Lessons from Libya for Dictators in Distress

[jgaffney]

Rick Richman at Commentary Magazine has this handy summary:

1. If you want to remain in power, you need to do more than send a man on a camel into crowds. Declare war on your people; hire other people to help out.

2. Do not worry if the U.S. president says you must “step down” and “leave.” It is only his personal opinion.

3. To ensure that the president does not focus unduly on your war, schedule it while he is preoccupied with other matters: a Motown concert, a conference on bullying, his golf game, and finalizing his Final Four picks.

4. Declare that the opposition is not “organic.” The president will not assist a non-organic revolution. If the revolution is organic, do not worry: an organic revolution is by definition one he does not need to assist. Either way, you’re fine.

5. Recognize that your membership on the UN Human Rights Council will be suspended — the president will send his secretary of state there to ensure that. Do not start a war against your people if you are not prepared for this.

6. Do not worry about a “no-fly zone” or some other U.S. military response. The president will consider it only if the world speaks with one voice. The world includes Russia, China, and Turkey.

7. Remember when the president adopted his Afghanistan policy after an extensive “review;” selected his own general to implement it; got the general’s recommendations; and then held endless meetings before finally reluctantly approving them? That was about a war he was already in. He will need many more meetings than that before he considers any new action against you.

8. You may eventually be subject to sanctions, so check to see if they’ve worked yet with Cuba, North Korea, or Iran.

9. Consider restarting your nuclear program, since the conditions that caused you to suspend it are gone. At most, the president will form a committee of several nations to talk to you; he will consider more sanctions if the world speaks as one. You need not worry about his “deadlines.”

10. There is basically only one thing you do need to worry about: do not, under any circumstances, approve any future Jewish housing in Jerusalem. The president will go ballistic if you do.

This is what the world looks like when America fails to lead. Like it yet, Mink?

[subdjoe]

And now the rest of the world, most especially Evropa, will rend its garments and decry the US not Doing Something in Libya.

Of course, if the US had Done Something, the rest of the world, most especially Evropa, would decry the US having Done Something.


Now, I'm not so sure that we are really wrong to stand aside. We know Mr. Q (Formerly Mr. K or Mr. G), but we have no idea who would come to the top if the opposition to him wins. Would we have an Iran, North Africa?

But, the spineless, dead fish, lack of decision and leadership by Barry Steve is worse than pathetic. Once again, in a time of decision, he has looked up from the game he is playing on his hand held device, waved and voted "Yeah, I'm here!"

[Joe Cocker]

Mr. G is a friend of Obama, so our leader stands down at all cost of life. Our leader is willing to let USA take a first blow, maybe more as in the SALT TREATY. I enjoyed the Hillary being rebuffed in Egypt with the youthful Demos.

www.csmonitor.com/World/Middle-East/2011/0315/Clinton-rebuffed-in-Egypt-faces-tough-task-on-Arab-upheaval

[subdjoe]

As much as I enjoy seeing these self-centered, self righteous clowns, capons, and snake oil salesmen getting their knocks, the damage they are doing to our Republic in our relations with other nations just isn't worth it. "Waffling Weakling" is NOT the image we need.

[mrbose]

Mar 16, 2011 20:27:55 GMT -5 subdjoe said:

As much as I enjoy seeing these self-centered, self righteous clowns, capons, and snake oil salesmen getting their knocks, the damage they are doing to our Republic in our relations with other nations just isn't worth it. "Waffling Weakling" is NOT the image we need.

exactly now the whole world sees the empty suit Obama is, shame on America for electing this clown

[jgaffney]

Daniel Henninger explains the consequences for the US.

Note: the original article is at the Wall Street Journal, beind the subscription wall. I captured the full text from the County library reference section and posted it here.

Not the 28 members of NATO, not the 15-member U.N. Security Council, not the 22 nations of the Arab League could save Libya's rebels from being obliterated by the mad and murderous Moammar Gadhafi. The world has just watched the collapse of internationalism.

The world's self-professed keepers of international order, from Brussels to Turtle Bay, huffed and puffed, talked and threatened. And they failed. Utterly.

But what we've watched is not merely the failure of the gauzy notion of "internationalism." It's more specific than that. What has collapsed here is the modern Democratic Party's new foreign-policy establishment.

Barack Obama is the first Democratic president to assemble a foreign-policy team made up entirely of intellectuals who for years have developed a counter-thesis to the policies of presidents extending back to John F. Kennedy. We are in a "post-American world," they have argued, in which the U.S. is obliged to pursue its interests in concert with the rest of the world's powers, never alone.

The uprisings against autocracies in 10 separate Middle Eastern countries, a crisis inherited from no one, was their real-world test. In Egypt, they fumbled. In Libya, they have failed.

The poster boy for this internationalist view is White House deputy Ben Rhodes, who told a reporter last week: "This is the Obama conception of the U.S. role in the world -- to work through multilateral organizations and bilateral relationships to make sure that the steps we are taking are amplified."

Days later, bemused Libyan rebel spokesman Essam Gheriani remarked in Benghazi: "Everyone here is puzzled as to how many casualties the international community judges to be enough for them to help. Maybe we should start committing suicide to reach the required number."

Mr. Rhodes' view isn't just briefingspeak. The new Democratic theory of the proper U.S. role in the world was articulated in a July 2008 document, "Strategic Leadership: Framework for a 21st Century National Security Strategy." (link in pdf) It described itself as "an intellectual and policy blueprint for the next administration."

Its authors included James B. Steinberg, who is now Mr. Obama's deputy secretary of state; Ivo Daalder, now U.S. ambassador to NATO; and Anne-Marie Slaughter, until a month ago the State Department's director of policy planning. Susan Rice, who is now our ambassador to the United Nations, wrote the preface.

Their blueprint, a tour of the world's regions, counsels constant multilateral cooperation, institution-building and consultation. While it admits U.S. preeminence, it is largely a meditation on the limits of American power and authority. This is the document's final, summarizing sentence: "And such [U.S.] leadership recognizes that in a world in which power has diffused, our interests are best protected and advanced when others step up and at times lead alongside or even ahead of us."

In the Middle East, no one has stepped up, no one is leading alongside and our allies are in the rear, accomplishing nothing while they wait for . . . America.

This was a test case, and what we have seen is that a world in which the U.S. doesn't unmistakably lead is a world that spins its wheels, and eventually the wheels start to come off. When the U.S. instructs the Saudis not to intervene in Bahrain, and the Saudi army does precisely the opposite, the wheels are coming off the international order.

In an op-ed piece for the New York Times this week, "Fiddling While Libya Burns," the recently departed State Department planner Anne-Marie Slaughter wrote a cri de coeur on behalf of doing something for Libya. "The United States and Europe are temporizing on a no-flight zone," she wrote. It was a remarkable call to action -- until the final two paragraphs. She concludes that the U.S. "should ask the Security Council to authorize a no-flight zone," (by asking Russia and China to abstain). If that works, then with the Arab League, we "should assemble an international coalition to impose the no-flight zone." Finally, failing all that, we should work with the Arab League to give the Libyan opposition "any assistance it requests."

But Benghazi will be dead by the time this calibration grinds down to Ms. Slaughter's bottom line. After Mr. Obama met with his national security team Tuesday, with Gadhafi one demolished town from Benghazi, the White House said, "The President instructed his team to continue to fully engage in the discussions at the United Nations, NATO and with partners and organizations in the region." Barack Obama is following their blueprint to a tee.

In a better world, James Steinberg, Ivo Daalder and Susan Rice would join Ms. Slaughter in resigning and calling for action to save Benghazi from outside the government. Being inside is manifestly useless. They are defaulting the U.S. into a dangerous irrelevance.

Libyan rebel commander Mohammed Abdallah, in bombed-out Ajdabiya, put the spike into them Tuesday: "The hands of the international community are covered in blood." But the "international community" was never much more than a academic abstraction, and blood, as always, can be washed off.

Credit: By Daniel Henninger

[jgaffney]

Alan Caruba calls on Obama to give the Nobel Peace Prize back:

As the Middle East begets one insurrection after another against the oppression that has been endemic to the region for centuries, and as Japan faces the worst nuclear energy disaster since Chernobyl, the president of America and commander in chief is Absent Without a Leave (AWOL).

Barack Hussein Obama is the first president of the United States who received a Nobel Peace Prize just for showing up. It is a mark of how debased that once prestigious international prize has become. Obama should give up the prize.

In the past, the Peace Prize went to Theodore Roosevelt in 1906 for negotiating an end to a Russian-Japanese conflict and to Woodrow Wilson in 1919 for his efforts to create the League of Nations. Its value fell off the cliff when it was given to Jimmy Carter in 2002 and Obama in 2009. In between, it was awarded to former Vice President Al Gore and the U.N.’s International Panel on Climate Change in 2007.

It is an ancient axiom that power is lost when power is not exercised. Osama bin Laden seriously misread the U.S. when he referred to it as “a weak horse,” an Arab way of saying it could be attacked with impunity. George W. Bush responded by bombing the heck out of Tora Bora in Afghanistan and then by invading Iraq to depose Saddam Hussein. Bin Laden has been in hiding ever since and his top lieutenants keep getting whacked.

Obama’s approach to foreign affairs has been to misunderstand and denigrate the role of America in a dangerous world. Daniel Henninger of The Wall Street Journal calls it “The Collapse of Internationalism” because the failure to lead has demonstrated the uselessness of the United Nations, and its Security Council, NATO, the European Union, and the Arab League when it comes to facing down a psychopathic despot like Libya’s Quadaffi. Of course, the same was true regarding Saddam Hussein.

This is how big wars occur.

This is also what the world looks like when America fails to lead. Remember when Donald Rumsfield was derided for his comment about "Old Europe"? Is there any question now about what he was referring to?

[subdjoe]

Even the Brits are bashing him.

INEFFECTUAL, invisible, unable to honour pledges and now blamed for letting Gaddafi off the hook. Why Obama’s gone from ‘Yes we can’ to ‘Er, maybe we shouldn’t’...

Let us cast our minds back to those remarkable days in November 2008 when the son of a Kenyan goatherd was elected to the White House. It was a bright new dawn – even brighter than the coming of the Kennedys and their new Camelot. JFK may be considered as being from an ethnic and religious minority – Irish and Catholic – but he was still very rich and very white. Barack Obama, by contrast, was a true breakthrough president. The world would change because obviously America had changed.
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INEFFECTUAL, invisible, unable to honour pledges and now blamed for letting Gaddafi off the hook. Why Obama’s gone from ‘Yes we can’ to ‘Er, maybe we shouldn’t’...

Let us cast our minds back to those remarkable days in November 2008 when the son of a Kenyan goatherd was elected to the White House. It was a bright new dawn – even brighter than the coming of the Kennedys and their new Camelot. JFK may be considered as being from an ethnic and religious minority – Irish and Catholic – but he was still very rich and very white. Barack Obama, by contrast, was a true breakthrough president. The world would change because obviously America had changed.

Obama’s campaign slogan was mesmerisingly simple and brimming with self-belief: “Yes we can.” His presidency, however, is turning out to be more about “no we won’t.” Even more worryingly, it seems to be very much about: “Maybe we can… do what, exactly?“ The world feels like a dangerous place when leaders are seen to lack certitude but the only thing President Obama seems decisive about is his indecision. What should the US do about Libya? What should the US do about the Middle East in general? What about the country’s crippling debts? What is the US going to do about Afghanistan, about Iran?

What is President Obama doing about anything? The most alarming answer – your guess is as good as mine – is also, frankly, the most accurate one. What the President is not doing is being clear, resolute and pro-active, which is surely a big part of his job description. This is what he has to say about the popular uprising in Libya: “Gaddafi must go.” At least, that was his position on March 3.

Read more: www.express.co.uk/posts/view/235196/Barack-Obama-The-Weakest-President-in-history-Barack-Obama-The-Weakest-President-in-history-Barack-Obama-The-Weakest-President-in-history-#ixzz1H4Z3Yd7O

Remember when he whined something like "Can't I just eat my waffle?" Seems like waffling is all he is good at.

[Joe Cocker]

I find it strange the Britain can't afford anything anymore too. It was reported that they fired their last Tommy-hawk. Now what does that mean as they have pulled some men out of there war zone in Afghanistan. If you been keeping up with their news papers.

[mrbose]

Just kill Gaddafi and get this mess over with