Leon Panetta’s Criticism of Former Boss: Why is He Surprised?

Leon Panetta is Barack Obama’s former CIA chief and Secretary of Defense. The Washington Post [10-6-14] reports that Panetta:

… criticized Obama in harsh terms that would have been dismissed as partisan sniping — if Panetta weren’t a Democrat who had served as Obama’s CIA director and secretary of defense.

Panetta criticized his former boss for having “lost his way” — allowing the power vacuum in Iraq that created the Islamic State, rejecting Panetta’s and Hillary Clinton’s advice to arm the Syrian rebels and failing to enforce his own “red line” barring Syria’s use of chemical weapons.

Did Obama really lose his way? This implies that he had a set of foreign policy principles in the first place. Obama came to office with the experience of a junior state representative, a junior college professor, and a junior U.S. Senator. He had no foreign policy experience at all. For all we know, he hadn’t done any serious thinking on the subject before coming to office.

What we do know is that he hadn’t seen America as a force for good in the world. Given his dislike of capitalism and economic freedom, how could he? This is probably a lot of what drove him, once in office, to make excuses for dictatorships like Russia and Iran, as well as to go on his infamous “apology tour” telling other nations that America had largely been wrong throughout world history, and it was time to correct these wrongs.

Given what we knew about Obama before he entered office, his policies have made a lot of sense. He openly sympathizes with Islam (always did), and — by extension — with militant jihadist Islamic fundamentalism. He dislikes any degree of capitalism, and his policies on domestic matters (socialized medicine, federal subsidies and control of automobile and banking industries) have made this very clear.

Given his intense dislike of profit-making enterprises in principle, like any good leftist Democrat he naturally detests oil companies who profit at American presence and interests in the Middle East. Where would we all be if those oil companies didn’t exist, and if our military didn’t attempt to make it safer for them to exist in that part of the world? Most of the good Democrats I know enjoy the comforts and pleasantries of capitalist (or more accurately, semi-capitalist) civilization. Where’s the gratitude — and where’s the realism?

He likewise has made his indifference if not hostility to Israel known from Day One. He has shunned or marginalized Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It’s sickening and disgraceful, as Netanyahu may be America’s only strong and principled ally on the planet, at present.

What “way” did Obama actually lose in his evasion of or indifference to matters in the Middle East?

The Post continues:

The interview was timed with this week’s launch of Panetta’s book, in which he wrote that Obama “avoids the battle, complains, and misses opportunities.” Panetta also wrote of Obama’s “frustrating reticence to engage his opponents and rally support for his cause” and his tendency to rely “on the logic of a law professor rather than the passion of a leader.”

I don’t doubt that this characterization of Obama is true. We can see evidence of that all the time publicly, such as his choice to engage in his compulsion for golf while Americans get beheaded by jihadists overseas.

But what is Obama’s “cause” to which Panetta is referring? What principles did he actually betray?

A cause implies that you’re in favor of something. We know what Obama is against. He rose to stardom based on a speech he gave in opposition to Bush’s war in Iraq. What was he for? Nothing, really, other than withdrawing troops. He did what was promised, and the expected thing happened. Islamic terrorists began to take over Iraq and the rest of the Middle East. It’s happening at this very moment, along with the beheadings and whatever else is yet to come. Granted, this is Obama’s responsibility. But if all he ever stood for was opposing the Iraq war, without any regard for what American interests and policies should be in that part of the world, what else could have been expected?

I don’t see why there has to be a conflict between the “logic of a law professor” and the “passion” of a leader. It seems to me that a law professor — or any intellectual — with principled, rational and valid ideas will certainly feel passion about those ideas, and exhibit those ideas in practice. That’s what integrity means: Loyalty, in practice, to the ideas one holds in theory.

The United States was founded by men such as this, i.e. men of high integrity. They were lawyers, scholars, scientists and all kinds of other things. They were extremely passionate, because the United States didn’t look very promising, back then, when it was basically nothing more than a wilderness and a loose confederation of separate little republics.

I don’t blame Obama’s lack of passion on his largely overrated intellect. I blame his lack of passion on a lack of coherent ideas — or, if anything, ideas that are totally at odds with American interests.

Obama is a negligent leader. Yet he’s not as unpopular as he deserves to be. His negligence, apathy and aloof coldness finally became too much for most of his ardent supporters. But what does it say about Americans who don’t see his whole presidency as the travesty — and ultimately the danger — that it actually is?

Joe Biden has condemned former cabinet members for daring to publicly criticize their former boss. This is the same man who refers to opponents of Obama’s health care plan as “terrorists.” Freedom of speech and tolerating dissension are not what he’s known for, any more than his boss.

Yet Obama doesn’t need people like his former Defense Secretary to show us how ruefully inept he is. All you have to do is read the headlines and watch what’s happening before our very eyes. Or observe his petulant arrogance, the kind of attitude you see in a young child who’s in over his head and mad for having it pointed out.

Biden insists there’s no  “elephant in the living room.” There plainly is. A majority of Americans put that elephant there. My question to those who did is, “So what now?” That’s my question for people like Leon Panetta, too, since they once supported and worked for him.

Obama is everything that his critics and former associates say he is — and much worse. But we can’t blame this all on Obama. His negligence in office is the manifestation of a sad, and disturbing, negligence that ultimately resides in the hearts and minds of the people themselves, about their own country and (supposedly) most cherished freedoms. Obama, playing golf as the country falls apart, represents the same mentality that sank the Titanic: pure hubris.

It never had to be so, and in order to get a course reversal we all have to demand and expect one.