"The time to guard against corruption and tyranny
is before they have gotten ahold of us.
It is better to keep the wolf out of the fold,
than to trust drawing his teeth and talons after he shall have entered."
Thomas Jefferson
As one crisis after another has spread across the globe, particularly in the Middle East, many people are scratching their heads and wondering exactly what drives President Obama’s decisions in foreign policy. Its obvious he has lost interest in it now that it has become much more than an apology tour. It is Secretary Clinton, who was a ghost for the first year and half of the Obama reign, who is now the face of American foreign policy in the absence of the president. She jets around the world, she hold news conferences, she makes statements, while he enjoys spring break in Rio, goes golfing and hosts Motown parties in the White House.
However detached he may appear, Barack Hussein Obama is still the president and he is still the one that drives American policy. It would appear that our decisions are made "on the fly" and place a glaring spotlight on his complete lack of experience. While that may be partly true, and while it may often be more reasonable to ascribe bad decisions to stupidity rather than malice, in the case of this White House and this president, I don’t think that we can cut them even that much slack.
It is my belief that this president has two primary motives for every one of his actions and if we understand these motives, what he does makes a lot more sense. Most past presidents were not hard to figure out. George W. Bush was motivated by his born again Christian faith and his belief that America should not only lead the world but should spread "democracy" by whatever means necessary. This explains why he would go to war so quickly and why he would preside over such a large expansion of domestic government programs. "Compassionate conservatism" embodied both concepts. Clinton just liked being president and he wanted everyone to like him as president. That is why his policies were pragmatic or poll driven. He wanted to do what was popular. Was he an ideological leftist, sure, but that took a back seat to popularity. He had no qualms about dropping "Hillarycare" or eventually signing welfare reform. He had no interest in getting us into long, drawn out, unpopular wars which is why he conducted war from thirty thousand feet and cut and run when it looked tough. Clinton enjoyed the perks of the presidency, sometimes a bit too much, but the "popularity president" explains much of what he does.
President Obama also has motives for being president. There is no question that, like Clinton, he loves the perks. But unlike Clinton, we get the feeling that Obama uses the perks like a stick in our eye, as if he thinks we have denied him what was owed and now he is flaunting his new found status as our overlord. The constant vacations, the air force one flyby of the Statue of Liberty, his arrogance in press conferences all seem to stem from this idea. But that is a side-show to the main event.
There are two things that motivate Barack Obama and while we may dismiss the talk show jock who proclaims "we have elected the enemy," there is no question that Barack Obama has embarked on a course of action that is severely detrimental to the health, and yes, honor, of our nation. The question is why? Two reasons. First, he divides the world into two camps-the haves and have nots, the oppressed and oppressor, the good and the evil. While traditionally we have viewed ourselves as the guys in the white hats, to Barack Obama, we definitely wear black.
This explains many of his actions toward our traditional allies like Great Britain. If there was ever an oppressor, great Britain and its colonial heritage fit the bill for Obama. In fact, with England, it is personal. It was the policies of Winston Churchhill that led to the imprisonment of his Marxist father in Africa. He has a deep seated hatred of previously colonial nations and his actions toward our traditional allies demonstrate this bias.
His division of the world is also based on his Marxist ideology. He believes in the redistribution of wealth not just from Joe the Plumber to the welfare queen but from the "haves" to the "have nots" of the world. That is why we will shut down American drilling in the Gulf of Mexico but grant drilling privileges to Brazil, which happens to be led by a fellow Marxist, a twofer for Obama. We will never move toward energy independence under Obama because by sending our dollars abroad we are facilitating a huge wealth transfer.
The second motivation is one which will, no doubt, put me in the camp with the tin foil hatters and conspiracy theorists. But if we accept the fact that we could elect an anti-American communist it should not be a stretch to say that we could have elected a Muslim radical as well. Yes, I said it, president Obama is a Muslim. Just as his Marxism was hidden in plain sight during his campaign and has become obvious in his policies, so his Islam was, and is, obvious if you look. In two interviews before the election he had a "Freudian slip" in which he referred to "My Muslim Faith," the one with George Stephanopolis being the most memorable. His early years were spent in Indonesia, the largest Muslim country in the world and one in which radical Islam has more than a toehold. He went to a Madrassa where he was taught Islam, a fundamentally anti-Semitic, anti-western ideology, a perfect complement to his anti-colonial Marxism.
This motivation will explain his actions in the Middle East. If the stated policy is to encourage "democracy", his actions are inconsistent at best. Why ignore the Iranian protesters, who may be the only pro-American group in the region, and throw support behind the Egyptian protesters? Two reasons. First, Iran is already anti-western and virulently anti-Israel, no need to support regime change there. Egypt under Mubarak, however, was nominally an ally of the United States and had maintained peace with Israel for over thirty years. That was a regime that could go, no problem. In fact, his policy in the Middle East is best explained by his support for radical Islam represented by the Muslim Brotherhood and other fundamentalist groups. That is why he has no problem pulling the plug on "secular" Arab leaders like Mubarak or Assad of Syria. So the "Obama Doctrine" is to basically ignore nations undergoing transformations from one anti-Semitic, anti-Western regime to another and support the transformation from secular, nominally pro-western, pro-Israel regimes to jihadist ones. The reason Obama has been so inconsistent on Libya is because while it falls into the former category, Khaddafy is a friend of his pastor, Jeremiah Wright, and a major supply of oil for the European nations that pressure us through the United Nations. He would rather stay out of it but was compelled to intervene by outside forces and is trying to make the best of it.
This "doctrine" is very bad for two reasons. One, although I don’t think we need to be supporting brutal dictators, particularly with taxpayer money, I don’t think we should be encouraging their ouster if they are likely to be replaced by radical Muslims who are going to be open in their support for anti-western terrorism. An Assad or Mubarak or even a Khaddafy may not like the West or America and may quietly support terrorism but their over-riding priority is maintaining their own power and they know, as Khaddafi found out in the Reagan years, they can go too far and put their very lives in danger. If, however, a group like the Muslim Brotherhood or the Revolutionary Party in Iran take power, their rhetoric will escalate in their religious fervor and they may not care about what they do. Martyrdom, after all, is their highest goal. On a national level, that is a thousand times worse than an Al Qaeda, as we have seen with Iran. Nations run by people who strap bombs to the chests of children have no concept of Mutually Assured Destruction. There is no negotiation with such regimes, none of the traditional means of applying pressure will provide deterrence. Killing the infidels, even if it means their own destruction, is an acceptable exchange for them.
While the ascendency of radical Islam to positions of power in several nations in the Middle East will certainly be a concern for our security and well being, the real threat is to the nation of Israel, whose very existence is put at risk. There has not been a major war between Israel and her neighbors since 1973. Between the peace with Egypt and a practical truce with her other neighbors, the situation has been one of relative peace, Palestinian suicide bombers excepted. If, however, the secular leaders of Egypt, Syria and even Jordan are replaced by radicals who join with Hamas in Gaza in the belief that waging jihad against Israel is the highest religious duty, Israel’s position becomes much less secure. Add to that our apparently official policy of backing off our support for Israel in favor of the very radicals that desire her destruction and Israel’s very existence is threatened. If Israel can no longer count on us and her enemies know that, they will be emboldened like never before.
I don’t think most people understand the ramifications of what the President is doing. His Marxism is leading to the weakening of America. He is accelerating the transfer of our wealth to other nations through his energy policy, impoverishing the citizens whose best interests he is supposed to represent. But he thinks we, as Americans, deserve to lose what be believes are our "ill gotten gains." Domestically, he is doing this three ways. First, through the energy policy mentioned above. Second, by placing us under loads and loads of debt by expanding government and rewarding his friends through the internal transfer of wealth. Finally, by destroying the dollar he is exasperating out trade deficit and undermining the very foundation of our economy. In foreign policy his anti-colonial, anti-Semitic ideology supported by his "Muslim faith" is making changes in the world that will have ramifications long after he is gone. He is supporting the ascent of radical, jihadist Islam across the Middle East and North Africa. Not just as a small cadre of terrorist groups within those nation states but as rulers of nation states themselves! Do we know what the world will look like when Taliban like governments rule nations from Iran to Morocco? If jihad is a threat when supported primarily by two nations, Saudi Arabia and Iran, imagine the mortal threat it will be when actively supported by the entire region. Outside the Middle East he is supporting the ascension of China, a repressive, communist regime. He is destroying our relations with our traditional allies, allies like Great Britain and Israel who share our fundamental values. Finally, he is subverting our very sovereignty as a nation to international organizations like the United Nations.
What makes such destructive policy catastrophic is the fact that the things he is doing cannot, in most cases, be reversed. Sure, we could repeal Obamacare and save some money in the future but the treasuries have been sold, the money is gone, the debt accumulated. If the dollar is destroyed, it is gone and even if it isn’t destroyed, it will take years to recover any of its value. Once domestic energy production is eliminated through regulation and tax policy, it will take years to get that back even if those regulations and policies are eliminated. We have seen this in the Gulf of Mexico. Once the moratorium of drilling was enacted, the drilling rigs moved elsewhere, companies are not going to wait around and lose money in the hopes that two or six years from now a more amenable administration will take power. Once the Muslim Brotherhood or some other group of Muslim radicals-Al Qaeda in Libya perhaps-is in control of some country, that’s it. We have condemned an entire nation to an oppression likely to be much worse that what was there before. We will have placed the nation of Israel, the only nation in the region where a liberal democracy protects the rights of its people, where beheadings and stonings don’t happen, where Jew and Arab live together, in a position where they and their enemies know they no longer have our support, a situation as grave as they faced in 1948. If we allow Israel to be destroyed, there is no going back. The flow of wealth and technology we have transferred to China cannot be reversed.
This is a direct result of the fact that we have placed entirely too much power in the hands of one man. Historians call this the development of the "imperial presidency" and it has been going on for over a century. Over time, the executive branch through its growing bureaucracy, the rise of the power of the Federal Reserve, an assumption of police powers through one crisis after another, has become, for all intents and purposes, an elected dictatorship. We may hope that the person we choose to lead our nation and, in may respects, the world, respects our history, institutions and traditions of freedom and limited government. Today we have a man in that office who sees our history as one set of oppressions after another, holds our traditions in contempt and believes in using the levers of power to destroy cherished institutions. For over two hundred years this great nation has been the example of what free men can accomplish. For the last hundred we have been in a position to lead the world, economically and militarily. We have not been perfect and sometimes made mistakes but the world was a better place because America led. We are starting to get a taste of what the world would look like when America no longer leads, its not pretty. Presently we choose not to but in the future we may not be able to.
The question is this. Will historians look back on the Obama presidency as a great transformative event, one that saw the decline of America and the genesis of a new Dark Age? It has become obvious that it is no longer simply our nation that is at risk. This generation of "we the people" have a burden at this time, in this moment, that will have ramifications for the world; not just for years but decades, perhaps centuries. We can no longer use the slow, timid approach, attempting to right the ship through incremental measures. We need bold action, bold policies. We need our representatives to shut down Obama’s ability to destroy by taking back their power, our power. We are supposed to have a government with checks and balances. It is time we used them. And if the weak-kneed Republicans won’t, "we the people" must.
"There are extraordinary situations which
require extraordinary interposition.
An exasperated people who feel they possess power
are not easily restrained within limits strictly regular."
Thomas Jefferson
Mike Calpino
