Saturday, October 25, 2008

Obama to Rekindle LBJ's Foreign Policy!

Melanie Phillips, with her usual aplomb, concisely lays out the danger of a Barack Obama administration in foreign affairs:

Obama thinks world conflicts are basically the west’s fault, and so it must right the injustices it has inflicted. That’s why he believes in ‘soft power’ — diplomacy, aid, rectifying ‘grievances’ (thus legitimising them, encouraging terror and promoting injustice) and resolving conflict by talking. As a result, he will take an axe to America’s defences at the very time when they need to be built up. He has said he will ‘cut investments in unproven missile defense systems’; he will ‘not weaponize space’; he will ‘slow our development of future combat systems’; and he will also ‘not develop nuclear weapons,’ pledging to seek ‘deep cuts’ in America’s arsenal, thus unilaterally disabling its nuclear deterrent as Russia and China engage in massive military buildups....

Obama dismisses the threat from Islamism, shows zero grasp of the strategic threat to the region and the world from the encirclement of Israel by Iran, displays a similar failure to grasp the strategic importance of Iraq, thinks Israel is instead the source of Arab and Muslim aggression against the west, believes that a Palestinian state would promote world peace and considers that Israel – particularly through the ‘settlements’ – is the principal obstacle to that happy outcome. Accordingly, Obama has said he wants Israel to return to its 1967 borders – actually the strategically indefensible 1948 cease-fire line, known accordingly as the ‘Auschwitz borders’.
There's more at the link, and when you're finished there, check out Daniel Larison, who sees the reincarnation of LBJ's liberal containment in an Obama presidency:

The people worried about the second coming of Carter ought instead of be more concerned about an administration more like LBJ’s, in which we would all probably agree that an excess of hawkishness rather than the lack of it was the central flaw.
Larison blogs at the American Conservative, the home of unpatriotic conservatives "at war with America":

They have made common cause with the left-wing and Islamist antiwar movements in this country and in Europe. They deny and excuse terror. They espouse a potentially self-fulfilling defeatism. They publicize wild conspiracy theories. And some of them explicitly yearn for the victory of their nation's enemies.
I genuinely doubt Obama will send hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops into foreign hostilities to fight our new "Cold War" against radical Islam!

But you've got to love those paleocons - they do know how to spice up an otherwise slow blogging night!

1 comment:

  1. ILLINOIS VOTERS Invite The Chicago Snake-Oil Pitch-men To Shape Their Destiny, Then Howl To The Moon...
    When Governance Unravels!

    Cry Me A River. reb
    _______________________________
    www.lazyonebenn.blogspot.com

    ReplyDelete