Obama’s is one of the most disastrous foreign policies of any president ever. His latest outrage is the dual absurdities of, on one hand putting Israel on a list of state sponsors of terrorism, while on the other hand opening a dialog with and bestowing diplomatic legitimacy upon the terrorists of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.

This is the schizophrenic mess that Obama’s anti-western centric foreign policy ideas have created. It shouldn’t be much of a surprise, though. Upon becoming President Obama almost immediately launched into a series of one more example of Obama giving Israel the back of his hand.

In 2008, the Bush administration created a list of nations whose citizens asking to visit our country the administration thought needed to be watched. This list contained nations that were determined to be possible state sponsors of terrorism. Nations like North Korea, Yemen, Libya, Turkmenistan, and Syria appeared on this list of nations that, in the State Department’s words, “have shown a tendency to promote, produce, or protect terrorist organizations or their members.”

However, the list put out during the Bush years has been altered by the Obama administration. On the 2011 list, North Korea has been removed while Israel has been added. Obama apparently feels Israel is worse than North Korea.

As my friend Jeff Dunetz says: “Only in the twisted world of the Obama Administration, where allies are trashed, and enemies are embraced, could the tiny nation of Israel, on the front lines of the war on terror for decades, be on a list of 36 nations which “have shown a tendency to promote, produce, or protect terrorist organizations or their members.’”

Then, to offset that news, the Obama administration has made another decision as opposite of the one above as possible. Obama and his State Dept. have decided that actual terrorists deserve to be given official diplomatic recognition!

That’s right, Obama has decided that the terrorists of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt deserve to be treated as a legitimate political body, one that deserves official recognition by the USA.

In explanation, an Obama administration official told the media that, “The political landscape in Egypt has changed, and is changing… It is in our interests to engage with all of the parties that are competing for parliament or the presidency.”

So, on one hand, Israel, our truest ally in the Mid East, is called a “state sponsor of terror,” while an actual terrorist outfit is “in our interests to engage.”

Meanwhile, the president himself won’t even cross the national mall to go meet with Senate Republicans to discuss the budget. I suppose it won’t be long before Obama puts the GOP on the list of state sponsors of terror.

The débacle of Washington’s handling of the Libya issue is symbolic of a wider problem at the heart of the Obama administration’s foreign policy. The fact that it took ten days and at least a thousand dead on the streets of Libya’s cities before President Obama finally mustered the courage to call for Muammar “mad dog” Gaddafi to step down is highly embarrassing for the world’s only superpower, and emblematic of a deer-in-the-headlights approach to world leadership. Washington seems incapable of decisive decision-making on foreign policy at the moment, a far cry from the days when it swept entire regimes from power, and defeated America’s enemies with deep-seated conviction and an unshakeable drive for victory.

Just a few years ago the United States was genuinely feared on the world stage, and dictatorial regimes, strategic adversaries and state sponsors of terror trod carefully in the face of the world’s most powerful nation. Now Washington appears weak, rudderless and frequently confused in its approach. From Tehran to Tripoli, the Obama administration has been pathetically slow to lead, and afraid to condemn acts of state-sponsored repression and violence. When protesters took to the streets to demonstrate against the Islamist dictatorship in Iran in 2009, the brutal repression that greeted them was hardly a blip on Barack Obama’s teleprompter screen, barely meriting a response from a largely silent presidency.

Isn’t this why Obama picked Joe Biden to be his vice president, because of all the vast foreign policy experience? How’s that working out? So far, Obama generally seems to spend as much time as possible demeaning our allies and working to alienate them, while either ignoring our enemies or looking for dialogue with them.

It has also become abundantly clear that the Obama team attaches little importance to human rights issues, and in contrast to the previous administration has not pursued a freedom agenda in the Middle East and elsewhere. It places far greater value upon engagement with hostile regimes, even if they are carrying out gross human rights abuses, in the mistaken belief that appeasement enhances security. This has been the case with Iran, Russia and North Korea for example. This administration has also been all too willing to sacrifice US leadership in deference to supranational institutions such as the United Nations, whose track record in standing up to dictatorships has been virtually non-existent.

That’s simply the way Obama rolls. And it highlights exactly why Joe Biden stated that being President does not lend itself to on the job training. A few years as a Senator, some time spent in the Illinois legislature, and a few years as a community organizer did not prepare him for actually being the person in charge of the most powerful nation on Earth. Now, is any president actually ready for the burden placed upon him? Of course not, but, some are more prepared than others, and have a staff that understands what to do, which is why Qaddafi’s Libya is in a much weaker position to use WMD

Senior administration officials and Pentagon planners, as they discuss sanctions and a possible no-fly zone to neutralize the Libyan air force, say that the 2003 deal removed Colonel Qaddafi’s biggest trump card: the threat of using a nuclear weapon, or even just selling nuclear material or technology, if he believed it was the only way to save his 42-year rule. While Colonel Qaddafi retains a stockpile of mustard gas, it is not clear he has any effective way to deploy it.

While it is unclear whether he might have ultimately succeeded in building nuclear weapons, as part of the deal (Qaddafi) gave up thousands of shells filled with chemical weapons.

The NY Times does everything it can to avoid giving any kudos and praise to Bush, but, this highlights the difference between Obama and Bush: one made the United States feared by most enemies, the other makes those same enemies bold, while pissing off our allies.

Crossed at Pirate’s Cove. Follow me on Twitter @WilliamTeach.

North Korea vowed Saturday to respond with ”powerful nuclear deterrence” to joint U.S. and South Korean military exercises poised to begin this weekend, saying the drills amount to a provocation that would prompt ”retaliatory sacred war.”

North Korea routinely threatens war when South Korea and the U.S. hold joint military drills, which Pyongyang sees as a rehearsal for an attack on the communist North. The latest threat comes amid increased tensions on the divided peninsula over the deadly sinking of a South Korean warship that Seoul and Washington blame on Pyongyang.

Welcome to dealing with nutjobs, Mr. President! Actually, you should be used to this type of over the top unhinged “I’m going to cry and scream till you give me a unicorn” behavior, considering the state of your voter base.

Crossed at Pirate’s Cove. Follow me on Twitter @WilliamTeach

Globalization, China rising, and FDR’s entitlement explosion are the driving forces.

Partisanship is running high these days, if you listen to any of the commentators, but one thing that partisans from both sides agree on is this: big changes are quickly coming to America.

Conservatives have been saying that Obama is a radical president intent on bringing socialism to America. Obama said that he was going to “fundamentally transform” America, prompting Glenn Beck to ask, “Transform into what?”

The passage of Arizona’s recent immigration law, according to liberals, signals America’s first steps into Nazi-ism or apartheid. This view has even been endorsed by Rep. Jared Polis of Colorado: “It is absolutely reminiscent of second class status of Jews in Germany prior to World War II.” (And they say Beck’s investigation into FEMA camps was conspiracy-mongering…)

Bertha Lewis, CEO of ACORN, recently told the Young Democratic Socialists that we are entering a new age of McCarthyism. (True, the tea partiers are routinely accused of being un-American seditionists by liberals.)

But the truth is, America isn’t fundamentally changing because of Obama and Congressional Democrats’ actions. America faces great change from large scale global and domestic events that would have came about no matter what Obama did. Obama is only hastening some of the economic changes.

America and the world are changing rapidly because of complex global economic forces involved in globalization. The manufacturing industry has seen decline in America for some time now–and foreign economies have been expanding–but it wasn’t until the past decade that China and India really caught fire. China’s GDP has more than doubled since 2000. They still have lots of room to grow. Most of their growth has been concentrated in the Eastern metro areas.

While this has increased the American standard of living through imports, it has also decimated our savings rate and provided China with the dollars that they have reinvested in America for us to increase our national debt.

Now some economists are questioning whether China might be creating a bubble, and that would certainly cause more repercussions for America.

This whole economic crisis is an example of the change that has not been caused by political forces but by global economic forces. When one domino comes crashing down, more will fall. Greece’s possible default has economists wondering if that might cause another chain reaction.

The rise of China also has consequences for worldwide political thought. It could destroy the pro-democratic hegemony that has ruled international relations since America won the Cold War.

In dealing with other countries that repress their citizens, America has often imposed sanctions or pressured the countries to change. We had sanctioned Cuba for years. We used economic pressure to bring democracy to South Korea and Taiwan in East Asia.

Now with another power rising and building up a military, America doesn’t have the same kind of leverage against North Korea, Burma, Iran, Zimbabwe, or Sudan–all dictatorships supported by China–as we would have in a different era. American economic policy towards China has itself been implicit in dampening our effectiveness as a force for global human rights.

No American president has considered dealing with China’s human rights problems. When China was rising and still vulnerable, America paved the road for it. After the Tiananmen Square Massacre of 1989, Japan pulled out from lending to China. Congress proposed several bills to sanction China, but George Bush was against them. Bill Clinton ran in support of them, but he buckled to business pressure when he was elected. This was China’s most vulnerable time. Now we are approaching times when we do not have so much leverage against China, and in fact China may have more leverage against us.

For Americans, what does it really mean to have China or Burma function as dictatorships? Not a whole lot personally, but they can back countries that might harbor anti-American threats, like North Korea, and they can build a military themselves that will have hawks crowing. (But it’s not like we ever went to war with Soviet Russia, and we didn’t even have economic relations to jeopardize.)

Nonetheless, it is a cause of global change.

Finally, let’s look at the entitlement crisis. What’s the problem? The $12 trillion national debt is nothing compared to the $50 trillion in unfunded Medicare and Social Securities liabilities unreported off the books. The federal government now spends 70% of it’s budget on Social Security and Medicare, and that figure is increasing every year, to the point that it will overtake federal revenues in the next twenty years, now that baby boomers are retiring.

Obama’s healthcare bill only adds to that problem, but it was FDR who caused the problem and previous Congresses and administrations that didn’t fix it.

In fact, if you look back at the socialist and Nazi accounts of US government that some partisans are weaving, the starting point isn’t too far off where fascism and communism spread. We’re in a global economic recession now. Political and social forces have been rapidly changing even before the recession. A lot of things are happening now that are beyond our control and people are grasping at ways to explain it and cope with it. That’s how it all started back then. It will be interesting to see what political forces emerge out of today’s problems.

If you like this column, you can subscribe to receive them weekly at MitchBlatt.com where you can also download my free ebook Democrats Acting Stupidly.

Indeed, the most pervasive malady of the collegiate system specifically, and the American experience generally, is that elaborate patterns of knowledge and theory have been disembodied from individual choices and government policy. What the members of ARA and SAM try to do is infuse what they have learned about the current situation, bring the words of that formidable roster on the face of Butler Library, names like Thoreau, Jefferson, and Whitman, to bear on the twisted logic of which we are today a part. By adding their energy and effort in order to enhance the possibility of a decent world, they may help deprive us of a spectacular experience — that of war. But then, there are some things we shouldn’t have to live through in order to want to avoid the experience.

Give up? Radical student Barack Obama:

During the campaign, I wrote a piece called “Why Won’t Obama Talk About Columbia? — The years he won’t discuss may explain the Ayers tie he keeps lying about.” So now, nearly six months into the Obama presidency, the mainstream media has finally done a bit of the candidate background reporting it declined to do during the campaign — other than in Wasilla — and whaddya know? The New York Times unearthed a 1983 article called, “Breaking the War Mentality,” that Columbia student Barack Obama wrote for a campus newspaper. The article shows that Obama dreaded American “militarism” and its “military-industrial interests,” while effusing enthusiasm for the dangerously delusional nuclear-freeze movement.

But surely Obama has come a long way since his college days, right?

President Obama, however, has mixed feelings about the missile-defense plan. The New York Times reported in March that the president “sent a secret letter to Russia’s president last month suggesting that he would back off deploying a new missile defense system in Eastern Europe if Moscow would help him stop Iran from developing long-range weapons.”

The Russians, for their part, have intimated that there will be no “resetting” of their diplomacy unless the United States drops the missile-defense plan. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has suggested that, in light of developments in Iran, Russia may be amenable to a plan involving Russian collaboration of some kind or another. But anything other than token cooperation would quite obviously be undesirable from the point of view of both the United States and Poland. The Russians, sensing this, have poured cold water on the idea.

If the president scraps missile defense for Poland, or if he drags his feet in implementing it, he will have done more than leave an ally in the lurch and raise doubts about the value of American promises. He risks giving the impression that America is wavering in its commitment to the “liberties of Europe.”

Sigh! Sadly, here is the naivete!

In the interview, the president described his agenda as the best way to move forward in a turbulent world.

“It’s naïve for us to think,” he said, “that we can grow our nuclear stockpiles, the Russians continue to grow their nuclear stockpiles, and our allies grow their nuclear stockpiles, and that in that environment we’re going to be able to pressure countries like Iran and North Korea not to pursue nuclear weapons themselves.”
And how does Obama propose to deal with Iran and North Korea? How else? Negotiations!
“We tried the unilateral way, in the Bush years, and it didn’t work,” a senior administration official said recently. “What we are trying is a fundamental change, a different view that says our security can be enhanced by arms control. There was a view for the past few years that treaties only constrained the good actors and not the bad actors.”

Beyond the first step — deep cuts in American and Russian arsenals — is an agenda that has already provoked stirrings of discontent at home and abroad.

So, as the evil dictators of the world are rushing to arm themselves with nukes, America is drawing down. Wishful thinking…dangerous wishful thinking. God help us!

North Korea fired seven ballistic missiles into the sea off its east coast on Saturday, in a show of defiance against UN sanctions.

The missile launches, which came on the US independence day, appeared aimed at grabbing the attention of the Obama administration, which has been wary of extending enticements to North Korea in exchange for only renewed pledges of restraint.

What you won’t find in that story, or around the ‘Net, is any Obama response. The closest response was Gaffemaster Joe with “the question is, is there anything that we should do about it?” (He also managed to point out that the admin had no clue about the economy.) What should we do about it? What should Obama, as President?

Quite frankly, personally, I think he has done the right thing in mostly ignoring North Korea, particularly this July 4th launch. What does North Korea and Kim Jong-Il want? Like a kid with a new baby sibling, he wants attention. Sure, he wants to demonstrate that his military stuff works so he can try and sell it, but, it still comes back to attention. And, with said attention, he wants stuff. Bling. So, it is best to ignore and frustrate him, much like your friend who keeps getting too drunk and talking loud as you go for that birdie on 18.

This is not too say it is planned. It could be. It could also be because he is incompetent and hasn’t a clue. It could be because he is too busy being President Celebrity. It could be because he has other fish to fry. We don’t know. But, I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt, and assume that it is planned. Hopefully, he will continue to ignore Kim, leaving him whining like a toddler who can’t find his blankie.

Oh, in other Obama news, he has apparently now become a zombie and can speak without Secretary Teleprompter.

A note from Radarsite: Despite its being at least as dangerous, in its global implications, as the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, and despite the fact that, according the rather ambiguous Korea Herald report quoted below, this looming maritime crisis still remains factually unresolved, we hear no more about it. Did the Kang Nam really turn around and head back home without discharging it deadly cargo? Did Kim Jong Ill really blink? Or as one skeptic suggests, did it already offload at some unknown port? Either way, thanks to the overwhelming event of Michael Jackson’s demise, and various other more important stories, it seems that the Kang Nam crisis is no longer deemed newsworthy. It’s off the front page. But it’s not off our radar screen. Did the world just avert a major catastrophe? Or has the world just decided to look the other way?

We will follow up on this. – rg

————————————————

From the Korea Herald

Kang Nam may be heading back home

The Kang Nam, a North Korean ship suspected to be carrying illicit weapons or related material, may be headed back home, according to diplomatic sources here.

“The ship is near our waters. That is about all I can say,” said one diplomatic source on the condition of anonymity.

Experts said this could mean that the ship is on its way back to North Korea, indicating that the latest United Nations Security Council sanctions are taking a toll on the reclusive communist state.

“If the ship is on its way back, it would mean that Resolution 1874 is taking effect and causing the North to retreat,” said Kim Tae-woo, vice president of the Korea Institute for Defense Analyses.

It has been almost two weeks since the Kang Nam set sail on June 17, but Seoul has claimed it has no information on the whereabouts of the ship.

The Kang Nam is the first North Korean ship to come under international scrutiny since the U.N. Security Council adopted Resolution 1874 that strongly recommends member states to help search and ground North Korean ships suspected of carrying illicit weapons or related material.

Some observers said the Kang Nam may have already unloaded such items, but others said the North would wait until the last minute, as the weapons and materials constitute a vital source of funds for the impoverished regime.

Myanmar, the alleged destination of the Kang Nam, has recently told the foreign press that it would not allow the ship to disembark if it is found to be indeed carrying such items.

The government of Myanmar already has an idea of the items on the ship as the Kang Nam must declare them in advance, according to Foreign Ministry officials.

“The fact that the Myanmarese government has spoken out, if it has as some of the news reports claim, it indicates that the resolution is working,” said one Foreign Ministry official.

The Myanmar Embassy here said it had no comment.

A United States destroyer – USS John McCain led by Capt. Jeffrey Kim – is reportedly close on the Kang Nam’s tail. But the destroyer is not authorized to forcefully search the North Korean ship.

Due to these limits, critics have said the resolution needs to plug the loopholes by allowing such actions by the member states.

(jemmie@heraldm.com)

By Kim Ji-hyun

On Monday, North Korea’s main Rodong Sinmun newspaper called it “nonsense” to say the country is a threat to the U.S. The paper also warned it is prepared to strike back if attacked.

“As long as our country has become a proud nuclear power, the U.S. should take a correct look at whom it is dealing with,” its said in commentary. “It would be a grave mistake for the U.S. to think it can remain unhurt if it ignites the fuse of war on the Korean peninsula.”

The Rodong Sinmun also denounced Obama’s recent pledge to defend and protect South Korea – even promising to keep Seoul “under the U.S. nuclear umbrella” – as an attempt to attack the North with atomic bombs.

Anything in the North Korean papers can be considered an official government policy. And Obama’s response?

But Obama said the U.S. is prepared for any North Korean provocation.

“This administration – and our military – is fully prepared for any contingencies,” Obama said Friday during an interview with CBS News’ “The Early Show” to be broadcast Monday.

“I don’t want to speculate on hypotheticals,” Obama said. “But I want … to give assurances to the American people that the t’s are crossed and the i’s are dotted in terms of what might happen.”

That should worry and scare the North Koreans, eh? Kumbaya policy at its finest. To paraphrase the Duke of Wellington, “I’m not sure what effect these policies will have on the enemy, but, by God, they frighten me.”

Related, North Korea is accusing the U.S. of plotting nuclear war against them (via Blue Star Chronicles)

Via Dry Bones Blog

Defense Secretary Robert Gates said he has ordered the U.S. military to take defensive measures should North Korea attempt to fire a ballistic missile toward Hawaii.

“I think we are in a good position, should it become necessary, to protect American territory,” Gates told reporters at the Pentagon today.

Will he also make sure they protect the hospital where Obama’s birth certific……OK, not going there.

Update by Jay: Biden said we would see this president tested. I’m thinking Kim Jong Il has tested him repeatedly and found him wanting. It will be interesting to see how Obama responds to this. So far today I’ve heard nothing. It’s actually an act of war. Obama will want to pretend like he didn’t hear anything, but the responsibility of his position demands some reaction. Will it be more stern words? Another meeting with the UN? Gates has sent interceptors to the island, so if their missiles aren’t a complete joke we may have to shoot them down. However, this will do nothing to deter future freak outs like this. I don’t know what the answer is, but closing our eyes and ignoring them sure hasn’t worked out for Obama. Appeasement hasn’t worked. Maybe they need their (Jong)….kicked!