Here we are in August of 2013, and guess what. Those vaunted intellectually superior policies enacted by Barack Obama, in the context of this particular argument, smart diplomacy, have led to the exact conclusions that every right of center pundit told us all they would lead. That smart diplomacy thing, otherwise known as projection of American weakness, or the Kumbayah School of American Foreign Policy has the mullahs of the Middle East every bit as on board with our peaceful intentions as it did in 1978. The only difference this time, is that rather than two or three glaring failures, Barack Obama has dozens to his credit.
What amazes us on the political right, is that despite the clearly superior intellect shown by those on the left in terms of academic credentials, every one of their smart theories turns out to be disastrously wrong when put into practice in the world of reality. Still, those very same arguments are trotted out and touted as something new, and put into practice once every generation. So now that history has once again been ignored, where are we today, in our latest experimentation of convincing those peace loving Jihadists to unclench their fists and sing Kumbayah-My-Lord-Kumbayah around the world’s community campfire?
It’s familiar ground, our President is a laughing stock in the Middle East, and like any wild animal, fear and weakness are exploited. So, as regime after regime are further radicalized, power consolidated, and we are forced to close our embassies on a massive scale for the first time in our nation’s history, what is our response, as per the new dictates of smart diplomacy, as projected in that nuanced and subsequently meaningless Obama Doctrine? Just for kicks, we’ll use the crisis dujour, Syria as our example.
Lesson number one, borders in the Middle East, especially among the Arabic nations mean much less to those living there, than they do to us. What does have greater meaning, and something that for reasons I can not fathom, turns out to be ignored almost completely by our current State Department, is the sect of Islam each political player represents. As important as seeing a world dominated by Islam, is seeing a world dominated by the specific sect of Islam each individual player happens to belong to. What is important also to realize is this, each of those sects is just as unreasonable and insane as all of the others. So, in terms of Syria, should it matter to us at all if the Salafists, Shiites, Sunnis, Sufists, Wahhabis, or the Ibadis end up controlling Syria? No matter who wins this civil war, the end result will, from our perspective, and the perspective of Israel, look just like what ever regime has been replaced. They’ll be a state sponsor of terror, and they’ll be a thorn in our side.
Lesson number two, we are once again avoiding the real problem in the region. Say what you want about Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, but they garnered real success in dealing with these nuts. In winning the Cold War, Ronald Reagan succeeded in cutting the money head off of the Hydra. When the Soviet Union fell, these vermin lost their funding, and consequently, we did not hear from them for a long time. The individual acts of terror, while still frequent, were still no where near as grandiose as they had been when the money spigots were turned on full blast. George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton were both recipients of the good fortune Reagan’s policies brought.
George W. Bush after his identification of the Axis of Evil being Iran, Iraq, and North Korea decided to go after the money once again, and he managed to cut the funding spigot, the United Nation’s Oil for Food Program, The result of course was that it took until September of 2012 for those unending acts of terror to begin matching the scale of grandiosity of what happened at the beginning of his Presidency a full eleven years earlier. Iraq, no matter what the naysayers say about it now, turned out to be the right war to wage. Whether Iran or North Korea would have been better targets for our aggression, should be the question asked.
Syria, for all of the bluster coming from the Mullahs that run that nation, is nothing more than an annoyance to anyone. Syria, has since 1978, acted only as her overlord, Iran, has directed. Learning from the Soviets, the Mullahs in Iran have become adept at using proxies to inflict her will upon others in the Middle East. If we push the Shiites out that answer to Tehran in favor of the Shiites who answer to the Muslim Brotherhood, what would be our net gain? What about any of this is worth the price to be paid by sending American Troops to intervene once again, in a regime change from one group of crazies in favor of another group of crazies?
In the grand scheme of things, what exactly has been accomplished by the grand reset button tours, that shameful speech in Cairo in which Barack The Confessor apologized for all of America’s sins, the, “Arab Spring,” our support of Al Queda’s take over of Libya, or the heavily nuanced multi thousand page Obama Doctrine on foreign policy? If we intervene in Syria, we stand to gain nothing. We will not be aided by a more American friendly regime. The resultant entity, what ever it happens to be, will be just as virulently evil as what they will be replacing. America will still be the Great Satan, and Israel will still be the Little Satan. Mean while, our true problem in the region, Iran, will continue to exist, just as it has since Jimmy Carter’s exercise of this very same foreign policy inflicted her upon the world in 1978.
That is the result that we all predicted would be the inevitable conclusion of Barack Obama’s foreign policy. The maddening point to all of this is that we are not psychics. We merely learned from history.
