Now Ronald Reagan during the 1980s also spoke of a world free of nuclear weapons. But Reagan had no intention of America disarming while other nations built up. Moreover, Reagan had a solution to the problem of vulnerability. That solution was missile defense. Reagan believed that if America was in a position to shoot down incoming missiles, then it could secure itself against outside attack. What makes Obama different is that he is disarming America’s nuclear arsenal while also curtailing our missile defense program. Early in his presidency, Obama cut back on missile defense systems in Alaska and California. More recently, Obama seems to have signaled to Russia’s former president Dmitry Medvedev that, upon re-election, he will grant further concessions on America’s missile defenses. Nor does Obama want America’s allies to have such defenses. A couple years earlier, Obama canceled an anti-missile system planned for Poland, as well as a missile-detecting radar system planned for the Czech Republic.
Now admittedly nuclear arsenals and missile defenses are only one aspect, although an important aspect, of a nation’s defense program. America also has a Defense Department that manages an army, a navy, an air force, and the Marines. In fact, the bulk of military spending goes toward conventional forces. America has these forces deployed around the world, but especially in trouble spots: in the Middle East, to maintain stability and secure access to oil supplies; in Europe, to protect our strongest allies; in Asia, to protect South Korea from North Korea and Taiwan from China. Recognizing that more than one war can break out at a time, America’s defense strategy has long been to prepare to fight two wars simultaneously: this way, for example, we can deal with a Middle East conflict while also protecting Taiwan from a Chinese invasion. If Obama wanted to reduce America’s nuclear dependency but maintain America’s strong defenses, we would expect him to push for a substantial increase in conventional force readiness and also in overall defense spending.
Actually, Obama has moved in the opposite direction. In 2009, Obama ordered $330 billion in defense cuts. The next year, he convinced Defense Secretary Robert Gates to pare an additional $100 billion. In 2011, Obama chopped an additional $487 billion from the Pentagon, thus bringing his total cuts to nearly a trillion dollars. The cumulative effect, according to General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is that the United States can no longer expect to be a global power .
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Obama usually announces his defense cuts with a practiced long face, and he says the cuts are necessary to reduce deficit spending. We have to, says our frugal man in the White House, put “our fiscal house in order.” And of course Obama is right that our fiscal house is not in order. I quite agree that in dire economic times, government programs that we now have may prove unaffordable, and defense is no exception. Obama’s Benihana defense policy could perhaps be justified in terms of a tough economy and national belt-tightening. But that is not Obama’s scenario. He has been cutting the military while pushing for huge increases in domestic spending. While the defense department is being cut to the bone, other programs like health care and “green” technologies are bloated with money. Obama shows no evident interest in reducing overall spending, only in reducing military spending.
The consequences are already being felt on America’s role in the world. Even with his rhetorical legerdemain, Obama has to acknowledge this. Given all that has happened in the Middle East and across the Muslim world—the subject of the next two chapters—Obama cannot deny that American power has greatly waned in those regions. Consequently he has sought to deflect the public’s attention with a much-publicized “pivot” to Asia. By itself this may seem far-sighted, a sound recognition of the growing power of China. But in Obama’s case, things are rarely as they seem. Obama has not actually redeployed America’s defense forces to the Pacific. He has not increased the targeting of Chinese military assets. In fact, his “pivot” seems to be mostly a rhetorical move, unaccompanied by any change in strategy or measurable increase in force levels.
So America’s military is in a bad way in 2012; what can we expect in 2016? If Obama is re-elected, we can expect further weakening. In my view, Obama’s goal is to introduce fear in the United States—fear of an Iranian bomb, fear of the rising strength of China, fear of a first strike, fear of cities being incinerated. Obama’s hope, if our theory is correct, is that fear will keep America humble. Call it humility through vulnerability. And in this way Obama hopes that America will stop acting like the evil empire. We will stop throwing our weight around and invading and bullying the rest of the world. Rather, we will accept that we have become, like the old Soviet Union, an irrelevant power, or like Canada, a large and harmless country. Instead of using American power to make the world safe for liberty or for democracy, Obama intends to use his own power to make the world safe from America.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE JIHADI AS FREEDOM FIGHTER
As the American approach to countering the Soviet menace came to be known as the doctrine of containment, the Obama doctrine may come to be known as the doctrine of self-containment.
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—Douglas Feith and Seth Cropsey,
Commentary
I
n this chapter, I intend to resolve the conundrum of why many people assume Obama is a Muslim. Obama, as we have seen, is not a Muslim. Yet polls show that approximately one-fourth of Americans suspect him of being one.
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This is odd and requires explanation. Because I was born in India, people often presume I am either a doctor or a software guy. They are wrong, but they make that assumption because there are lots of Indian doctors and software guys in the United States. By the same token, Obama is not a Muslim, so why do so many people believe he is?
The surveys don’t tell us, but it’s probably because Obama seems so weirdly solicitous of Muslims and Muslim causes. One of Obama’s first actions as president was to retire the phrase “war on terror,” which he thought was too easily conflated with a war on Muslims. Obama took the position that America was simply battling an international criminal outfit called al-Qaeda whose members happened to be Muslim. Obama supported the construction of the Ground Zero mosque despite strong opposition from New Yorkers, especially Jews. As I documented in
The Roots of Obama’s Rage
, Obama tacitly approved the Scottish government’s release of the Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset al-Megrahi—a terrorist responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Americans—so long as the man remained in Scotland. Obama sought to move jihadis from the detention center at Guantanamo Bay to civilian prisons in the United States. His Justice Department opposed military trials that would treat jihadis captured in Iraq and Afghanistan as war criminals. Instead, the Obama administration sought to give them civilian trials and provide them with constitutional rights and free legal counsel. Several radical lawyers who had previously represented or advocated on behalf of Muslim terrorists were subsequently hired by the Obama Justice Department. Obama also opposed terrorist interrogation techniques like sleep deprivation and water-dunking (“water-boarding”) even though those techniques would subsequently lead to information about the whereabouts of Osama Bin Laden.
True, Obama was thwarted on some of his goals. Even Democratic members of Congress protested moving Muslim terrorists to prisons in their districts. So the detention center at Guantanamo remains open. Under pressure from both parties, and some in his own administration, Obama agreed to try 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Muhammad and some of his co-conspirators in a military court, although the venue of other terrorist trials is undecided. Yet in other ways Obama has been successful. The military has abandoned the very same interrogation techniques that resulted in the tracking of Bin Laden to his Abbottabad compound. The Islamic Center near Ground Zero has been built. The Lockerbie bomber was released, and Scotland went one better by sending him home to Libya, where he lived as a free man until his death recently from cancer.
Obama’s behavior in all this seems downright baffling. Consider the idea of giving civilian trials and constitutional rights to captured war criminals. In World War II the idea would have been considered so outlandish that no one seriously proposed it. The Nuremberg trials were military tribunals, and they were held only after the war ended. The rights in the U.S. Constitution are reserved for U.S. citizens; they emerge out of a social compact among people who implicitly agree to live under the same laws, pay taxes, and share certain social obligations. These rights don’t automatically extend to illegal aliens, and they certainly don’t apply to Muslim jihadis apprehended in foreign wars against the United States. Even if we consider international law, the Geneva Convention applies only to states that have approved the rules of the Convention. The jihadis don’t represent a state, and they aren’t conventional soldiers in that they don’t wear uniforms or operate in accordance with the rules of war. They extend to their captives no protections whatever. Consequently, they have placed themselves outside the orbit of Geneva Convention rules. All of this is well known, so why does Obama persist? His behavior on behalf of the Muslim jihadis seems so inexplicable that some people conclude that Obama must be a closet Muslim.
But actually there’s an anti-colonial explanation for Obama’s conduct that works much better. Obama views America as an imperial invader, occupier, and aggressor that has looted Iraq and Afghanistan, while America’s ally and satellite Israel has occupied and oppressed Muslim Palestine. If America and Israel are the aggressors, the Muslims fighting against American and Israeli occupation are freedom fighters. Obama considers them anti-colonial heroes, like Mandela or Gandhi or his own father, fighting to free a colonized people. Once we put this framework into place, we will see very clearly what Obama is doing in Iraq and Afghanistan. We will also be able to predict what, in his second term, Obama has in mind for Israel.
Even before we get started, however, we need to confront a powerful objection to our thesis. This objection was succinctly put to me by Conor Friedersdorf, an associate editor of
The Atlantic Monthly
, in an email following the news that Bin Laden had been killed. “In light of President Obama’s success bringing Osama Bin Laden to justice,” Friedersdorf wrote, “do you remain convinced that his actions are motivated by a Kenyan anti-colonial ideology?”
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I could just see Friedersdorf’s smug expression as he composed the email. And I understood clearly what he was getting at. Obviously Obama can’t be sympathetic to Muslim jihadis if he ordered the killing of the most notorious and infamous Muslim jihadi of all, Bin Laden. So where does that leave your thesis now, Mister Smarty Pants D’Souza?
Actually, it leaves it quite intact. But this requires some explanation. I’d like to begin by strengthening Friedersdorf’s objection. Bin Laden frequently portrayed himself as an anti-colonialist fighting against American occupation of Saudi Arabia. This was the theme of Bin Laden’s
Declaration of Jihad Against the Americans
, in which Bin Laden stated, “Ever since God made the Arabian peninsula ... it has never suffered such a calamity as these Crusader hordes that have spread through it like locusts, consuming its wealth and destroying its fertility, and all at a time when nations have joined forces against the Muslims as if fighting over a bowl of food.” In his 2002
Open Letter to Americ
a, Bin Laden broadened his indictment of U.S. actions in the Muslim world. “The American people are the ones who pay the taxes which fund the planes that bomb us in Afghanistan, the tanks that strike and destroy our homes in Palestine, the armies which occupy our lands in the Persian Gulf, and the fleets which ensure the blockade of Iraq.” In both documents, Bin Laden portrays himself as a resister against American occupation and exploitation.
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So if Bin Laden sees himself as an anti-colonial resister, shouldn’t he be a hero to Obama? Why would Obama order his killing?
The answer to this question is given by Obama himself in his 2006 book,
The Audacity of Hope
. There Obama writes, “It’s useful to remind ourselves . . . that Osama Bin Laden is not Ho Chi Minh.”
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This is a very telling observation. The context is that Obama is chastising American liberals for failing to make distinctions. And here is the distinction that Obama insists upon making: Ho Chi Minh, in his analysis, was a good guy. He was a true nationalist who was fighting to free his country, Vietnam, first from French and subsequently from American occupation. So Obama concedes that Ho Chi Minh is an anti-colonial hero. But Obama has a different view of Osama Bin Laden. Certainly Bin Laden started out as a Saudi nationalist, fighting against his own government for its willing subordination to the United States. But subsequently Bin Laden decamped for Afghanistan, where he began to plot terrorist attacks in Europe and America. Rather than defend his homeland, Bin Laden sent people to the United States to knock down buildings and bomb government and civilian targets. This for Obama is not anti-colonialism ; it is criminal behavior. Obama viewed Bin Laden not as a freedom fighter, but as a kind of international gangster. So the purpose of Obama’s comparison is to say to Bin Laden: You’re no Ho Chi Minh! You’re not a real anti-colonialist! No wonder Obama had no qualms about dispatching Seal Team Six to, in Obama’s own words, “bring him to justice.”
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