Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Here's an excellent piece by Bret Stephens that exposes the reality the chattering classes who derided Bush and praised Obama and Biden -- the people who fantasized about "George Bush's" War on Terror (as though it would all go away if we just got someone new in office), and blamed Don Rumsfeld for being rude to Europe when the fact was that they simply gave him nothing to be polite about. There's a rude world out there, worse than rude. From one of my quotes of the (occasional) day:
"...'I believed I could make this world anew. I believed that all this world needed was honesty and kindness. I believed that if you treated folk well, that if you gave them peace and offered them justice they would respond with gratitude. I thought I could dissolve evil with good.' He paused. 'I suppose I thought of people as dogs,' he went on ruefully, 'and that if you gave them enough affection then they would be docile, but they aren't dogs, Gwydre, they're wolves..."
-Arthur, from Bernard Cornwell's Excalibur
Barack Obama comes from a deeply naive leftist intellectual tradition and was elected by a deeply naive electorate which he and his party pandered to and encouraged. Now we get reality. Iran is perfectly happy to slight us, North Korea continues to whine and threaten, Pakistan frees their rogue nuke scientist, Russia spits in our eye by bribing Kyrgyzstan to close our base, the Arab 'Street' is the same old same old, and the Europeans, who we were assured were oh-so-willing to help us more in Afghanistan if we were just a bit nicer to them (and would finish up with Iraq) aren't exactly falling all over themselves to send help to us in combat.
Obama, Biden and all the rest should have known that, of course -- that Europe no longer has armed forces capable of extended operations, that they've gotten fat expecting Uncle Sam to do the real fighting for them, that their societies have lost the gut required to send people to fight and die outside their borders for any length of time (no democracy has great staying power in war, but the Euros of today make America look downright Prussian), that all this rhetoric about 'George Bush's War' that the left has fostered and benefited from has so poisoned the well that they'll never be interested in sacrificing any blood or treasure to help this American (as they see it) effort, and that when we look for help and assistance, self-help will be the only reliable kind....as it has been for the past eight years.
The world is run by wolves, not sheep. Always has been, always will be. Imagining anything else is not just a mistake, it's a good way to be eaten. Reminds me of this classic:
Oh yeah, that Bret Stephens piece: Obama's Charm Isn't Working Wonders Abroad. It ends thus:
...True, Mr. Obama has made the U.S. popular in places like Montreal and Berlin, where our unpopularity never mattered much to begin with. But foreign policy is not about winning popularity contests. And woe to the president who imagines he needn't inspire fear among the wicked even as he embraces the adulation of the good.
He is turning out to be very bad indeed. True, he is not as bad as he might, in theory, have been expected to be by some measures. He did, for example, single out Hamas and Hezbollah as terrorist entities last night. But he has already soft-peddled Iran and its Mullahs, he has indicted the U.S.'s policies both tacitly and more overtly, he has forwarded foundational and conscious deceits - still in campaign rhetoric mode it seems - in lieu of better conceived, more honest, more transparent forms of suasion. I.e. his integrity is now, unquestionably, in doubt.
How bad? That can still be variously debated and opined upon, but reality and Obama are not often seen in the same environment together, at least not in a mutually agreeable or mutually consonant manner. To the contrary, they too often appear to be foes, antagonistic with one another and antagonistic with one another at foundational and critical levels. Caveats to that concern are still warranted, there is a degree of sincerity at the base of the man and that shouldn't be dismissed. But tell-tale "earmarks" are evidencing themselves - and they are not often propitious.