National Security in the aftermath of UPS ...

Obama's Foreign Policy & National Security Policies can best be described as Amateur Hour.


Time to Rethink Our National-Security Policies
November 1, 2010

By Victor Davis Hanson

If it is true that the State Department, in adolescent fashion, tweeted a birthday message to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on his 54th, and if it is true that the man believed to be responsible for the latest bomb plot, Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri, was behind or at least associated with the Christmas Day bomber, then some very real questions arise as to the sanity of our current policies. Evidently, the terrorists are getting a much different message than the one the Obama administration intended to send.

The list goes on and on: the al-Arabiya interview, the Cairo speech, the bowing, the euphemisms (“man-caused disasters,” “overseas contingency operations”), the president’s use of “enemies” for Americans rather than radical Islamists, the KSM trial gambit, the constant trashing of the Bush administration by John Brennan and others, Muslim outreach at NASA, the demonization of Guantanamo and the subsequent retreat from insistence on its closure, the criminalization of acts of war . . .

These actions have not deterred would-be terrorists intent on blowing up airplanes, Times Square, or U.S. service personnel. Moreover, they may be sending the message that we are less confident now that radical Islam is something that needs to be defeated and crushed. We surely didn’t get that sense of outrage last Christmas when the president characterized Abdulmuttalab’s foiled attempt with the legalistic adverb “allegedly.”

A leader who has promised to wipe out Israel — and is proceeding to find the means to do so — will not be flattered by a Twitter message. He can only have contempt for our frivolity and appeasement. Had Abdulmutallab immediately been arrested last Christmas as an enemy combatant (a phrase that has also been Trotskyized in the last 21 months) and promptly sent for interrogation at Guantanamo, would he have enlightened us about the nature of his bomb maker, and would that inquiry have led to some increased defense against Asiri’s handiwork? Would Asiri have gotten as far as he did in his latest terrorist attempt? This is not partisan inquiry, but legitimate questioning of the national-security policies that affect us all.
It is past time to cool the “reset button” rhetoric and get back to the serious business of protecting American lives against radical Islamic terrorists. As we have seen the last two years, they will step up their efforts to kill us until they accept that doing so is synonymous with their own destruction.


Amateur Hour at the State Department

November 1, 2010 12:56 P.M.
By Claire Berlinski
Denise recently asked whether Obama has put a “kick me” sign on our backs. I have a few thoughts about this.

I recently interviewed Turkey’s former ambassador to the United States, Faruk Loğoğlu. He is appalled — like many in Turkey — by the soft-headedness of the Obama administration’s diplomacy in this region. He finds Obama’s speeches about his personal warmth toward Islam ludicrous and inappropriate. “Obama can’t play the religious game,” he said. “He should be playing the security game. His policy toward Turkey is a bad imitation of the worst parts of Orientalism.”

It’s not merely the ideological color of the Obama administration’s diplomacy that worries me, but its incompetence. I’ve lately been examining in very close detail the events that led to Turkey’s “No” vote on the Iran sanctions package in the UN. I’ll be writing about this elsewhere, and the details are too complicated to summarize here. But one thing leaps out: our incompetence. How could there have been any ambiguity — and obviously there was — in our communication with Turkey about our negotiating position on the nuclear-fuel-swap deal? How is it possible that Turkey was receiving critically different messages from the White House and the State Department on an issue as significant as the Iranian nuclear program, for God’s sake? It’s inconceivable, but on looking closely at the evidence, it is clear that this is just what happened.

When the State Department spokesman sends a completely inappropriate birthday message to to Ahmadinejad via Twitter, it is, likewise, a symptom of utter amateurism. Apologists for this incident have suggested to me that this wasn’t such a big deal; it was sarcastic, they say, and it wasn’t a diplomatic note or official communiqué. I am guessing that had that Tweet said, “Tomorrow we bomb Iran into rubble,” the same people would have thought it quite a big deal indeed.

It is hugely significant when the tone coming out of the State Department is childish, inappropriate, and supine; it is fundamentally unserious to put such a message on Twitter; and it is beyond belief that anyone there would think “sarcasm” about this situation — we are talking about kidnapped U.S. citizens who are being held hostage in Iran — conveys American resolve. Signaling counts. Signaling that you are damned serious does not start wars, it prevents them.