Wednesday, March 19, 2014

Romney and Israel Give Obama Scathing Performance Reviews

There are times when President Barack Obama receives an unexpected job performance review. Yesterday he got two. Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican presidential nominee defeated by Obama, kept his dignity and grace when, some time after he said during the 2012 campaign that Russia is America's "greatest geopolitical foe. They stand up for the world's worst actors," Obama seized the occasion to belittle Romney in the final debate of the presidential campaign. Obama tried to portray challenger Mitt Romney as a novice who lacks understanding of complex world issues, saying : "Governor Romney, I'm glad that you recognize that al-Qaida is a threat, because a few months ago when you were asked what's the biggest geopolitical threat facing America, you said Russia, not al-Qaida. You said Russia...the 1980s, they're now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because, you know, the Cold War's been over for 20 years," Obama said. We now know that Mitt Romney was right and Barack Obama is the neophyte who doesn't understand the geopolitics of the world he is supposed to be leadung. Yesterday, Romney, still as polite as ever, told the Wall Street Journal that President Obama "has procrastinated in making foreign policy decisions, frittering away the chance to influence events until it was too late." The consequence, Romney said, is a litany of leadership failures on the global stage. There are no "good choices" because of the President's "terrible timing." Romney pointed out that it is the case regarding Iran's quest for nuclear weapons, Bashar al-Assad's persistence in Syria's relentless civil war, and the refusal of Iraq and Afghanistan to sign status-of-forces agreements with the United States. "Why, across the world, are America's hands so tied?" the former Massachusetts governor wrote. "A large part of the answer is our leader's terrible timing." Romney said the time to have acted on Ukraine was when the protests and violence first began to percolate and it was obvious Russia would try to exploit the instability : "That was the time to talk with our global allies about punishments and sanctions," Romney wrote. The time to have acted on Syria - seeing to it that the rebels were armed - was during the early stages of the rebellion when promoting moderate leaders and reassuring al-Assad's Alawite base would have been possible. Romney said that the United States should have pressured Hosni Mubarak to reform Egypt's political system before violence destabilized the country. It should have signed deals about force levels with Iraq and Afghanistan before announcing timelines for troop withdrawals. Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton failed to "anticipate events, prepare for them, and act in time to shape them," Romney wrote. They failed "to act when action was possible and needed." As a result, Romney said, the world has diminished respect for the United States, and the troubles Washington faces have only been exacerbated. Romney wrote that "a chastened President" and current Secretary of State John Kerry "can yet succeed . . . Timing is of the essence." We can only say 'Amen' to Mitt Romney's analysis and ask why Americans were so lacking in judgment as to re-elect Barack Obama. But, more frontal criticism of Obama's foreign policy failures also came from another quarter yesterday. Israel's Defense Minister, Moshe Yaalon, gave an address at Tel Aviv University on Monday, which was reported by the daily paper, Haaretz, quoting Yaalon as saying that Israel cannot depend on the United States to lead any action against Iran's nuclear program and can only rely on itself. The comments by Moshe Yaalon came as world powers and Iran were about to start a new round of talks in Vienna over Iran's contested nuclear program. The background to Yaalon's remarks is well-known. The West fears the Iranian nuclear program could be used to make a nuclear weapon and seeks to scale it back. Teheran denies the program has a military dimension and insists it is for peaceful purposes only, such as power generation. If a deal with world powers is reached, sanctions imposed on Iran over the nuclear program could be lifted. Israel has criticized the ongoing talks with Teheran, saying an interim nuclear deal, struck last November, has left Iran's military nuclear capabilities largely intact while giving it relief from some economic sanctions. At the same time, Israel's strongest piece of leverage, the threat of a military strike on Iran, has taken a back stage to the talks, despite Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's insistence it remains on the table. Yaalon's remarks seemed to underscore that insistence. "We thought that the one who needs to lead the campaign against Iran is the US," Yaalon said, according to Haaretz. Yaalon reportedly said that the US began negotiations with Iran and Iran gained the upper hand in the talks : "If we wished others would do the work for us, it wouldn't be done soon, and therefore in this matter, we have to behave as if we can only rely on ourselves." Yaalon's office confirmed his remarks but refused to comment whether he was advocating an Israeli strike on Iran. Netanyahu's office also declined to comment. Yaalon criticized the West, saying its leaders prefer to avoid confrontation with Iran. As for the US, the defense minister alleged American influence is waning in other parts of the world, such as Ukraine over the crisis there : "Weakness certainly does not pay in the world,...No one can replace the US as the world's policeman. I hope the US will come to its senses." ~~~~~ Dear readers, there is little to add to these separate but accurate Obama performance reviews. Obama's complete lack of mastery of the larger world and its political, military and cultural dynamics has left us wondering how much more harm he can do before November 2016 and how long it will take to re-establish a balance in the world based on commonly-held beliefs in democratic values backed up by US military power. It may be that Barack Obama had a vision of a world roundtable where all are equal. But he sorely misjudged the nature of the players vying for places at that table. Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria and Ukraine are paying the price for Obama's naive misconceptions. America must find a better equipped President - one who can deal with the world's reality. That is not Hillary Clinton. If America fails in 2016, the whole world will be at the longer-term mercy of bullying, vicious dictators.

9 comments:

  1. It's a crying shame we've come to this point whereas impeachment would have solved the problem months ago.

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  2. Impeachment is a political remedy, not a legal one. Still, you would have to be an unusually obtuse observer not to notice that the grounds for removing Obama from office are stronger than the grounds that were deemed sufficient to impeach Richard Nixon. The president’s most fundamental constitutional duty is to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed,” but Obama has not even pretended to execute the laws faithfully. Rather, he enforces the ones of which he approves, and declines to execute the law whenever it is politically convenient for him to do so. Further, Obama’s cover-ups of various scandals–Fast and Furious, Benghazi and the IRS are probably the best known, but by no means the only ones–are at least as brazen as Nixon’s cover-up of Watergate, and much more successful.

    Nixon had his faults, but one thing we can say in his favor: he was nowhere near as dishonest as Barack Obama and Nixon choose to resign.

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    1. . Impeachment most certainly IS a legal remedy. It is the constitutionally-provided means for the people's representatives - the Congress - to remove an out-of-control or corrupt chief executive.

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  3. Principal's CountsMarch 19, 2014 at 4:27 PM

    Liberals are so politically inert. The Democratic Party, to the extent that it’s liberalism, wins nationally because the GOP is as big or bigger group of leaderless basket cases. The hard left, which knows that Democrats are about as neoliberal as the GOP, lives in a nonsense world in which puppet-wielding protesters shape policy. I know some very well meaning, otherwise intelligent leftists who are nonetheless the most politically infantile people you will ever meet.

    Few people have come thru the presidential election process being ready to assume the duties of the office. Obama is certainly not one of them. Jimmy Carter may be the closest person to Obama's ineptitude. And they are both extreme left wing Progressive democrats.

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  4. Concerened CitizenMarch 19, 2014 at 4:45 PM

    As we have proven that color is no bar to the holding of highest office we must now prove it is no bar to removal for just cause, else we shall have created a group of people who can flout the law with impunity, and no good person of any color wants that.

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  5. De Oppressor LiberMarch 20, 2014 at 8:34 AM

    It’s amazing to me how many commentators can be so completely oblivious to the fact that Russia’s maneuvers in Crimea, however illegal, are entirely the result of Western maneuvers in and around Ukraine. Whatever we think of Russia, they don’t operate in a vacuum.

    In the absence of any natural barriers (mountain ranges, great bodies of water, etc.) to invasion other than a few bogs and wide open space, Russia has a natural desire to prevent potentially hostile powers from getting too close. Isn’t that what the exterior ring of countries around Russia has always been about … a land mass fence protecting or giving time for Russian forces to protect Mother Russia.

    Bad enough to have put Poland in NATO–Ukraine would be a bridge way too far. The Russians would no more accept that than we did Russian missiles in Cuba. If our leaders had an elementary notion of geopolitics; they wouldn’t have let Nuland-Kagan and McCain within 500 miles of Kiev.

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    1. The Kagans, Nulands and McCains of this world ARE the representatives of the currently so called American Foreign Policy consensus. They are the “leaders”. They beat their chests and then fail to use their real power of persuasion. These people are ignorant, and they are not professionals in Foreign Policy in the general sense of the word. They are ideologues and that imposes immediately a number of impediments for developing the sensible and effective solutions.

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  6. Ever wondered why Washington is so bad in foreign policy? Why folks like, say, the Russians, walk all over us and laugh about it? Why scandals after scandals, ranging from intelligence failures to drunken, lecherous ambassadors bedevil us?

    Political hacks and campaign money bundlers are rewarded with ambassadorships in a diplomatic spoils system that hearkens back to the Robber Baron age. Our foreign policy is in the hands of the clueless, the self-serving and the politically corrupt.

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  7. Democrats in general promote decay, lack of morals, lack of standards, and lack of accountability. They accept no accountability for the mess that they have us in. Foreign Policy is as foreign to Obama and his inner circle and cricket is to sports.

    Obama's foreign policy position when he took office consisted solely of, "I am not George W. Bush." It hasn't worked the magic that he believed it would which is not a surprise for those of us who don't believe in magic.

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