Chaos and danger, or a brave new world?

Victor Davis Hanson writes,

...The greatest check on ISIS terrorism may lie in the hands of ISIS itself: If its operatives continue to cull the Western herd by a few dozen murders every few months, the U.S. will likely continue to do little. If they get greedy and seek a repeat of something on the scale of 9/11, then the American public will force this administration to act.

...We are now in a truly 1984 scenario in which the current Egyptian head of state, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, warns the West of radical Islam, while Obama objects that Westerners, the target of such Islamists, have exaggerated the threat: so much so that the White House recently, in an official video, edited out French President François Hollande’s reference to “Islamic terrorism” — though the passage was restored after the gap was widely remarked.

The bombing of Libya not only violated U.N. resolutions (no-fly zones and humanitarian aid only), but also destroyed the government of the monster-in-rehabilitation Moammar Qaddafi, leaving nothing in its place but a terrorist badland. The logical follow-up was the attack on the American consulate in Benghazi. Almost everything the administration then said about Libya was crude or simply a lie. Secretary Clinton was especially immoral in her chortles about “We came, we saw, he [Qaddafi] died,” “What difference does it make?” and, more recently, “No Americans died in Libya” — bookended by her face-to-face lies to the families of the men who died, whom she told that a videomaker, not al-Qaeda, had prompted the attacks. Note that Susan Rice (wrong about Egypt, wrong about Libya, wrong about Bergdahl) spoke misleadingly quite often on the Sunday talk shows, attempting to protect the Obama reelection narrative that al-Qaeda was “on the run” and incapable of such attacks.

Just as the failure to get in on the ground floor when Mubarak was deposed in Egypt had sparked Obama’s interest in preempting in Libya, so too it is probably Libya’s implosion that paralyzed Obama into doing nothing when violence overwhelmed Syria. The administration somehow then managed to achieve almost every negative result imaginable during the Syrian mess: Obama issued red lines about WMD use, did not enforce them, and then denied that he had ever issued them at all — eroding not just U.S. credibility but the very idea that a U.S. president should tell the truth. He failed to arm Syrian “moderates”; eventually they disappeared and Syria became a war between Bashar Assad and ISIS. In pre-reelection panic, Obama then invited Vladimir Putin into the Middle East and outsourced to him Assad’s WMD program. Refugees swamping Europe, a quarter-million dead in Syria, Putin’s bombing, and the end to the Christian community in Syria sum up the result.

Iraq’s fate was in some ways worse, because the present destruction of that country was likely preventable. Obama and Vice President Biden had until 2011 praised the quiet in Iraq — which they had inherited from the Bush administration — as their own, only to squander it by needlessly pulling out all U.S. peacekeepers for the price of another cheap reelection talking point. Now, when it is too late, we are quietly sending back in U.S. troops, who might as well have stayed where they were when it was not too late.

...The mullahs in Tehran noticed that the administration had embarrassed America’s friends, did not believe in expanded missile defense, and had kept quiet when a million dissidents hit the streets in protest against their dictatorship, and concluded that it was time to formalize a pathway to an eventual nuclear weapon. They guessed rightly that a legacy-hungry Obama would circumvent the Senate by saying the proposed treaty was not really a treaty, and blasting Republican skeptics while speaking far more respectfully of anti-American Iranian theocrats.

Central to Obama’s foreign policy was a redefinition of allies, enemies, and neutrals, as if such distinctions were fossilized Cold War relics. Obama reached out to regimes, like the ones in Iran and Cuba, that had long despised the United States. Yet even if they were to become friendly toward us, neither could offer America any strategic benefits — and both have lots of downsides given their rank oppression of their own people and their propensity to undermine their neighbors. After such outreach, both Fidel Castro and the Iranian theocrats gratuitously defamed the United States and Obama in particular. Allies like Britain, France, and Israel have been snubbed, as Obama and his aides leaked disdain for their leaders via interviews and open-mike slurs.

...Obama has become a cooler version of Jimmy Carter, without the latter’s 1980s second thoughts over the consequences of his appeasement. It is only April, and the bills from the last seven years are going to come due thick and fast in the next ten months. What most see as chaos and danger, Obama welcomes as a brave new world.

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