Sixty-five days elapsed between 9/11 and the capture of Kabul by American-assisted Afghan forces. President Obama has had roughly six times as long since his election to formulate a strategy for preventing a reversal of that victory. The latest word is that he may decide something within a month or two.
Wars being dynamic, this procrastination can only aid the enemy, which is being afforded leisure to expand its region of effectiveness and harden itself against eventual American counteraction.
Many commentators seem surprised that the President has tossed and turned in this manner, yet his (in)action is easy to understand. For the first time in his life, Barack Obama must make a decision whose consequences will be huge and impossible to obfuscate. Within a relatively short period, the military situation in Afghanistan will get better or worse, and the world will lay the praise or blame at the President’s feet. The failure of the spending spree stimulus to decrease unemployment can be obscured by fuzzy statistics; the Iranian mullarchy’s drive for hegemony in the Middle East will take years to reach fruition; nobody in this hemisphere cares much about the expanding Russian Empire. But there will be no way to ignore the disaster if Kabul falls to the Taliban.
Faced with need to avert that prospect, the President is acting just like an ill-prepared man ignorant of history and military affairs would be expected to react: He puts off committing himself. He studies and ponders and hopes in his heart that the challenge will evaporate before he must tackle it.
The evidence is piling up – not just Afghanistan but also Iran, Israel, North Korea, Russia, China, Burma, Honduras – that the Obama Administration is incapable of carrying out a coherent foreign policy that defends our country’s interests. Not even Jimmy Carter failed so universally and dramatically.
Nonetheless, however badly he mishandles foreign relations, Mr. Obama will be in charge of them for another 38 months. If present trends continue, his successor will face a hostile and difficult world, one in which Islamofascism will be advancing confidently, backed physically by at least one, perhaps several, nuclear-armed jihadist states, and morally by the consensus of bien pensant left-wing opinion.
America will, I am sure, come through the ensuing Time of Troubles. Much as we mope about failings of our contemporary national character, the country has a vast capacity for recovery. We also should not overestimate our adversaries, most of whom are decadent, anti-rational and backward. Still and all, the world would be better off if the President were to follow the path of Pope Celestine V.
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