PrintApril 26, 2010
Obama Is Enabling Nuclear Breakout
Jimmy Carter didn't want to be known as the Ayatollah Appeaser, but that's how history has him chalked up. Bill Clinton played dumb about the 1994 World Trade Center bombing, actually blocking the flow of foreign intelligence between Justice and the CIA, and thereby enabled 9/11/01 -- the second al-Qaeda attack on Manhattan in seven years. The liberal media are still in shrill denial of those facts, but history will not forget their failures. Historians will ask over and over why yet another feckless Democrat was elected in 2008. How could Americans be so blind to the circling jackals of this world?
Now Obama seems intent on reversing the Cold War and letting nuclear proliferation explode. In Congress, the Democrats are committing mass suicide for him. FDR gave us the New Deal, and Obama is giving us the Raw Deal.
But FDR presided over the bloodiest war for America since the Civil War. He didn't want to be a war president, but when Pearl Harbor came, he did not deceive himself the way the Left has deceived itself since 9/11. Pearl Harbor was a plain act of war, and Americans in 1941 got that instantly. Four years later, Harry Truman didn't plan to begin the Cold War against Communist aggression with a defensive war in Korea. But that's how it turned out. "Events, my dear boy," said Harold McMillan. Events decide how presidents will look to history.
Obama is now set to be the biggest loser of the last sixty years -- the man who let nuclear weapons explode out of control by fundamentally misunderstanding the nature of the threat. The implications for the future are unpredictable, but just as World War II was more consequential than the New Deal, there is nothing an American president can do that is more important that his national security actions. When -- not if -- nuclear proliferation runs out of control, it won't look like the Cold War, when only two superpowers had usable missiles and weapons, and when, after Stalin died, both sides acted fairly rationally.
Instead, Obama's towering failure means a multi-polar race to get the baddest bombs, with the mullahs racing the Sunni Arabs and a very real chance that Hezb'allah or al-Qaeda will get enough material to build a dirty nuke. Only advanced missile defenses will save us, and if America doesn't speed up our defense development, then the saner nations in the world will do it. They are not going to wait for us.
When unstable tyrannies like Iran, North Korea, Libya, and even Venezuela have nukes, Obama's self-glorifying ego trips will fade by comparison. The only question Americans will ask will be: How well did he protect his country? We forget that for the last ninety years, America's military power has been kept at the razor's edge -- not because we somehow decided to conquer the world, but because we had to resist the imperialistic aggression of the Kaiser, Hitler, Stalin, Mao (by proxy in Korea and Vietnam), and the Soviet Empire. Liberals pretend that war is all the past, but history hasn't ended.
Today we see murderous tyrannies rising again, and Obama is too busy navel-gazing to see them for himself. Hugging Mugabe is more his style. So nobody is driving this train, and an abyss yawns just ahead of us.
Jimmy Carter actively enabled the Islamofascist overthrow of the Shah of Persia, one of the great traditional imperial powers of the Middle East. Turkey, another great power for five centuries under the Ottomans, has now slipped back from a century of increased political tolerance toward radical Islam, and is now siding with Iran against Israel. Iraq, another imperial center that goes back six thousand years to Sumer, is torn between Sunnis and Shiites, which means Iran against the Arabs. The Saudis helped finance Pakistan's nukes and missiles, and they can import them as soon as they give the signal. Arabia is the heartland of Islam, and Iran has had its eyes on Mecca and Medina since Khomeini. The end of war? Only in Liberal Land.
Radical Muslims are ideologically resistant to the Enlightenment values of tolerance, science, free speech, elected governments, and free trade. They are not like India and Japan, which have adopted modernism at a very deep level in the last half century. But since Khomeini took over Iran, all the modernizing forces in Muslim lands have been forced backwards. Islamic radicalism was much less of a problem before that huge defeat for civilization. Jimmy Carter was therefore criminally naïve (and still is today), Clinton didn't even try to face the facts of international life, and Obama is the worst of all. He is mentally stuck in third-world Leftism, and he has shown no capacity to learn. So much for "progressive" politics driving us back to the past.
A small but ominous event happened two weeks ago at the "nuclear summit" of 45 nations, most of which have no nuclear capacity at all. At the summit, Obama publicly snubbed the president of Georgia. The American media were too dumb and ignorant to get it, but Putin and Eastern Europe took notice, all right. Georgia was, after all, the first country to be invaded by Russian tanks since Afghanistan, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany.
Two years ago, Putin stole the province of Abkhazia from Georgia, and today they are committing ethnic cleansing there. For Obama to snub Georgia's president at a big international powwow sends the clearest possible signal to Czar Putin: Go ahead -- we won't stop you. That's why the Russian Bear is snarling again in the Ukraine, Poland, Syria, (where it is building deep water ports), Iran (where it just declared its intention to complete the Bushehr nuke reactor), and anywhere else it sees easy prey. Predators act like predators. It's not a surprise to saner folks.
The astonishing thing about Obama is that he actually signals American weakness deliberately; he is the anti-Reagan to the ultimate. Only the American people are kept in the dark.
A week after Obama's snub of Georgia, a Russian-maintained, Russian-manufactured airplane carrying Poland's president Lech Kaszinksy, its army chief, its central banker, and 94 other leaders died in a suspicious crash at Smolensk. We don't know if Putin sabotaged the plane -- easy enough to do -- but we know that he regularly assassinates his opponents, domestic and foreign. Putin poisoned the president of the Ukraine with dioxin and killed a former KGB spy in London with radioactive Polonium. Is there a link between the death of Poland's political leadership and Obama's signals of weakness? Well, the timing was perfect. It also happened to be the anniversary of Stalin's massacre of Polish officers in Katyn forest. Coincidence? Nobody who knows that history will believe that.
Obama has now publicly humiliated the Prime Minister of Israel, the PM of Britain, the Queen of England, the Czechs, the Poles, and the Japanese. He has bowed ostentatiously to the Saudi king, the former god-emperor of Japan, and the president of China. Those are not slips of diplomatic etiquette. They aren't even eccentricities for this ultimately weird president. They are deliberate signals to the world, and our enemies know exactly what they mean.
The United States has plainly failed to stop North Korean and Iranian nukes. Saudi Arabia just announced plans to build a nuclear plant. North Korea just blew up a South Korean warship. All the little mad tyrannies around the world see nuclear weapons as their key to survival and power forever.
Nuclear breakout can't be far away.
