Obama's Dangerously Aimless Foreign Policiy

Obama foreign policy dangerously aimless

16

Steve Huntley August 29, 2014 5:00PM

President Barack Obama speaks Monday in the White House Briefing Room about ISIS. (/MANDEL NGANMANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images)

ARTICLE EXTRAS

View Gallery

Updated: August 31, 2014 2:30AM

 

President Barack Obama’s statement that “we don’t have a strategy yet” against the Islamist army rampaging across Syria will hearten Americans opposed to escalating the U.S. role in the Middle East chaos. But it’s hard to see how the fanatics of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria won’t interpret it as Obama backing away from another American “red line.”

That’s because Obama only a week ago called ISIS a “cancer” while his military and foreign policy advisers said it was an “imminent threat” (Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel) that “will eventually have to be defeated” and attacked in Syria (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey) and that “the United States of America will never back down in the face of such evil” (Secretary of State John Kerry).

In his latest statement, Obama also said, “I think what I’ve seen in some of the news reports suggests that folks are getting a little further ahead of where we’re at than we currently are.” Was he referring to his advisers, or to calls to go to Congress to seek authorization for a stepped-up military campaign against ISIS? Could be it was both.

I was one who didn’t think Kerry, Hagel and Dempsey would speak out of school. It’s starting to look like they did, or perhaps Obama is having second thoughts about a tough stance now that Kurdish and Iraqi forces backed by U.S. airstrikes seemed to have foiled the threat of ISIS to overrun northern Iraq and the memory of the beheading of journalist James Foley is receding.

As he showed in his retreat from the “red line” on Syria’s use of chemical weapons a year ago, Obama won’t hesitate to back down from a hard line no matter how it appears to friend or foe. Then his defenders said he was reversing the threat to use military force against Syria because it wouldn’t have support in Congress. That might have been true, but his critics were correct that the about-face undermined U.S. credibility with our allies and adversaries.

This time the White House immediately realized the “we don’t have a strategy” remark was a gaffe. A presidential spokesman followed up to say what Obama meant was that he was awaiting military options from the Pentagon.

Maybe Obama will eventually order a robust military campaign against ISIS, but the narrative of a feckless, weak U.S. role in world affairs already has taken hold. The United States was left mostly on the sidelines throughout the Israeli-Hamas war. Egypt and the United Arab Emirates conducted airstrikes against Islamist forces in Libya without consulting Washington.

Russia has launched a new invasion of eastern Ukraine in an apparent attempt to secure a land bridge to the Crimea peninsula Moscow annexed only a few months ago. President Vladimir Putin appears secure that the West won’t do anything significant to foil his expansionist plans. Indeed, Obama again ruled out shipping arms to Ukraine, though its military has proved to be tough, effective and resilient in combatting the Russian-backed separatists.

Obama’s defenders will argue that many world events are beyond Washington’s control and afford no good options. Furthermore, they will claim that Obama did not this time draw a red line, that he put the brakes on before doing that.

Still, plenty of tough talk has come from Obama’s closest advisers in recent days. Now he is saying something different. When the U.S. government doesn’t speak in one voice, the world sees an indecisive, divided, irresolute and even weak administration. That’s not good for America nor for global stability.

Email: shuntley.cst@gmail.com

16

---

Mitch Up 4 Points in New Poll

LEXINGTON, Ky. (WKYT) -

With two months to go before the November election, a new Bluegrass Poll found Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell strengthening his lead over his Democratic challenger Alison Lundergan Grimes.

The poll - conducted for WKYT-TV, the Lexington Herald-Leader, the Louisville Courier-Journal, and WHAS-TV - found the longtime Kentucky senator's re-election bid leading by four percentage points in the race with Grimes and Libertarian David Patterson.

McConnell’s four-point lead in his strongest 2014 Bluegrass Poll to date. In February, Grimes was leading the race by four percentage points.

"Clearly the race remains competitive," said WKYT political editor Bill Bryant. "But these new numbers indicate McConnell has gained some advantage at an important time in the campaign."

McConnell's entire lead comes from men, where he is up by 10 points. The contest is effectively even among women.
“One of Grimes’ primary challenges will be to attract more support from women which has proven elusive in our last two polls,” said Bryant.

The Bluegrass Poll also found McConnell's favorable opinion among those polled up as well to 36 percent. It was only 29 percent in May. 
McConnell's challenge remains his 46-percent unfavorable rating.

“McConnell has been working to soften his image and appear more connected to Kentuckians,” said Bryant. “His challenge is to sell his experience in Washington as an asset to the state rather than a drawback.”

Grimes scored 38 percent in favorability. At 37 percent, her unfavorable score was nine percentage points lower than McConnell's.

Voters by 2:1 trust McConnell to protect Kentucky's coal interests. Voters by 3:2 trust McConnell on foreign policy and by 4:3 trust him on immigration over his rivals. However, the Bluegrass Poll found Kentuckians split on whether McConnell or Grimes is stronger on the economy. By a 5:3 margin, Grimes leads as most trusted to improve the lives of women.

The Bluegrass Poll found McConnell’s biggest geographical strength was in western and eastern Kentucky where he had significant advantage over Grimes. While Grimes edged out McConnell in Louisville, Lexington, and the areas defined as central and northern Kentucky, her leads were not as great as McConnell’s in western and eastern Kentucky.

In similar results to the McConnell-Grimes race, 47 percent of those polled said Republicans would do a better job running the Senate while 43 percent said Democrats. In both cases, Republicans are ahead by four percentage points.

McConnell's 1984 election to the U.S. Senate marked the first time a Republican won a statewide office in Kentucky since 1968. In 2006, Republicans elected him to be the their leader in the Senate.

In 2011, Grimes made her first step into politics by entering the race to replace former Secretary of State Trey Grayson. She went on to beat Gov. Steve Beshear's appointee to finish Grayson's term in the Democratic primary and then soundly beat the Republican businessman Bill Johnson in the general election that focused highly on requiring photo IDs in order to vote.

Before politics, Grimes was a Lexington attorney.

For the Bluegrass Poll, SurveyUSA interviewed 700 state of Kentucky adults between August 25 and 27. Of the adults, 647 were registered to vote. Of the registered voters, 569 were determined by SurveyUSA to be likely to vote in the November 4 general election. This research was conducted using blended sample, mixed mode. Respondents reachable on a home telephone (72 percent of likely voters) were interviewed on their home telephone in the recorded voice of a professional announcer. Respondents not reachable on a home telephone were shown a questionnaire on their smartphone, tablet or other electronic device.

Fiscal Crisis America’s real ice bucket challenge

Column: America’s real ice bucket challenge

First Lady Deborah Bryant does the honors of pouring a bucket of ice water over her husband, Gov. Phil Bryant, Friday, Aug. 22, 2014 as he undertakes the Ice Bucket Challenge outside the Governor's Mansion at the Capitol in Jackson, Miss., (Joe Ellis/AP)

DANA MILBANK 
AUGUST 29, 2014

I’m just back from vacation in Europe, where, to judge from the political headlines coming out of the United States, this country had no greater care than which of its leaders would next be soaked in cold water.

George W. Bush was doused by his wife, Laura, and then nominated Bill Clinton to take the ice-bucket challenge for charity. Mitt Romney got a bucket poured on him by his former running mate, Paul Ryan, who joined other possible 2016 presidential aspirants Scott Walker andChris Christie in performing the ritual. Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman, dumped a bucket on his wife, NBC’s Andrea Mitchell, who then tapped Hillary Clinton for the treatment.

In my unplugged state, the occasional ice-bucket updates provided a sense of well-being: If this is going on, things must not be too bad in Ferguson, Mo., or with the Islamic State, or with Ebola. And so I pursued my own ice-bucket challenge, which involved a bottle of wine and a view of the sea.

But on my first day back in Washington, the Congressional Budget Office threw cold water on my tranquility. Its semiannual report on thefederal government’s fiscal health, released Wednesday, was downright bone-chilling.

The top-line conclusions were grim enough, if not catastrophic: The federal budget deficit would shrink this year, but less than had been expected. The economy would continue its expansion this year — but at less than half the rate forecast earlier.

Read further, though, and you see that the long-term fiscal disaster, predicted for some time, has crept into the short term. We’re several years into the expansion, and a full recovery from the 2008 collapse should come in the next few years, the CBO predicts — but just in time for that long-dreaded era when interest payments on the debt and the costs of Medicare and Social Security begin to crowd out everything else the government does. While we watch Lady Gaga and Justin Timberlake take their ice baths, the wolf is at the door.

Federal debt will reach 74 percent of gross domestic product this year, more than twice what it was at the end of 2007 and higher than in any year since 1950, the nonpartisan CBO found. In a decade, it will hit 77 percent; in 25 years, 100 percent — “a level seen only once before in U.S. history, just after World War II.”

What’s more, 85 percent of the federal government’s spending increases between now and 2024 will be consumed by just three items: Social Security (which will claim 28 percent of the increase), Medicare and other health-care programs (32 percent) and interest on the debt (25 percent). Spending on everything else — military and domestic programs alike — would fall to the lowest proportion of the economy since at least 1940, when such statistics were first collected.

The warnings, if not new, are stark, and the report offers an occasion to reflect on the folly of the budget battles of the past four years. Conservatives threatening government shutdowns and defaults forced discretionary spending down to levels not seen since early last century — hampering the economic recovery — and yet the debt continues to rise.

That’s because of the cowardice of leaders on both sides, who have avoided serious changes to the tax code and to Medicare and the other “mandatory” spending programs that are the real problem. President Obama, in his news conference Thursday afternoon, made no mention of this as he cited recent evidence of growth. “Over the past four-and-a-half years, our businesses have now created nearly 10 million new jobs,”he said, “so there are reasons to feel good about the direction we’re headed.”

He’s correct — if you care only about the next three years. The CBO forecast that deficits would continue to shrink over the next few years as the economy, after a long delay, finally begins to reach its potential. But after 2018, deficits are forecast to rise again as baby boomers retire and require new spending on entitlement programs. Medicare’s trustees reported last month that the program would become insolvent in 2030 (slightly better than earlier forecasts, in part because of modest improvements made by Obamacare) and Social Security would run into trouble a few years later.

This, then, should be the real ice-bucket challenge. Washington has just a few years until deficits swell again and any changes to these programs become much more painful. Then it won’t be a bracing splash of ice water, but a deep and deadly freeze.

Rich Lowry: Warren Buffett Betrays His Country

Rich Lowry: Warren Buffett Betrays His Country

on Sat, 30 Aug 2014

Note from Senior Management: National Review Editor-in-Chief Rich Lowry takes on Warren Buffett's tax strategy in Politico. We reprint here.

It must have been a bitter moment for President Barack Obama when he got the news that his favorite economic guru not only doesn’t like paying taxes but hates America.

Warren Buffett, whose eponymous rule was a staple of Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign, is underwriting Burger King’s proposed move to Canada that the left is denouncing as practically the most dastardly plot since the Rosenbergs helped the Soviets get the atomic bomb.

Burger King is acquiring the Canadian coffee and doughnuts chain Tim Hortons in what is called a “corporate inversion.” At least that’s the technical term for it. Obama and the left prefer to call it by names usually reserved for spies and AWOL soldiers before they get a last cigarette and a blindfold.

The practice of corporate inversion, or relocating overseas to avoid the burden of U.S. taxes, offends the president’s sense of “economic patriotism,” as he put it in a speech a few weeks ago. He referred to firms that make this move as “corporate deserters” taking advantage of an “unpatriotic tax loophole.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders, the socialist from Vermont, says companies like Burger King are betraying America’s veterans, and “have absolutely no loyalty to the people of the United States and our government.” Sen. Sherrod Brown, a Democrat from Ohio, has called for a boycott. Online petitions are targeting the chain for its rank abandonment of the United States.

This outpouring of patriotic fervor is something to behold, especially from the same sort of people who used to think expecting a politician to wear a flag lapel pin was a crudely nationalistic imposition.

The left almost universally scorns the idea that a closely held family business might have religious motivations — and was outraged by the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision for this reason — yet believes that enormous globe-bestriding corporations should have patriotic feelings.

Burger King is owned, by the way, by a Brazilian private equity firm. Its Brazilian patriotism should be in doubt, too, since it showed no sign of sinking into a months-long funk after Germany crushed Brazil in the World Cup semifinal.

Obama: Everything Just Seems Bad Because of Social Media

by Jonathan Strong

Aug 29, 2014 3:28 PM PT

At a Democratic National Committee fundraiser in New York Friday, President Obama attributed people's pervasive sense the world is falling apart to “social media.”

“The world’s always been messy… we’re just noticing now in part because of social media,” Obama said.

“I can see why a lot of folks are troubled,” he said. But American military superiority has never been greater, he added, according to a pool report.

Obama has faced withering criticism for taking a lengthy vacation that included nine rounds of golf, while terrorist group Islamic State (ISIS) has been on the march in Iraq, an Ebola crisis is spreading in Africa, and Russia is making increasingly aggressive moves against Ukraine.

“If you watch the nightly news, it feels like the world is falling apart,” Obama said. He said this is a time of extraordinary changes around the world. He cited several hotspots, saying, “We’ve seen the barbarity of an organization like ISIL.”

The Middle East is challenging, “but it’s been challenging for quite a while,” Obama said, adding that this challenge was not comparable to the Cold War.

Previous Next 

America Deserves Better than an Empty Suit with No Strategy Against Radical Islam

by Robert Davi

Aug 30, 2014 7:44 AM PT

Let me pose a question. Do you think America is better off today then it was in 1989?

Some of you may not even have been born yet to remember. But for those of you that were, what say you?

You may ask, "well, what made you chose 1989?" What is the significance of that particular date? It was 10 years after the failed presidency of Jimmy Carter, a decent fellow; I remember how we were supposed to overlook his incompetency by saying, "I think he is a decent fellow." The date is also after two terms with Hollywood B-actor Ronald Reagan as president, whom we were led to believe, by the media, was not intelligent and out of touch.

Are we better of today than in 2001? How about 2008? Is the world better off? If your answer is no, then the question is why and what is the difference between then and now? Well, the leadership that currently occupies our government and the incremental acceptance by both parties to a weakening of American principles, yes American principles, is to blame! I contend that both parties are anemic and incompetent. Oh, there may be some politicians that are quite "decent" but there is a lack of decisive, intense, crystal-clear, courageous, imaginative leadership in both parties.

Combine that with most of the media being more then biased, driven by an agenda that is detrimental to the cause of freedom and to the idea of an exceptional America. Then add an educational system that has slowly been hijacked by the extreme left and, like termites, are eating away at American values replacing them with Common Core.

Our culture has made it more important to worry about recycling than the defense of our country. Dear friends, we are on the verge of a bigger crisis than Hitler, Hirohito, Mussolini and Mao combined ever presented.

I have heard over and over a certain kind of elitist discourse from the left that talks about "nuance." As if being "nuanced " is a quality the left equates with intelligence. Well guess what? Take your "nuance " and shove it up your indecisive behinds.

Where is the outrage for a Commander in Chief not having a "strategy" against the most dangerous threat to freedom since the dawn of man! If a football coach preparing to play the Super Bowl said, "We don't have a strategy" he would be fired! Let's say even if he didn't have a clear strategy, he would at least be inspirational!

In 2004, when I first heard then Sen. Obama speak I was inspired. I remember feeling, "he will be the next president of the United States." Now, after six years and hearing him speak this week, I feel we are witnessing a deliberate dereliction of duty.

Our president should at least inspire and inform. Our president should have made a speech like British Prime Minister David Cameron did.

The president must be held accountable for his administration redefining radical Islam as a criminal problem and not one of ideology! We must also take to task Vice President Joe Biden, and the whole caboodle of our present government who lack the guts to tell the American people the truth.

I do not want "nuance. I do not want pastels. I want bold colors--red, white and blue.

Previous Next 

Saudi king warns West will be jihadists' next target

Saudi king warns West will be jihadists' next target

---

Jeddah (Saudi Arabia) (AFP) - King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia has warned that the West will be the next target of the jihadists sweeping through Syria and Iraq, unless there is "rapid" action.

"If we ignore them, I am sure they will reach Europe in a month and America in another month," he said in remarks quoted on Saturday by Asharq al-Awsat daily and Saudi-backed Al-Arabiya television station.

"Terrorism knows no border and its danger could affect several countries outside the Middle East," said the king who was speaking at a welcoming ceremony on Friday for new ambassadors, including a new envoy from Saudi ally the United States.

The Islamic State (IS) jihadist group has prompted widespread concern as it advances in both Syria and Iraq, killing hundreds of people, including in gruesome beheadings and mass executions.

Lack of action would be "unacceptable" in the face of the phenomenon, King Abdullah said.

"You see how they (jihadists) carry out beheadings and make children show the severed heads in the street," he said, condemning the "cruelty" of such acts.

"It is no secret to you, what they have done and what they have yet to do. I ask you to transmit this message to your leaders: 'Fight terrorism with force, reason and (necessary) speed'."

President Barack Obama has yet to decide whether the United States should launch raids against positions held by the Islamic State jihadist group in Syria to follow US air strikes on IS activities in Iraq.

US Secretary of State John Kerry called Friday for a global coalition to combat Islamic State fighters' "genocidal agenda".

Writing in the New York Times, Kerry said he and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel will meet European counterparts on the sidelines of a NATO summit in Wales next week, to enlist assistance.

They will then travel on to the Middle East to build support "among the countries that are most directly threatened".

"With a united response led by the United States and the broadest possible coalition of nations, the cancer of ISIS will not be allowed to spread to other countries," Kerry said in Friday's op-ed piece.

Asharq Al-Awsat said the king urged other countries to join the UN Counter-Terrorism Centre, set up in 2011 to respond to new threats, and to which Saudi Arabia has made a grant of $100 million.