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The president is pretty laid back when dealing with enemies like Putin, ISIS, and Hamas. But he’s “enraged” with our ally Israel. Bret Stephens notes the disconnect.
Barack Obama “has become ‘enraged’ at the Israeli government, both for its actions and for its treatment of his chief diplomat, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry. ” So reports the Jerusalem Post, based on the testimony of Martin Indyk, until recently a special Middle East envoy for the president. The war in Gaza, Mr. Indyk adds, has had “a very negative impact” on Jerusalem’s relations with Washington.
Think about this. Enraged. Not “alarmed” or “concerned” or “irritated” or even “angered.” Anger is a feeling. Rage is a frenzy. Anger passes. Rage feeds on itself. Anger is specific. Rage is obsessional, neurotic.
And Mr. Obama—No Drama Obama, the president who prides himself on his cool, a man whose emotional detachment is said to explain his intellectual strength—is enraged. With Israel. Which has just been hit by several thousand unguided rockets and 30-odd terror tunnels, a 50-day war, the forced closure of its one major airport, accusations of “genocide” by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, anti-Semitic protests throughout Europe, general condemnation across the world. This is the country that is the object of the president’s rage.
Think about this some more. In the summer in which Mr. Obama became “enraged” with Israel, Islamic State terrorists seized Mosul and massacred Shiite soldiers in open pits, Russian separatists shot down a civilian jetliner, Hamas executed 18 “collaborators” in broad daylight, Bashar Assad’s forces in Syria came close to encircling Aleppo with the aim of starving the city into submission, a brave American journalist had his throat slit on YouTube by a British jihadist, Russian troops openly invaded Ukraine, and Chinese jets harassed U.S. surveillance planes over international waters.
Mr. Obama or his administration responded to these events with varying degrees of concern, censure and indignation. But rage? …
One of our current problems is we have a president who is truly ignorant of history. Victor Davis Hanson is our guide.
… What explains Obama’s confusion?
A lack of knowledge of basic history explains a lot. Obama or his speechwriters have often seemed confused about the liberation of Auschwitz, “Polish death camps,” the political history of Texas, or the linguistic relationship between Austria and Germany. Obama reassured us during the Bowe Bergdahl affair that George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt all similarly got American prisoners back when their wars ended — except that none of them were in office when the Revolutionary War, Civil War, or World War II officially ended.
Contrary to Obama’s assertion, President Rutherford B. Hayes never dismissed the potential of the telephone. Obama once praised the city of Cordoba as part of a proud Islamic tradition of tolerance during the brutal Spanish Inquisition — forgetting that by the beginning of the Inquisition an almost exclusively Christian Cordoba had few Muslims left.
A Pollyannaish belief in historical predetermination seems to substitute for action. If Obama believes that evil should be absent in the 21st century, or that the arc of the moral universe must always bend toward justice, or that being on the wrong side of history has consequences, then he may think inanimate forces can take care of things as we need merely watch.
In truth, history is messier. Unfortunately, only force will stop seventh-century monsters like the Islamic State from killing thousands more innocents. Obama may think that reminding Putin that he is now in the 21st century will so embarrass the dictator that he will back off from Ukraine. But the brutish Putin may think that not being labeled a 21st-century civilized sophisticate is a compliment.
In 1935, French foreign minister Pierre Laval warned Joseph Stalin that the Pope would admonish him to go easy on Catholics — as if such moral lectures worked in the supposedly civilized 20th century. Stalin quickly disabused Laval of that naiveté. “The Pope?” Stalin asked, “How many divisions has he got?” …
Ron Fournier gets a turn too.
… Instead of clarity, we get condescending lectures, like the one Obama gave rich supporters about a messy world and social media.
Rather than decisiveness, the White House stalls with defensive spin, such as this gem from senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer: “There’s no timetable for solving these problems that’s going to meet the cable-news cycle.” As if the enemy is CNN, and not ISIS, which has proven to be more nimble and quick than Obama.
The White House public relations staff must think Americans are pretty dumb. How else do you explain the way chief spokeswoman Jennifer Palmieri defended Obama for playing golf immediately after an address about the slaughter of journalist James Foley? “His concern for the Foleys and Jim,” Palmieri said, “was evident to all who saw and heard his statement.” Yes, just as evident as what else the world saw that day: the president’s golf cart, his golf clothes, and his wide, sporty smile.
The racially charged protests in Ferguson brought more second-guessing of Obama, as conservative and liberal partisans objected to his balanced approach. I found his tone refreshing in describing the conflict between a mostly African-American community and a majority-white police department, but Obama seems less clear-eyed about the international stage.
He tries to manage the world as he hopes it will be, rather than lead the world as it is. Yes, foreign policy is hard. These issues are both historic and existential. The American public is fickle. Congress is all but useless. And our allies in Europe are loathe to lead—or even to pay a fair price for fighting threats closer to their borders than our own.
But that’s why only one person gets to be president of the United States, and, presumably, that’s why Obama asked twice to be elected. He wanted the job. He knew its challenges (including the existence of social media). He thought he could lead. When does he get started?
Ron Fournier used to be a certified media liberal, but he is no more. But. the NY Times’ Frank Bruni is still a card carrier. What does he think of his hero?
There are things that you think and things that you say.
There’s what you reckon with privately and what you utter publicly.
There are discussions suitable for a lecture hall and those that befit the bully pulpit.
These sets overlap but aren’t the same. Has President Obama lost sight of that?
It’s a question fairly asked after his statement last week that “we don’t have a strategy yet” for dealing with Islamic extremists in Syria. Not having a strategy, at least a fixed, definitive one, is understandable. The options aren’t great, the answers aren’t easy and the stakes are enormous.
But announcing as much? It’s hard to see any percentage in that. It gives no comfort to Americans. It puts no fear in our enemies.
Just as curious was what Obama followed that up with.
Speaking at a fund-raiser on Friday, he told donors, “If you watch the nightly news, it feels like the world is falling apart.” He had that much right.
But it wasn’t the whole of his message. In a statement of the obvious, he also said, “The world has always been messy.” And he coupled that with a needless comparison, advising Americans to bear in mind that the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, the rapacity of Putin, the bedlam in Libya and the rest of it were “not something that is comparable to the challenges we faced during the Cold War.” …
Michael Barone posts on the president who is uninterested in other people.
Some time ago I contrasted the reaction a conservative would get if he were in the same room with the two most consequential politicians of the 1990s, Bill Clinton and Rudy Giuliani.
If you were in a room with Bill Clinton, he would discover the one issue out of 100 on which you agreed; he would probe you with questions, comments, suggestions; and he would tell you that you enabled him to understand it far better than he ever had before.
If you were in a room with Rudy Giuliani, he would discover the one issue out of 100 on which you disagreed; he would ask pointed questions and pepper you with objections; he would tell you that you are wrong on the facts and wrong on the law, and that you needed to admit you were utterly mistaken.
The difference is partly a matter of personality and temperament, and of regional style: Southern affability, New York prickliness. …
… The ability to read other people comes more easily if you’re interested in others, curious to learn what makes them tick. It comes harder or not at all if you’re transfixed with your image of yourself.
Which seems to be the case with Barack Obama. Not only is he not much interested in the details of public policy, as Jay Cost argues persuasively in a recent article for the Weekly Standard. He is also, as even his admirers concede, not much inclined to schmooze with other politicians, even his fellow Democrats. …
… Obama critics have pointed out his fondness for the first person singular. He said “I,” “me,” or “my” 63 times in his 1,631-word eulogy for Hawaii Sen. Daniel Inouye. He spoke twice as long about his own family experiences as the heroism for which Inouye was awarded the Medal of Honor.
Bill Clinton and Rudy Giuliani succeeded in large part because they were curious about other people different from themselves. Barack Obama prefers to look in the mirror.
Another liberal, Dana Milbank, is unnerved by the president’s happy talk.
Obama has been giving Americans a pep talk, essentially counseling them not to let international turmoil get in the way of the domestic economic recovery. “The world has always been messy,” he said Friday. “In part, we’re just noticing now because of social media and our capacity to see in intimate detail the hardships that people are going through.”
So we wouldn’t have fussed over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine if not for Facebook? Or worried about terrorists taking over much of Syria and Iraq if not for Twitter? This explanation, following Obama’s indiscrete admission Thursday that “we don’t have a strategy yet” for military action against ISIS, adds to the impression that Obama is disengaged.
In short, Americans would worry less if Obama worried more.
A poll released last week by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center found that 54 percent of the public thinks Obama is “not tough enough” in foreign policy. Americans are not necessarily asking for more military action — Pew’s polls also have found a record number of Americans saying the United States should mind its own business — but they seem to be craving clarity. As National Journal’s Ron Fournier put it: “While people don’t want their president to be hawkish, they hate to see him weakish.”
Richard Fernandez posts in the Belmont Club about the urgency in putting out fires.
… One of the most interesting things about the Battle of Midway in 1942 was that it was just as much lost by the Japanese firemen as it was won by USN aviators. The most powerful ship in the Japanese fleet was the Akagi. It was hit by only one bomb, a 1,000 pounder dropped by Lt. Richard Best. No one on the bridge at first believed that a single hit could pose a serious danger to the huge ship. The fire it started just under the smashed deck elevator was for some minutes unobserved — until the gasoline which had been sloshing around the hanger from punctured gas tanks reached it. And then a deadly chain initiated. The fire set off one armed aircraft after the other, like a string of Chinese firecrackers. All of a sudden the blaze was out of control. The fiery fingers of the conflagration crept ever downward to the magazines and gasoline fuel tanks. By dawn the next day the Akagi was nothing but a lump of slag and scuttled by the escorting destroyers.
The main reasons for the Akagi‘s loss were later ascribed to the early destruction of its fire isolation curtains and the absence of a working foam suppression system. They didn’t smother the blaze when they had the chance. Then they ran out of time. And then they ran out of ship. When facing a fire, the golden rule is hit it as hard as you can while it is small. Once you start playing the “fierce minimalist” with fire, it is apt to get away from you.
During the worst part of the fire season in southern California, strong Santa Ana winds will blow carpets of burning embers across eight-lane freeways. During the 1988 fires in Yellowstone National Park, hot embers managed to cross the Lewis Canyon, a natural canyon up to a mile wide and 600 feet (180 m) deep. In Australia, firebreaks are less effective against eucalyptus forest fires, since intense fires in tinder-dry eucalyptus forest spread through flying embers, which can be carried by the winds to trigger new blazes several kilometres away.
This almost exactly describes the problem the president finds himself in. Every blaze we now see around us appeared to be only a humble ember until recently. Only two years ago Obama was ridiculing Romney for thinking Russia would be a problem. Only this year he was describing ISIS as a junior varsity team. Today the Ukraine is being invaded. Islamists are swimming in the U.S. Embassy pool in Libya. Just yesterday ISIS posted video of a second beheaded American journalist on YouTube. And those thousands of “American”, “British” and “Australian” jihadis drifting back — those are your sparks right there.
What happened? Somehow yesterday’s gentle campfires are now raging conflagrations. It would seem that of the two presidents, Franklin Roosevelt may have had the better understanding of fire. The president may think he’s in control. But maybe he’s not. The important thing is for the president’s supporters to stop kidding themselves. They’ve wasted enough time already without getting lost in catchphrases like “fierce minimalist.”
We like to close the week with late night humor from Andy Malcolm. But, he has not posted yet so for humor, Mr. Malcolm quotes the president and then follows with his thoughts in bold type.
… Obama on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: “We are not taking military action to solve the Ukrainian problem.” Did anyone in Negotiation 101 ever mention that leaders rarely get what they want by announcing out of the gate what they will not do?
“President Putin and Russia have repeatedly passed by potential off-ramps to resolve this diplomatically. And so in our consultations with our European allies and partners, my expectation is that we will take additional (sanction) steps primarily because we have not seen any meaningful action on the part of Russia to actually try to resolve this in diplomatic fashion.
“And I think that the sanctions that we’ve already applied have been effective.” How exactly have they been effective if you’ve seen no ‘meaningful action on the part of Russia’?
And what evidence do you have of Russian suffering from your sanctions? “Are there long lines of people trying to emigrate into Russia?”
We saved for last a quote from Vice President Joe Biden’s speech to Detroit union members on Monday: “So, folks, it’s time to take back America!” Wait! What? From whom? You and Barack have been in charge these past 2,052 days.