Much ado has been made over Obama’s slip that the U.S. government has no strategy for fighting ISIS (Islamic state) terrorism in Iraq, Syria and elsewhere.
It’s much ado about something. But not for most of the reasons even Obama’s most strident critics are saying.
In order to have a strategy, you first must have a set of principles. A set of principles tells you what you want to achieve, and why you wish to achieve it.
Strategy comes next. The purpose of a strategy is to tell you how to achieve it.
Like most administrations before him, Obama governs without a coherent set of principles when it comes to the Middle East.
Before Obama, most Presidents vacillated between the right principles and no policy at all, with respect to the Middle East. Obama, on the other hand, vacillates between the wrong principles, and no policy at all.
What are the objectively right principles with respect to the Middle East? The nations that come closest to the Western values of upholding individual rights deserve our support and protection. And oil is a legitimate interest of the United States.
I call these principles “right” based on a couple of assumptions. One, human life is the standard of value. Two, freedom-loving countries support human life infinitely better than totalitarian ones (communist, fascist, and religious). In any struggle between free or semi-free countries and totalitarian nations, the right side is always on freedom. That’s us. In the Middle East, that’s Israel. And the Islamic states are no less totalitarian than Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia; in some ways, they’re potentially more dangerous because they’re not simply power hungry. They’re nihilistic and suicidal.
Obama is a very poor leader. He doesn’t act, nor does he seem to feel, proud of what his country still stands for, at least in principle if not always in practice (thanks in part to his economic and domestic policies). Obama goes back and forth, but in his more principled moments, he appears sympathetic to our enemies. It’s almost as if Obama doesn’t understand that the good guys in any struggle are the ones who protect freedom and individual rights.
With prior presidents, such as the Bushes, Clinton, Reagan and Ford/Nixon/Kennedy, there was little or no doubt that we were the good guys. These presidents were not always willing to assert it with conviction and consistency, but you knew where they stood on that issue, at least when they stood on any issue at all.
Not so with Obama. He really is different.
At different times, for example, Obama has said, “We are not at war with Islam.” That’s interesting. Islam appears to be at war with us. Does Obama not think so? If not, why not? And if he really thinks we’re not at war with Islam – how does he explain ISIS, waging its holy war across the Middle East and threatening to cross over American borders to blow up buildings and people?
In order to develop a strategy, you first have to know what’s right, what’s wrong and why. Obama is more adrift than any of his predecessors (other than Jimmy Carter) in this regard, and that’s saying something.
Obama’s foreign policy reminds me a lot of President Jimmy Carter’s, back in the late 1970s. Carter vacillated about the Middle East as well as Soviet Russia. During Carter’s term, Iran was taken over by militant Muslims who still terrorize us today; and Soviet Russia (although eventually defeated) was on the march during his time. (Interestingly, you see history repeating itself now with fascist Russian dictator Vladimir Putin on the march.)
When the good guys humiliate or otherwise humble themselves, the bad guys gain confidence they never would have enjoyed otherwise. The Putins and ISIS militants of the world can only win by default.
Jimmy Carter was overwhelmingly defeated and denied a second term for his lack of coherent principles and strategies back in the 1970s. It’s not at all clear Obama, nor his probable successor and former Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, will ever face accountability for their policies. Is it because of a double standard? No. The more likely reason is that the country has changed.
People don’t think in principles. They’ve been trained not to do so. They shy away from any notion of right or wrong, even rationally defined. Obama speaks for the majority—the same majority who keep electing him, or his equivalent—when he says things like, “Issues are never simple. One thing I’m proud of is that very rarely will you hear me simplify the issues.”
While it’s certainly wrong to oversimplify issues, human beings possess the capacity for condensing facts and knowledge into coherent principles. That’s the whole basis for science, capitalism, knowledge and technology — all the things that make human life sustainable and worthwhile.
It’s not always obvious what the right principles are. But the fact that violent religious fundamentalists who blow up private property and harm innocent people are clearly on the wrong side of things should be obvious, even to Obama.
Yet it isn’t.
And we’re surprised he doesn’t have a strategy for dealing with the Middle East. Of course he doesn’t. How could he?
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