President Obamas Postmodern Middle East Policy Victor Davis Hanson Provides the Ah-Ha! Factor at West Coast Retreat
Posted By Donald Douglas On April 8, 2011 Victor Davis Hanson gave the breakfast keynote address at the West Coast Retreat on Saturday, April 2nd. And out of a long day of many outstanding presentations, this one was truly special. I think Hansons talk provided the weekends biggest Ah-Ha! Factor. Thats the moment when all the pieces of the intellectual puzzle snap together and you say to yourself, Ah-Ha! Its a gleeful flash of recognition. The loose ends have been wrapped up and you really see things in a new light. Hanson described President Obama <http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=1511> s approach to policy (both foreign and domestic) as a postmodern problématique. Over the last couple of years, Obama has made promises of public policy completely abstracted from reality: on energy (cap-and-trade, eventually abandoned), on health care (ObamaCare, riddled with waivers), and on foreign policy (from Guantanamo to Libya, one brush with reality after another). Simply put, every single claim President Obama has ever made has been completely divorced from reality. On Libya, for example, Hanson cracked wise when he compared President Obamas demands that Muammar Gaddafi <http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2092> step down You gotta go to the thought of Winston Churchill demanding of Hitler Adolf, you gotta go. Seriously. Historys tyrants arent going anywhere unless removed by raw power. But American policy toward Libyas been soft-and-squishy, dithering and excruciatingly multilateral. And in the end, the goals of the mission remain unclear to this day. Are we going to remove Gaddafi from power? Well, Obama pledged no to regime change. Are we sending in ground troops? No, but the CIAs been activated for potential covert operations. The possibility of a quagmire was made all the more likely by the ease of military action in Libya: Its right there in the Southern Mediterranean. Britain and France can deploy without needing permission from allies for territorial flyovers and Anglo-French expeditionary forces wont be trudging through barren terrain halfway around the worldlike American troops have been doing for nearly ten years in Afghanistan and Iraq. Unfortunately, Gaddafis not going quietly, and victory in Libya is now in question. Hanson laid out a number of scenarios to finish the war: 1. The U.S. could mount a massive land invasion similar to the Iraq deployment, with the goal of deposing the Libya dictatorship and establishing a constitutional regime; 2. The U.S. could pull out of Libya altogether, like we did in Lebanon or Mogadishu, basically washing our hands of a costly mission seen as a rash mistake in hindsight; or 3. The U.S. could implement an extended bombing campaign targeting the center of Gaddafis power, much like during the Kosovo war in the late-1990s that sent Slobodan Milosevic to the Hague. Hanson didnt pick any one scenario over another, although he did suggest that a Somalian-style withdrawal from Libya was a strong possibility. Most of Hansons remarks at the Palos Verdes retreat were later published at National Review, in a piece focusing on Obamas regional postmodernism from Cairo to Kandahar. See, A Middle East Policy in Shambles <http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/263997/middle-east-policy-shambles-v ictor-davis-hanson> : The Obama administration, in finger-in-the-wind fashion, urged pro-American authoritarians in Egypt and Tunisia to leave but only belatedly and only when it appeared that the protesters would probably win. In the aftermath, the Obama administration still has little notion who the successors will be, or what their agenda is, or whether they will be better than what they replaced. Most likely, the United States now suffers the worst of both worlds: looking weak and opportunistic in withdrawing support from former American allies, while not receiving much credit from the protesters because of the absence of early principled support. If the Muslim Brotherhood assumes de facto power in Egypt, opens another front against Israel, and serves as the Sunni bookend to Shiite theocratic Iran, then we may witness the worst geopolitical calamity since the fall of pro-American Iran, or indeed the Communist takeover of China. In fact, the entire American response to unrest in the Muslim world is ad hoc, reactionary, and often contradictory apparently favoring government repression of rebels in the Gulf while intervening to stop such crackdowns in Libya but not elsewhere; pressuring pro-American tyrants in Tunisia and Egypt, while carefully not antagonizing anti-American tyrants in Iran and Syria; declaring support for human rights and transparency in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya, while ignoring these values altogether in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen. In eerie fashion, the less the Obama administration seems to know about the complexities of the serial unrest, the more it jumps in with blunderbuss sermonizing. We treat restraint from our allies with contempt, and excess from our enemies with an odd sort of deference. One sees the Carter world of 1979 and awaits only the oil crisis and then shrugs that $5-a-gallon gas may be on the way to finish the parallel. Theres more of the Ah-Ha! Factor where that came from, so read the whole thing at the link <http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/263997/middle-east-policy-shambles-v ictor-davis-hanson> . _____ Article printed from NewsReal Blog: http://www.newsrealblog.com URL to article: http://www.newsrealblog.com/2011/04/08/president-obamas-postmodern-middle-ea st-policy-%e2%80%94-victor-davis-hanson-provides-the-ah-ha-factor-at-west-co ast-retreat/ [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------------------ -------------------------- Want to discuss this topic? Head on over to our discussion list, [email protected]. -------------------------- Brooks Isoldi, editor [email protected] http://www.intellnet.org Post message: [email protected] Subscribe: [email protected] Unsubscribe: [email protected] *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material whose use has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. 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