo promise is broken . . . The right-track/wrong-track numbers are still pretty bad. Obama's job approval numbers are underwater, 50-50, or barely above. The public is losing faith in this guy on a lot of fronts.

A large chunk of the public grew weary of Obama's predecessor, George W. Bush, sometime in 2005; after Katrina and Harriet Miers, the public stopped listening to him and wrote him off as a failure. But the one thing they gave him credit for was preventing any further attacks on the homeland after 9/11. Perhaps if there is a successful attack, the public will not turn on Obama. But if two planes fall out of the sky, the public will lose faith in this president fast. And while I didn't vote for him, I don't want him to be seen as a useless joke with three years left in his term. I'm pounding the table over this because lives are at stake, and because I don't want to see a failed president running out the clock until January 20, 2013.

Take it seriously, Mr. President. Work the problem hard, at least as hard as you've worked on health care... and hopefully more effectively. Because it's probably the most important part of the job.

Bringing Us All Together

Well, at least the health care plan is more popular than this...

Last May, Gallup asked poll respondents, "Do you think the Unites States should -- or should not -- close [Guantanamo] and move some of the prisoners to U.S. prisons?" At the time, 65 percent of respondents opposed the plan to close Guantanamo, while 32 percent supported it.

Fast forward seven months. The Obama administration has decided to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in New York and has just announced it will bring other Guantanamo inmates to a souped-up prison in Illinois. So Gallup has taken another poll. And the results are…virtually the same as in May.

In the new survey, 64 percent say they oppose bringing Guantanamo inmates here, while 30 percent support it.

The president doesn't even have a majority of his own party on his side. In the new poll, 50 percent of Democrats support bringing Guantanamo prisoners to the U.S., while just 28 percent of independents and eight percent of Republicans do.

Opposition to Obama's policy is spread evenly across the country. Gallup found that 65 percent of people in the East, 60 percent of people in the Midwest, 67 percent of people in the South, and 64 percent of people in the West oppose bringing the prisoners to the United States.

The President is bringing everyone together and unifying the country on this point. Granted, it's against him, but maybe it's all part of a secret plot on his part, and he'll switch sides at the last minute in a shocking turn against his own party base.

After all, Obama is now taping messages for the WWE. And you know, Hope and Change would be a pretty good 1980's tag team name.

Simpsons Quote of the Day

I don't know why, but this just seems appropriate.

Krusty flashes back to his U.S.O. Tour during Gulf War I, when he entertained the troops... who seemed unusually sensitive...

Krusty: (on stage) "Saddam Hussein? They should call him 'So Damn Insane!'"

Soldier 1: (protesting) "Hey! You're just fanning the flames of hatred!"

Krusty: (ignoring him) "Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, just when you thought the desert couldn't get any hotter, it's the Cincinnati Bengal cheerleaders!" (cheerleaders cartwheel onto stage, as soldiers shrink back in the audience)

Soldier 2: (covering his eyes) "I can't look at that! I have a girlfriend back home!"

Soldier #3: (offended and shouting) "This is an insult to our Muslim hosts!"