What the (Bleep) Just Happened? (36 page)

In his speech, Obama spoke not of victory but of national limitations. That wasn’t exactly the quintessential American way. We know we have limitations as a nation, but we don’t want to hear our president fence us in with them. The president is supposed to transcend those limitations, to get the country to go big—and win. He’s supposed to be Carol Brady, not Debbie Downer. His Afghanistan speech should have stirred the soul with a sense of renewed national commitment to defeating the mass-murdering al-Qaeda and Taliban enemy and an unwavering determination of a nation at war. Instead, Obama looked like the two-bit law lecturer he is, trying to community-organize Afghanistan.

In addition to containing the good war/bad war characterization of Afghanistan and Iraq, Obama’s speech was chockablock with his typical faculty-lounge dichotomies. On the one hand, he announced that it was “in our vital national interest to send an additional thirty thousand troops to Afghanistan.” On the other hand, he announced an exit strategy: “After eighteen months, our troops will begin to come home.” On the one hand, he was escalating the war. On the other, he was ending it. His policy was the equivalent of FDR telling Hitler and Hirohito that we were serious about defeating the whole fascism thing but we’re outta there by 1944.

Obama played his cards faceup. And he set up our military to fail. Once troop withdrawals begin in earnest, he’ll be able to say he gave the generals what they wanted (Petraeus, no less!) and they simply couldn’t make it work. Our enemies know what the timeline is. Our allies know they can’t count on us. And our troops know they’re risking their lives for a mission their commander in chief has written off. They weren’t allowed to win the war in a way that would have sent a clear message to the enemy.

Obama’s sole “strategy” on Afghanistan was to limit the enemy to al-Qaeda, so once bin Laden and other top al-Qaeda terrorists had been killed, he could declare success and get out. Beyond that, the policy has been all confused tactics, without a grand plan to create an effective Afghan fighting force, a responsible Afghan government, or a coherent strategy to deal with Afghanistan’s nuclear-armed neighbor, Pakistan. It had long been assumed by both Teams Bush and Obama that getting and keeping Pakistan on our side was the key to prevailing in Afghanistan. In fact, the opposite is true: proving our commitment to defeating the enemy in Afghanistan so they cannot return and use the country as a terrorist base would finally force Pakistan’s leaders to deal with their own Taliban and terrorist presence, before they have the chance to seize power, as they almost did in 2009 when the security situation in Afghanistan was particularly bad. If Obama goes through with his withdrawal, Pakistan will face rising Islamist radicalism and the unthinkable possibility of al-Qaeda or the Haqqani terror network getting control of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons. The inevitable chaos and carnage would most certainly spread into Afghanistan.

During his Afghanistan speech at West Point, Obama sounded exasperated that he had to deal with such a messy mess at all. After contemplating the age-old nature of war, Obama said, “I do not bring with me today a definitive solution to the problems of war.” Well now.

Then came his familiar invocation: “But we do not have to think that human nature is perfect for us to still believe that the human condition can be perfected.” Well now.

When the civilized world encounters evil, Obama believes he can formulate a sociological hypothesis for why it exists and how he can work with it.

An outrageous case in point: in very early 2012, the
Hindu
reported that Team Obama had turned to Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Muslim Brotherhood’s leading legal authority, to mediate secret negotiations between the United States and the Taliban. Qaradawi is the most influential Sunni Islamist in the world. In 2003, he issued a fatwa calling for the killing of U.S. troops in Iraq. He calls for a world dominated by Islam and a global caliphate governed by sharia. He openly calls for jihad, suicide bombings, and the murder of civilians, and he supports Hamas and the destruction of Israel. Obama allegedly wanted this sworn enemy of the United States and Israel to help him get a deal that would install our Taliban enemies as part of a sharia state in Afghanistan. Part of the deal was to involve the release of high-level Taliban prisoners from Guantánamo Bay in exchange for the Taliban opening a “political office” for “peace talks” in Qatar. One of the Taliban operatives on the Obama release list was Mullah Mohammed Fazi, a terrorist so fearsome that he’s wanted by the UN for war crimes for the slaughter of thousands of Shiites when he served as the Taliban army chief of staff. The U.S. military has continued to detain him because it’s deemed him a “high risk” for jihadist recidivism and a threat to the Afghan government. But Obama apparently thought it a swell idea to release this guy. As if that weren’t bad enough, the administration also signaled that it would agree to lift UN sanctions against the Taliban and recognize it as a legitimate political party. For its part, the Taliban claimed that it would forswear violence, dump al-Qaeda, and promise to play nice with its rivals in the Karzai government. As if. Perhaps this is what Obama meant when he talked of a “more perfect union”: one that got into bed with our most lethal enemies, believed their sweet nothing lies, and supported their ambitions while the American people got screwed without so much as dinner and a movie first.

The reality is that we’re not going to turn Afghan president Hamid Karzai into Thomas Jefferson, although we might be able to score him a panelist gig on
Project Runway
. We’re also not going to turn Afghanistan into Malibu. But what we can still achieve is an Afghan army strong enough to deal with the terrorist presence and a decent enough Afghan government that can work hand in glove with tribal leaders to keep the country stable.

And yet, as with Iraq, Obama has chosen weakness and surrender over strength and victory in Afghanistan. It’s a strategy that will likely lead to deadly global convulsions. But Obama’s objective in Iraq and Afghanistan is not to win and advance our interests but to wrap up what someone else started, redirect the “saved” money to his domestic projects, reduce American power and influence in the region, and use our losses there as punishing levers of humiliation against the United States.

The best day after a bad emperor is the first.

—Tacitus, Roman historian

In the mythology of the 2011 Arab Spring, a slap across the face set off a chain of events that changed the world. On the morning of December 17, 2010, a struggling Tunisian street vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi rolled his small cart of fruit and produce into his usual area in his hometown, Sidi Bouzid. The police arrived and began harassing him for not having the correct permit. Lacking the funds to bribe them, Bouazizi was then subjected to a humiliating beating by the local police, including a female municipal officer, Faida Hamdi, who allegedly slapped Bouazizi, spat on him, confiscated his weighing scales, and turned over his produce cart. Enraged and humiliated, Bouazizi dashed to the governor’s office, only to be turned away. He then ran to a nearby gas station, got a can of gasoline, and went back to the governor’s office. As he stood in the middle of midday traffic, Bouazizi shouted, “How do you expect me to earn a living?” He then doused himself and lit a match. Eighteen days after his self-immolation, he died.

Within hours of Bouazizi’s altercation, protests sprang up over his treatment at the hands of the Tunisian government, first in Sidi Bouzid and then across the country. To the protesters’ amazement, the army stood down and refused to fire upon them. Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, the dictator who had kept them poor and enslaved, fled to Saudi Arabia on January 14, 2011, a mere month after Bouazizi set himself aflame. He became the first dictator to fall in the so-called Arab “Spring.”

The roots of the upheaval are vast and diverse. Much of the Arab world lived under repressive regimes that allowed little or no personal freedom while their economic conditions deteriorated under rising food prices and sky-high unemployment, particularly among young people. Fed up with their regimes’ inability and unwillingness to improve economic conditions and grant them even the most basic human rights, many in the Arab world discovered the courage to stand up to their governments.

It was a courage first inspired by President Bush, who advocated an aggressive “freedom agenda,” about which Obama had expressed his opposition, primarily because it was applied most controversially in Iraq. But the overthrow of Saddam Hussein allowed the Iraqi people to be liberated from exactly the kind of dictator millions of Arabs protested in early 2011. The power of the Iraqi example is difficult to measure, but what isn’t tough to see is the widespread desire for a greater voice.

The Arab Spring actually began over a year earlier with the Persian Spring, when a genuine revolt against tyranny began next door to Iraq, in Iran. On June 13, 2009, millions of Iranians poured into the streets, outraged over what they viewed as a fraudulent election that handed the presidency back to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad over opposition candidates Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi. Mousavi’s campaign color had been green, and his supporters wore the color when they demonstrated against the regime, leading the movement to be called the Green Revolution. Protesters relied heavily on Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking sites to communicate with each other, until the government slowed them or shut them down completely. Soon, however, much of Tehran and other major cities were seas of green. The Iranian regime wasted little time cracking down. It began mass arrests of prominent reformist leaders, human rights advocates, and journalists. The Iranian government militia, the Basij, stormed the protests, deploying tear gas, breaking into houses and businesses, rounding people up and detaining them, and firing live ammunition into the crowds, killing and injuring dozens of people. As the casualties mounted and women were raped and tortured, Obama did nothing. As Iranian militias attacked students in their dorm rooms and Internet censorship spread, Obama did nothing. The mullahcracy that had been the number one state sponsor of terror for thirty years was teetering on the brink of collapse … and Obama did nothing.

While millions of Iranians were courageously taking their lives in their hands, they looked to the United States for support. They would have appreciated covert assistance in terms of sophisticated communication technology that would have allowed them to get around Tehran’s censorship, among other things. But they would have settled for some basic moral support, a word or two from the American president in support of their aspirations for greater freedom. Instead, they got crickets and tumbleweeds from the White House. The seat reserved for the Leader of the Free World was empty.

During the 2008 campaign, Obama had promised to open negotiations with Iran “without preconditions.” Several months after he became president, Obama sent good tidings to the regime at the start of the Iranian new year. He offered “the promise of a new beginning” that was “grounded in mutual respect.” That came after his inaugural address announcement that he’d cozy up to enemies like Iran: “To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history; but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.” Iran greeted his “extended hand” by grabbing three American hikers on its border and holding them for two years, escalating war games, and threatening to close the Strait of Hormuz, through which over one-third of the world’s oil flows.

Obama’s obsession with striking a grand bargain with the Iranian regime over its nuclear weapons program was based on a single objective: he wanted to strike a historic rapprochement with Iran. If Nixon could walk through the streets of Beijing in 1972, Obama could very well walk through the streets of Tehran. Nothing would alter Obama’s course of pursuing “engagement” with the Iranian terrorist dictators, not even their mass slaughter of their own people.

Obama thought that through the sheer force of his dazzling persona, he’d be able to convince the mullahs to at least pretend to want to give up the nuke dream. That, of course, was absurd on its face. Once Iran got a nuke, it would dominate the Persian Gulf, threaten Israel’s very survival, and set off a regional arms race that would likely see Saudi Arabia and possibly Jordan, Egypt, and Turkey going nuclear. In fact, in early 2012 Saudi Arabia struck a deal with China to develop nuclear capability. The entire Middle East—already a white-hot tinderbox—would explode in nuclear-weapons-driven instability, but Iran would be driving the bus. They were getting tantalizingly close to their game-changing possession of a nuke just as the American president was making a yahoo out of himself with his “extended hand.”

Meanwhile, negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program through the United Nations and the Europeans dragged on. A lot of talking was done, mostly by everyone but the Iranians. Time and again, the Iranians talked and stalled, stalled and talked. In November 2009, Team Obama said it was willing to give Iran more time to decide whether to accept a UN-brokered deal to get Iran to move its stocks of low-enriched uranium to Russia or another country in exchange for fuel for a nuclear medicine laboratory. Iran hemmed and hawed, asking for countless amendments and more talks. The U.S. government offered all kinds of incentives, from Miley Cyrus tickets to a week of all-inclusive heaven at Sandals in Jamaica. They even offered up a chance for Ayatollah Khamenei to hang out with the stars of MTV’s
16 and Pregnant
. In the end, the Iranians bailed on the deal.

Instead of dealing more realistically with a regime that had no intention of negotiating away its nuclear weapons program, Obama continued to make more accommodations, including dropping a key condition that Iran shut down its nuclear facilities during the early stages of talks. European negotiators, along with Team Obama, said they were interested in “building trust,” to which the Iranians replied by again laughing themselves silly.