Freedom Line Blog

Sara Carter, national security correspondent at The Washington Examiner, discusses WikiLeaks, North Korea and her time on the front-line in Afghanistan.

Listen to the interview here.

In a recent interview with CFIF’s Renee Giachino, John Yoo, University of California at Berkeley School of Law Professor and former deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel of the U.S. Department of Justice, discussed the Obama Administration’s record on issues involving foreign affairs, national security and the separation of powers.

Listen to the interview here.

As we profiled in last week’s Freedom Minute video, they’re currently doing a bit of housekeeping in the Obama White House, with key departures coming throughout the ranks of the senior staff. Thus far, the biggest change has been on the economic team, with the departures of Peter Orszag, Chrisina Romer, and Larry Summers. Last week’s announcement that General Jim Jones would step down as National Security Adviser, however, shows that the bloodletting is now spreading to the president’s foreign policy team.

Unfortunately, the upshot of this transitional period seems to be replacing plaques rather than policies. The new economic advisers promise more of the same. And on national security, we may actually be trading down.

While General Jones was known for keeping banker’s hours and not being a particularly influential member of Obama’s inner circle, his military credentials insulated him from being viewed as too dovish on foreign policy. Not so his replacement, Thomas Donilon, whose past successes include being in-house counsel at Fannie Mae (you can’t make this stuff up).

Writing in today’s New York Post, AEI’s Arthur Herman lays out the case for pessimism at Obama’s choice for the nation’s most powerful national security position:

I’ve been writing in this space for months now that Western policymakers who believe Iran can be contained or deterred by conventional methods once it goes nuclear are deluding themselves. As I wrote in a commentary nearly a year ago:

In the 1930s, Winston Churchill – virtually alone – called for swift action to remove Hitler before he could wreak havoc.  What was the source of his clarity? Churchill simply understood that Hitler meant what he said in “Mein Kampf” and was developing the capacity to act on it. Meanwhile, the rest of Europe’s political sophisticates believed that Hitler’s rhetoric was purely for domestic consumption – a tool used to exploit the grievances of the demoralized Weimar Republic.
 
Today, a similar debate rages over Ahmadinejad and the mullahs whose regime he leads.  But the sincerity of their beliefs should be in doubt to no one.  The Iranian President is a man who, during his tenure as the mayor of Tehran, ordered the city’s streets widened in anticipation of the return of the Twelfth Imam, a figure who accompanies the apocalypse in Shiite Islamic theology. The American left would call for the head of any mayor in the United States who wanted to widen Main Street to prepare for the return of the Christ. Yet they apparently think a similar figure in the world’s biggest hotbed of religious fundamentalism can be expected to be a benign wielder of nuclear launch codes.

In the new issue of Commentary, the Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens, in a piece entitled “Iran Cannot be Contained”, comes to the same conclusion from a different angle, rebutting those who think that because containment worked on the Soviet Union it can work on the Iranian regime:

… The most important difference between the Soviet Union and Iran may be ideological. A credible case can be made that Communism is no less a faith than Islam and that Iran’s current leadership, like Soviet leaders of yore, knows how to temper true belief with pragmatic considerations. But Communism was also a materialist and (by its own lights) rationalist creed, with a belief in the inevitability of history but not in the afterlife. Marxist-Leninist regimes may be unmatched in their record of murderousness, but they were never great believers in the virtues of martyrdom.

That is not the case with Shiism, which has been decisively shaped by a cult of suffering and martyrdom dating to the murder of Imam Husayn—the Sayyed al-Shuhada, or Prince of Martyrs—in Karbala in the seventh century. The emphasis on martyrdom became all the more pronounced in Iran during its war with Iraq, when Tehran sent waves of child soldiers, some as young as 10, to clear out Iraqi minefields. As Hooman Majd writes in his book The Ayatollah Begs to Differ, the boys were often led by a soldier mounted on a white horse in imitation of Husayn: “the hero who would lead them into their fateful battle before they met their God.” Tens of thousands of children died this way.

The martyrdom mentality factors into Iran’s nuclear calculus as well. In December 2001, former Iranian President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani—a man often described as a moderate and a pragmatist in the Western press—noted in his Qods (Jerusalem) Day speech that “if one day, the Islamic world is also equipped with weapons like those that Israel possesses now, then the imperialists’ strategy will reach a standstill because the use of even one nuclear bomb inside Israel will destroy everything. However, it will only harm the Islamic world. It is not irrational to contemplate such an eventuality.”

We are, quite simply, running out of time.  We can try to ignore reality, but reality won’t return the favor.

There’s an interesting column in Foreign Policy I commend to anyone trying to make sense out of the realignment going on in the Democratic and Republican parties.  With former president George W. Bush firmly entrenched in the public’s mind as a neoconservative nation-builder, President Barack Obama did what most political opponents do – adopt the opposite strategy.

Thus, we’ve got a Commander-in-Chief who looks and sounds a lot like former president George H. W. Bush, the highest ranking member of the foreign policy “realist” school.  To my lights, foreign policy realism is shorthand for “The world is a really dangerous place run by a lot of bad people.  Since there’s nothing we can do to change it we might as well make nice with some of the friendlier dictators.”

Perhaps that notion is correct; at least in general.  Such a view of the world helps explain why President Obama can’t seem to summon his emotions when pro-democracy marchers are killed in the streets of Tehran.  Bad people do bad things, but hey; it could be worse.

But while Jacob Heilbrunn’s Foreign Policy article does a nice job of recounting the ebb and flow of Realism’s popularity with Republicans, he seems to miss a more obvious point about the kind of politician who would be attracted to the philosophy.  Consider the presidents Heilbrunn identifies as fans: Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, George H. W. Bush, and now Barack Obama.  Their commonality?  Each president is motivated by pessimism about the world around him.

Eisenhower’s most memorable speech was his farewell address warning about a military-industrial complex.  Nixon had enemies’ lists.  Bush didn’t see the value of “the vision thing” and preferred to talk shop with elites instead of connecting with everyday citizens.  And then there’s Obama.  He might be the most negatively-oriented president we’ve had since Nixon.  The reason America needs “Hope” and “Change” is because everything is currently broken.  Besides, who are Americans to lecture the world on morals when it’s so obvious to Progressive faculty members that the United States is probably at fault for their problems?

Foreign policy realism may be a necessary corrective to neoconservative empire-building, but realism’s lack of popularity doesn’t mean it is right; just that if offers an unsatisfying view of the world.

In this week’s Freedom Minute, CFIF’s Renee Giachino discusses the need for President Obama to shift gears and restore American foreign policy to what actually works:  treating our friends as friends and our enemies as enemies.

Following up on our commentary last week that Turkey’s increased malfeasance illustrates the Obama Doctrine’s failure, today’s Wall Street Journal includes a commentary by Eliot A. Cohen entitled With Friends Like the United States…

Cohen points out that even in supposedly Obama-loving Europe, America’s standing has declined, not risen:

When asked about relations with the U.S. under President Barack Obama, 17% of Britons in a recent poll thought they had improved; 25% thought they had deteriorated.”

Cohen also notes Obama’s poor treatment of such friends as Colombia and Israel, alongside his spinelessness toward North Korea, Iran, China and other antagonists.  As he cogently summarizes, “The Obama Administration has managed to convince most countries around the world that we are worth little as friends and even less as enemies.”

More ominously, Cohen concludes, “the administration is making a dangerous world even more so.”

That’s how Samuel Johnson defined a second marriage. But it applies with equal force to nearly every pronouncement that the international diplomatic community makes about Iran.

With news that the Islamic Republic has struck a fuel-swapping deal with Turkey, the hallelujahs are coming fast and furious. However, the subtle undercurrent for those who pay attention to such things is that this will only chink away at UN efforts to impose harsh sanctions (not that there’s much hope there — but even failure on such an incremental step redounds to Iran’s favor).

The less subtle upshot, however? Well, I’ll let the Iranians tell you themselves:

“There is no relation between the swap deal and our enrichment activities … We will continue our 20 percent uranium enrichment work,” said Ali Akbar Salehi, head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organisation.

On a good day, the West’s diplomatic strategy towards Iran is “pray”.  On a bad day, it’s “duck and cover”.

As I mentioned in a recent column, President Obama’s seeming contempt for the Israeli government — especially in light of his propensity for coddling hostile regimes — is an embarassment that undermines America’s traditional foreign policy values. Now, that judgment seems to be echoing through the corridors of power in the Democratic Party.

Chuck Schumer, the liberal New York Senator who may well succeed Harry Reid as Democratic leader in the upper chamber next year, had this to say about Obama’s Israel policy during an interview on a Jewish radio program:

I told the President, I told Rahm Emanuel and others in the administration that I thought the policy they took to try to bring about negotiations is counter-productive, because when you give the Palestinians hope that the United States will do its negotiating for them, they are not going to sit down and talk,” Schumer told Segal. “Palestinians don’t really believe in a state of Israel. They, unlike a majority of Israelis, who have come to the conclusion that they can live with a two-state solution to be determined by the parties, the majority of Palestinians are still very reluctant, and they need to be pushed to get there.

“If the U.S. says certain things and takes certain stands the Palestinians say, ‘Why should we negotiate?'” Schumer said.

Given the strong ties that America’s Jewish community has to the Democratic Party, this could be the beginning of a widening fissure on the left. Politico has the full story.

Here’s a little secret about those of us who tend to the Freedom Line garden (though it applies equally to all our brethren in the conservative blogosphere): we’re hopeless nerds. Our reader’s digests of political and policy developments come from hours of reading, writing, and thinking about the great issues of the day. Government is for us what fantasy football is to a much broader swath of America.

When you spend that much time consuming news, however, the callouses develop quickly. It’s hard to be impressed. To break through to the sense of genuine wonder that brought us into this field usually requires either singularly great writing or a singularly great man.

I mention all this to give a full-throated endorsement to Mark Bowden’s article “The Professor of War,” a profile of General David Petraeus in the May issue of Vanity Fair (a publication whose political coverage — with some exceptions for Christopher Hitchens — is usually uneven at best). This is a piece so exceptional — and an individual so compelling — that one can only hope Bowden someday gets drafted to be Petraeus’s official biographer.

This piece is far too rich to justify through excerpt, so here’s one brief paragraph that ably represents the writing in microcosm:

Congress underestimated David Petraeus. He is a man of such distinction that in the army legends have formed about his rise. Beyond his four-star rank, he possesses a stature so matchless it deserves its own adjective—call it “Petraean,” perhaps. It is an adjective that would be mostly complimentary, but not entirely so—there can be a hard edge to the man, a certain lack of empathy, and there is something vaguely unseemly in his obvious ambition. But when Petraeus tests himself, he usually wins. When he assumed command in Iraq, he had accepted a challenge few thought even he could meet, turning around the longest and most mismanaged war in American history. But Iraq is only part of the story. Through his writing and teaching, Petraeus was at the same time redefining how the nation will fight in the 21st century. And he was doing something more difficult still: leading a cultural and doctrinal revolution inside one of the most hidebound institutions in the world, the United States Army. Whatever the fate of Iraq and Afghanistan, this transformation is a Petraean legacy that will be felt for years to come.

My favorite piece of journalism so far in 2010. Read the whole thing here.

Jon Stewart has been getting laughs at the expense of conservatives (many justifiably), then booking conservative straw men that he could easily knock down for years. Yet Stewart met his match on Monday’s edition of The Daily Show, when he interviewed former Bush Administration DOJ official John Yoo (author of the infamous “torture memos”).

If Stewart hadn’t been the one ginned up for a fight, it would’ve been appropriate to invoke the mercy rule. But it was hard to feel sorry for the smug, self-righteous (Stewart’s least appealing style) host when Yoo gently and subtly exposed his complete lack of even a basic understanding of the issues at play.

On the following night’s show, Stewart even had to cop to how badly he got owned.  See the full interview here, here and here.

There is a fascinating piece over at Foreign Policy from a former American paratrooper and human rights defender who was tasked to help remake Liberia’s decimated military. The almost humorously titled “I Built an African Army” provides a sober assessment of the big picture thinking needed to train, equip, and manage a developing country’s military. One of the most important insights was to inculcate ideas about social justice, and a soldier’s place in a democracy into recruits who identified themselves and others by tribe membership before citizenship.

And though the author doesn’t linger on it, early on he mentions that his mission on behalf of the U.S. State Department was contracted through DynCorp International, a private military company. Yes, liberals, there are plenty examples of private military contractors doing the kind of nuanced, real world nation building that all the money from the UN, WTO, and IMF couldn’t equal. It’s nice having a new round of ammunition.

The folks at Foreign Policy have compiled a list of the top ten underreported stories from 2009 that could have a major impact on 2010. They are:

1. The Opening of the Northwest Passage

2. Growing Hostilities between Iraq’s Arab and Kurdish Populations

3. An Intensifying Border Dispute between India and China

4. Uncle Sam Fueling another Housing Bubble

5. Pentagon Edges State Department as Primary Nation Builder

6. Brazil Helping China Expand Its Naval Capabilities

7. Security Breaches in U.S. Passport Procedures

8. Chechen-Related Assassinations

9. American Military Involvement in Uganda’s Civil War

10. CIA Proposes Its Own ROTC-Style Program

Foreign Policy Initiative’s Abe Greenwald does an excellent riff on President Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize acceptace speech today on National Review’s website. The upshot: Greenwald wonders whether Obama’s stark articulation of evil’s presence in the world (and its impact on international affairs) shows a president who’s starting to rethink some of the first principles of his foreign policy.

Greenwald sees some promising signs, but still wonders whether Obama can ever fully turn the corner. In one bravura passage:

“Irving Kristol said, almost too memorably, ‘A neoconservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality.’ With that definition in mind, an eminent national-security personage put this perfectly phrased query to me over the summer: ‘Is Obama too arrogant to get mugged by reality?'”

“An excellent question. What the president calls his “philosophy of persistence” looks increasingly like the vice of conceit. The new White House imperiousness explains Obama’s inability to offer full-throated praise for the Iraq War — an undertaking he staunchly opposed. It also explains his devotion to de-fanging Iran through the voodoo of his personal allure (and to his correspondent obtuseness on Iran’s democrats).”

Today’s best piece on foreign policy (apart from this one). Read it here.

What if suddenly, after eight years of a “cowboy presidency” and the election of a worldly, foreign policy-hesitant President, America’s biggest nemesis voluntarily offered to deescalate tensions? As the Obama Administration waits for such a breakthrough moment with North Korea, Iran, Hamas, Sudan, Venezuela, and others, a new article in Foreign Policy by David E. Hoffman analyzes the actions of a different man in a similar moment.

Hoffman’s primary criticism of President George H. W. Bush during the tumultuous year of 1989 is that he failed to appreciate the scale and speed of change inside the Soviet Union. On more than one occasion, Bush took a cautious, wait-and-see approach when evaluating Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev’s liberalization programs of perestroika and glasnost. It literally took the Berlin Wall falling down before Bush convinced himself that Gorbachev was serious about implementing fundamental changes both inside and outside Russia.

The title of the article, “1989: The Lost Year,” reflects the missed opportunities that, if realized and acted on, could have led to a much smoother Soviet transition from orthodox communism. Would President Obama be able to distinguish real reforms from empty platitudes, or would he make the same mistakes as Bush Senior? For all of the current president’s stubbornness in ramming through his domestic agenda, he’s shown a conspicuous lack of clarity when it comes to foreign affairs. From urging restraint during the Russian invasion of Georgia to dithering on Afghanistan troop levels, Obama shows signs of being caught off guard in the unlikely event his overtures to America’s enemies actually work.

True, February is still a few months away. When it comes to reporting the “news” in foreign affairs, however, there are some stories that just won’t go away.  Joshua Keating over at Foreign Policy has compiled a darkly humorous compilation of the stories that never seem to get old. (Or, at least never get a new angle.) Here are some of the headlines (see if you can pick the year): “North Korea to return to negotiating table”; “Pakistan finally getting tough with the Taliban”; “Israel preparing military strike against Iran”; “Dollar to be replaced as global reserve currency”; “Fidel Castro is dying”; and of course, “Israel and Palestinians reach peace deal.”

In a column published today, CFIF Contributing Editor Troy Senik argues that the Administration’s response to a nuclear Iran must be more definitive.

Below are some highlights of the piece:

The die has yet to be cast, but when the history of the momentous changes that beset Iran (and with it the world) in the early 21st century is written, this may go down as the first time in our history when Americans – who often wait too long to respond to a crisis – failed to react whatsoever.
 
“Last week, as President Obama gathered with world leaders at a United Nations session in New York, Iran announced the existence of a second nuclear site on its soil, this one’s location obscured deep beneath one of the country’s mountain ranges.  For the second time in less than a year, a rogue nation was showing off its weapons capacities as the President held court about the need for a nuclear-free world.  The net effect was something like holding a gun control rally in the middle of a gang fight.”

Red the full column here.