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Caroline Glick writes on this administration’s disastrous Mid East policy.
When US President Barack Obama phoned Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu on Sunday night, in the middle of a security cabinet meeting, he ended any remaining doubt regarding his policy toward Israel and Hamas.
Obama called Netanyahu while the premier was conferring with his senior ministers about how to proceed in Gaza. Some ministers counseled that Israel should continue to limit our forces to specific pinpoint operations aimed at destroying the tunnels of death that Hamas has dug throughout Gaza and into Israeli territory.
Others argued that the only way to truly destroy the tunnels, and keep them destroyed, is for Israel to retake control over the Gaza Strip.
No ministers were recommending that Israel end its operations in Gaza completely. The longer our soldiers fight, the more we learn about the vast dimensions of the Hamas’s terror arsenal, and about the Muslim Brotherhood group’s plans and strategy for using it to destabilize, demoralize and ultimately destroy Israeli society.
The IDF’s discovery of Hamas’s Rosh Hashana plot was the last straw for any Israeli leftists still harboring fantasies about picking up our marbles and going home. Hamas’s plan to use its tunnels to send hundreds of terrorists into multiple Israeli border communities simultaneously and carry out a massacre of unprecedented scope, replete with the abduction of hostages to Gaza, was the rude awakening the Left had avoided since it pushed for Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from Gaza.
In other words, in their discussion Sunday night, Netanyahu and his ministers were without illusions about the gravity of the situation and the imperative of winning – however defined.
But then the telephone rang. And Obama told Netanyahu that Israel must lose. He wants an unconditional “humanitarian” cease-fire that will lead to a permanent one.
And he wants it now. …
… The problem is that in every war, in every conflict and in every contest of wills that has occurred in the Middle East since Obama took office, he has sided with Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood, against America’s allies.
Under Obama, America has switched sides.
More from Jennifer Rubin.
There is growing bipartisan awareness that the entire President Obama/Hillary Clinton/John Kerry foreign policy, not simply in Gaza or even Israel generally, is a disaster. The public realizes this. The latest Associated Press-GfK poll finds that 59 percent of voters disapprove of Obama’s handling of foreign policy (“U.S. role in world affairs”), with only 39 percent approving. In handling relations with other countries, 43 percent approve, 55 percent don’t; on Ukraine, 41 percent approve, 57 percent don’t; on Israel, 37 percent approve, 60 percent do not; on Iraq, 41 percent approve and 57 percent don’t; and on Afghanistan, 38 percent approve and 60 percent do not. Obama has managed to hand the advantage on national security back to the GOP, as voters favor Republicans to protect the country over Democrats (33 to 18 percent). On maintaining the United States’ image (27 to 24 percent) and handling international crises (29 to 20 percent), Republicans also best Democrats. …
… It is therefore a mistake to treat the Obama/Clinton/Kerry foreign policy debacle as a series of discrete errors. Rather, it is their entire worldview that has been flawed from the start. The chickens are only now coming home to roost. To fix what is wrong will require new people, a new outlook and new resources. Those who counseled retreat, retrenchment and reduction in our armed forces should not be entrusted with fixing what they wrecked.
Obama and his minions are so hoping for impeachment that even the mainstream media have noticed. Here’s Time’s Joe Klein on the administration’s transparently disgraceful wish.
… So, this is smart strategy on the part of the Obama political operation, right? Well, grudgingly, yes. But it’s also cynical as hell. The White House is playing with fire, raising the heat in a country that is already brain-fried by partisan frenzy. There is something unseemly, and unprecedented, about an administration saying “Bring it on” when it comes to impeachment. Clinton’s White House certainly never did publicly, even though it was clear from polling that the spectacle would be a disaster for Republicans. Of course, President Clinton had done something immoral, if not impeachable, and Obama has not. Another impeachment ordeal would be terrible for the country.
Also terrible for the country, if all too common, is the DCCC’s impeachment begging—and the President’s constant fat-cat fundraising in a summer of trouble. What if he simply said, “I’m done with fundraising. This is an important election, but there’s just too much going on in the world right now”? His political folks would hate it, but I suspect it might be more effective, and presidential, than sending out tin-cup emails.
Ben Domenech at The Federalist says the president will not be impeached but he will be disgraced.
There’s nothing that President Obama’s current distasteful impeachment trolling resembles so much as Alex Rodriguez in 2004. The slumping hitter, frustrated after a difficult season, triggered a bench-clearing brawl in Boston after being hit by a pitch from Bronson Arroyo. Rodriguez threw down his bat, glared, and started cussing at the pitcher. Red Sox catcher Jason Varitek rushed into his path, and as A-Rod cursed the pitcher and accused him of hitting him on purpose, legend has it Varitek shot back, “We don’t throw at .260 hitters!” …
… So Republicans and Independents keep dropping jaws and cracking monocles, but it’s not going to do any good, and there’s no referee to throw the flag or umpire to call out the president for slapping the glove (well, there is that god-awful record at the Supreme Court, but that works on a delay). Paul Ryan has said that the GOP’s current political differences with the president don’t add up to high crimes and misdemeanors. But even if Obama does this (mass amnesty), and even if the base concludes this is a step too far, there’s really nothing Republicans can do other than to laugh at how much of a failed presidency this has become, at the sheer absurdity and elitism of engaging in mass amnesty at a time when the working class is struggling so much, and get back to winning the argument with the people.
Don’t throw at .260 hitters. Impeachment won’t stop disrespect of the rule of law from this crew. Only crafting a new governing majority will. …
Paul Mirengoff thinks crying impeachment might be a Dem mistake.
The Democrats have been fundraising like crazy based on claims that President Obama is in danger of being impeached by House Republicans. Last night, John wondered whether it’s good idea to tell your party’s members repeatedly that the leader of their party is in danger of being impeached.
The answer, I think, is that it is a good idea to the extent the message is heard only by party members. Few Democrats will be able to conceive of a rationale for impeaching their leader and nearly all will view the alleged threat of impeachment as confirmation that House Republicans are evil.
And the money will pour in.
But money isn’t the key to saving endangered Democrat-held Senate seats and making inroads into the House Republicans majority. Only the votes of independents and true moderates can accomplish these goals.
The Democrats can’t keep the “news” of possible impeachment to themselves. The question thus becomes whether it is a good idea for Democrats to cause independents and moderates to believe that President Obama is in danger of being impeached.
I don’t think so. …
Ordinarily we concentrate on the criminal miscreants in DC, but today Kevin Williamson turns our attention to Illinois and New York. Of course, here in Virginia we have our own problems. Our last GOP governor is on trial for corruption and our present governor is a former Clinton bagman.
There must be something in the DNA of Democratic governors that gives them a very specific sort of superpower — the ability to endure doses of irony that would disable an ordinary mortal, or at least cause him to blush. In my recent jaunt through Illinois (National Review subscribers can read about my adventures here), I frequently was reminded of the intensity of the violent crime plaguing its cities — not only in murder-happy Chicago (“Gangsterville”) but also in the bedeviled city of East St. Louis, where the incidence of criminal violence is five times Chicago’s rate. Illinois is of course a wildly corrupt state — its prisons function as pension homes for its politicians — and Governor Pat Quinn, either through sheer fecklessness or with malice aforethought, allowed his signature antiviolence program to be converted into a political slush fund, currently being investigated by federal criminal authorities. Which is to say, Governor Quinn’s main anticrime measure is being investigated as a criminal enterprise.
I have a writer’s superstition that the fundamental truth about a politician can be revealed through anagrams, though the best I can do for Governor Pat Quinn is “porn-quoting raven,” which sounds like it ought to be a literary motif from the poems of Edgar Allan Hoe. Andrew Cuomo’s anagram — “Owed ACORN . . . Um?” — is probably more fitting. And Cuomo the Lesser is having some troubles quite similar to those of the flighty Quinn, having empaneled an inquisition into corruption in New YorkState government, known as the Moreland Commission. The Moreland Commission was supposed to be independent, but it wasn’t, and Governor Cuomo is accused of having “interfered” with it, the usage of that word in the context of Albany bringing to mind the ancient euphemism “interfering with children.” According to the New York Times, the executive director of the commission, Regina Calcaterra acted as Governor Cuomo’s spy on the panel and as his factotum, notably by blocking subpoenas directed at the state real-estate board. Real-estate interests have been among Governor Cuomo’s most reliable financial supporters. …