Crimes Against Liberty

by David Limbaugh

  Obama added failure on top of failure as he doggedly clung to his engagement strategy. Playing bad cop to his good cop, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had issued Iran an ultimatum in March 2009 to disband its nuclear program by year’s end, warning of “real consequences” unless Iran complied.20 No response. In July she threatened to beef up the military capabilities of our Persian Gulf allies if Iran continued to develop its nuclear program.21 Again, no response. Obama had said in May, in his “diplomatic” way, “The important thing is to make sure there is a clear timetable, at which point we say these talks don’t seem to be making any serious progress. By the end of the year, we should have some sense whether or not these discussions are starting to yield significant benefits, whether we are starting to see serious movement on the part of the Iranians.”22

  Iran contemptuously dismissed Obama’s end-of-year deadline. On December 22, 2009, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad asked defiantly, “Who are they to set us a deadline? We set them a deadline that if they do not correct their attitude and behavior and literature we will demand from them the Iranian nation’s historic rights....They must know that the Iranian nation and all the world’s nations will continue resisting until the complete (nuclear) disarmament of America and all arrogant powers.”23

  The Obama administration cravenly responded by disavowing its own deadlines. Hillary Clinton said, as if the administration’s previous words meant nothing, “Now, we’ve avoided using the term ‘deadline’ ourselves. That’s not a term that we have used, because we want to keep the door to dialogue open.” Tellingly, she even admitted the administration’s efforts at “engagement” had not succeeded.24 Iran triumphantly acknowledged the administration’s abandonment of its deadline. An Iranian foreign ministry spokesman crowed, “We share the same idea with [Clinton]. Deadlines are meaningless. We hope other countries return to their natural path, too.”25

  Obama claimed there was a method to his engagement madness. If his efforts ultimately failed, he argued, countries previously resistant to sanctions—Russia, China, and Germany—would come on board. Secretary Clinton said, “We actually believe that by following the diplomatic path we are on, we gain credibility and influence with a number of nations who would have to participate in order to make the sanctions regime as tight and as crippling as we would want it to be.”

  But by all indications, that strategy was not working too well, either. While Germany might have been playing lip service to supporting sanctions, Russia, which has considerable economic interests in Iran and is helping to build Iran’s nuclear reactors, resisted all but the most toothless sanctions. Similarly, with “a rapidly growing stake in Iran’s energy sector,” China had decreed that Iran’s nuclear program did not represent a threat and therefore diplomacy should be given more time. China declined to send a high ranking official to talks among the United States, Britain, France, Russia, and Germany, and it even stopped using the word “sanction.” Without Russia or China’s cooperation, the prospect of meaningful sanctions was negligible because, among other things, both countries have a Security Council veto at the United Nations. Thus, the only sanctions to emerge from the UN—and greeted with mocking contempt by the Iranians—have been largely symbolic measures that Russia and China allow to pass only because of their meaninglessness.

  As both prongs of Obama’s Iran strategy—engagement and sanctions—were failing, even some of his defenders, such as an anonymous “Hill Democrat” quoted by Time, were asking, “What exactly did your year of engagement get you?” According to Obama-friendly Time, “The very fact that the U.S. and its allies are even thinking of going it alone is a sign of just how much trouble Obama’s policy is in.”26

  Columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote that Iran’s thuggish president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, didn’t simply reject Obama’s “feckless floating nuclear deadline...he spat on it.” Krauthammer sighed, “So ends 2009, the year of ‘engagement,’ of the extended hand, of the gratuitous apology—and of spinning centrifuges, two-stage rockets and a secret enrichment facility that brought Iran materially closer to becoming a nuclear power.”27

  In May, Iran announced it had reached an accord with Turkey and Brazil to exchange a portion of its low enriched uranium to more highly enriched uranium to fuel its medical research reactor in Tehran. It was a clever move on Ahmadinejad’s part: while it wouldn’t satisfy the UN Security Council’s demands to halt Iran’s uranium enrichment processes, but it could further undermine Obama’s efforts to impose sanctions, demonstrating yet again the futility of his engagement efforts.28

  As the Washington Times editors observed, during the campaign Obamamade light of what he saw as his [Bush’s] lack of diplomatic skills. As Wednesday’s U.N. Security Council vote on sanctions over Iran’s nuclear program showed, Mr. Obama’s team could learn a few things about diplomacy from George W. Bush.... President Obama is losing the international consensus that Mr.

  Bush once had.... Talk is cheap, but true diplomacy is difficult.... Perhaps [Obama] should take a trip to Dallas to pick up a few pointers from Mr. Bush about how to rally the world behind the policies that are in America’s best interests.29

  MUSLIM OUTREACH

  A centerpiece of Obama’s foreign policy and national security policy strategy has been to improve our relationship with the Muslim world. Obama seems obsessed with the idea that Muslims believe we are at war with them instead of with radical Islamists. Perhaps more accurately, he believes it—and is intent on rectifying it.

  President George W. Bush, on countless occasions, declared we are not at war with Muslims. But Obama’s insistence that he needed to correct the record lent credence to the notion that we are. Obama also seems to believe he has a certain duty to engage on this issue, given his childhood in Indonesia and his lineage from Muslim family members. He can relate to Muslims—and he wanted to tell them so in a forum where the entire world was watching. In his vaunted Cairo speech of June 2009, he apologized for America again, gave legitimacy to Muslim grievances, inflated the number of Muslims in America three-fold, and exaggerated Islamic accomplishments in world history and in American history. He implied the war in Iraq was an unjustified act of aggression by the United States and that we had earned our poor reputation among Arab and Muslim peoples, and assured his audience that we were not at war with Islam.

  After all this pandering, what did Obama have to show for it? In November 2009, one Saudi academic in Jeddah who had previously been enamored with Obama said of him, “He talks too much.” Fouad Ajami, a professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, thought the Obama mystique had already worn off. “He has not made the world anew, history did not bend to his will, the Indians and Pakistanis have been told that the matter of Kashmir is theirs to resolve, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the same intractable clash of two irreconcilable nationalisms, and the theocrats in Iran have not ‘unclenched their fist,’ nor have they abandoned their nuclear quest.”

  Moreover, Pew polling confirmed that for all his posturing, Obama hadn’t improved our Muslim relations at all. Only 15 percent of those in the Palestinian territories had a favorable view of the United States, while 82 percent had an unfavorable one. In Turkey—after Obama gave a speech in Ankara—14 percent favorable and 69 percent unfavorable. In Egypt, 27 percent favorable, 70 percent unfavorable. In Pakistan things got worse, with unfavorables rising from 63 percent in 2008 to 68 percent in 2009,30 which is an ominous sign given Pakistan’s nuclear capability and the precariousness of Pakistan’s current leadership. “There were a lot of illusions about Obama because he has African and Muslim roots,” said Aya Mahmoud, a Cairo University student. “Turns out the [Cairo] speech was all just hype.”31

  Obama’s primary failure here lies not in his inability to cure this region of its endemic anti-Americanism, but in his profoundly naïve assumption that he could, and in wrongly castigating the Bush administration for causing Middle East animus toward the United States, which predated Oba
ma’s presidency by decades, is thriving during his term, and will last long after he vacates the Oval Office.

  Under Obama, America is no longer proud of its liberty. Instead, we are peddling American guilt and doing penance. Professor Ajami says this approach has been ill-advised. “No one,” says Ajami, “told Mr. Obama that [in] the Islamic world, where American power is engaged and so dangerously exposed, it is considered bad form, nay a great moral lapse, to speak ill of one’s own tribe in the midst, and in the lands, of others.”32

  THUG OUTREACH

  Rejecting the Bush administration’s focus on supporting international democratic movements, Obama adopted a policy of appeasing the world’s tyrants and dictators—also with no dividends to show for it. At the Americas Summit in April 2009, he boasted that reaching out to U.S. enemies “strengthens our hand” and claimed the notion that his approach projects weakness “doesn’t make sense.”33 Illustrating his new tack, he snuggled up to anti-American Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez at the summit, graciously accepting Chavez’s gift—a book by Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent— which is a scathing attack on American and European involvement in Latin America. Galeano wrote, “Our defeat was always implicit in the victory of others; our wealth has always generated our poverty by nourishing the prosperity of others.”34 Was Reverend Jeremiah Wright also Chavez’s mentor?

  Also at the summit, following a nearly hour-long tirade against the United States by far-left Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega, Obama elected not to defend his own country, instead saying he was “grateful that President Ortega did not blame me for things that happened when I was three months old.” In other words, America might be terrible, but it’s not my fault. And anyone who thought Obama might at least have his secretary of state rebuke Ortega and stand up for America was mistaken. As FOX News reported, “Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ignored two questions about Ortega’s speech, instead offering lengthy praise of a cultural performance of dance and song opening the summit.”35

  Besides Ortega and Chavez, other Latin American leaders took swipes at Obama at the summit. Brazilian president Luis Inácio Lula warned Obama that another summit without Cuba’s Communist leaders would be unacceptable, and Argentine president Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner detailed a host of grievances against America, from the drug war to U.S. support for counterinsurgencies during the 1980s.36

  After a full year of Obama’s enlightened diplomacy, Chavez did-n’t seem to warm up any further. At the Copenhagen summit in December 2009, he called the United States “the great polluter,” which was responsible “for having threatened, for having killed, for genocide as well.” Having called President George W. Bush a “devil” whose podium “still smells of sulfur” in 2006, Chavez said of Obama in 2009, “I still smell sulfur. I still smell sulfur in this world.” He referred to Obama’s recently received Nobel Peace Prize as the “Nobel prize of war” and called Washington’s offer to contribute $10 billion to an annual fund for developing countries “laughable.”37

  THE ANTI-DEMOCRAT

  Like most leftists, Obama sees himself as a champion of democracy but proves otherwise, not just on domestic policy, where he routinely thwarts the people’s will, but on the world stage as well, where he instinctively sides with tyrants, thugs, and dictators, and turns his back on true democratic movements. Nowhere was this on clearer display than with Obama’s appalling handling of the Iranian uprising of 2009.

  Here it was not just his leftist instinct toward tyranny, but also his fear that showing any sympathy to the people might displease the dictator he was trying to court. When outraged Iranians took to the streets in summer 2009 to protest the corrupt “election” of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Obama largely remained neutral, even in the face of the regime’s widespread beatings and killings of peaceful protestors. The administration’s initial response was not to stand with the Iranian people and denounce the fixed election, but rather to insist the engagement policy would continue regardless of the election’s outcome.38

  Everyone knew the election was disgracefully fraudulent. As Senator Joe Lieberman declared, “Through intimidation, violence, manipulation and outright fraud, the Iranian regime has once again made a mockery of democracy and confirmed its repressive and dictatorial character.” Senator John McCain urged Obama to “speak out forcefully” against the “sham, corrupt election” and the “depravation of [the Iranian people’s] fundamental rights,” and to “speak up for the people of Iran” and “make sure the world knows America leads.”39

  But Vice President Joe Biden said on Meet the Press, “We’re going to withhold comment.... I mean we’re just waiting to see.” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton offered the same, saying, “The United States has refrained from commenting on the election in Iran.” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, unwittingly approaching Saturday Night Live absurdity, said the administration was “impressed by the vigorous debate and enthusiasm this election generated.”

  The administration’s feckless response brought derision from critics around the world. British political commentator Nile Gardiner called America’s response “cowardly, lily-livered and wrong” and said it was “undermining America’s standing as a global power.” He denounced it as a “cynical exercise in appeasement that will all end in tears.... As blood flows on the streets of Tehran, the United States government remains as silent as a Trappist Monk.” Even the German government, he said, was “showing more backbone than the White House.”40

  But Iranian democratic protestors persisted. They turned the pressure up a notch on November 4, the thirtieth anniversary of the Iranian leadership’s takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran, when they gathered in the streets and called Obama out. “Obama, Obama, you are either with us or with them,” they yelled. He answered them again, emphatically, with his silence.

  That very day Obama was scorned by the brutal leaders whose favor he was seeking. Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, spurned Obama’s numerous direct overtures to him and warned that negotiating with the United States would be “naïve and perverted,” and that Iranian political leaders must not be “deceived” into engaging in negotiations. Khamenei acknowledged Obama’s outreach, but dismissed it as, essentially, empty rhetoric. He said Obama had “said nice things.... He has given us many spoken and written messages and said: ‘Let’s turn the page and create a new situation. Let’s cooperate with each other in resolving world problems.’” However, “What we have witnessed is completely the opposite of what they have been saying and claiming. On the face of things, they say, ‘Let’s negotiate.’ But... they threaten us and say that if these negotiations do not achieve a desirable result, they will do this and that.” Unmoved by Obama’s acclaimed personal charm, Khamenei said, “Whenever they smile at the officials of the Islamic revolution, when we carefully look at the situation, we notice that they are hiding a dagger behind their back. They have not changed their intentions.”41

  Obama employed the same hapless, morally bankrupt approach toward the true democratic forces in Honduras. He instinctively sided with the country’s socialist thug president, Manuel Zelaya, when Zelaya launched a referendum without the backing of his Congress to organize an assembly to draft a new constitution. The move, which was declared illegal by the Honduran Supreme Court, was a clear attempt to extend his power beyond the constitutionally prescribed term—a tactic previously employed by his ally, Hugo Chavez. Lawlessly, Zelaya and his supporters seized millions of ballots from a military base, but before he could implement his scheme, the Supreme Court ordered his arrest. He was then sent to Costa Rica, and Congress appointed an interim successor.

  Although Zelaya’s leftwing sympathizers denounced his removal as a coup, it was nothing of the sort. The military acted under color of law, by order of the Supreme Court. If anyone was attempting a coup it was Zelaya, who had even terminated a top military leader, General Romeo Vasquez, because he
wouldn’t join the conspiracy to commandeer the crooked referendum.

  The Obama administration, which had refused to “meddle” in the internal affairs of Iran, was all too pleased to inject itself into the Honduran crisis, and as usual, on the side of the thug. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton fretted that the situation had “evolved into a coup.” She stated, “It’s important that we stand for the rule of law”—just as she was siding with the very forces who were defying the rule of law in Honduras.

  Obama continued to violate his own admonition against meddling by pressuring the interim regime to restore Zelaya to power. Claiming Zelaya’s ouster could set a “terrible precedent,” he joined with other Latin American countries—Costa Rica, Peru, Panama, and Colombia—to condemn the move as an illegal coup. To add some teeth to his declarations, Obama slashed military aid by $16.5 million to Honduras, cut off various kinds of economic aid, and suspended issuing most visas to Honduran citizens.

  The interim Honduran government, however, refused to yield to the pressure, even after Zelaya snuck back into the country and took refuge in the Brazilian embassy. Four months after Zelaya’s removal, the Honduran Congress decided by an overwhelming 98 to 12 majority not to reinstate him.42 Honduras instead held a presidential election that, in a shocking turnabout from America’s historic support for democracy, the Obama administration had repeatedly threatened not to recognize unless Zelaya presided over it.