Pity Poor America: Obama, Romney, and Foreign Policyby
Michael Scheuer Recently by Michael Scheuer: To President Obama: The 2nd Amendment Is About Fighting Tyranny, Not Hunting Deer
This Tuesday’s Romney-Obama foreign-policy debate will again show Americans that both political parties mean to maintain the lie that has kept the United States losing the war al-Qaeda and its allies declared on us in 1996. There will seem to be debate during the debate, but at day’s end there will be no difference between Romney and Obama: America is “exceptional,” and exceptionally entitled to intervene in other peoples’ affairs; what we do in the world is well-intentioned and benign; and Islamist militants are attacking us because they hate freedom, liberty, and Budweiser. In other words, both men will implicitly tell Americans that their government will not recognize the seriousness of our war with the Islamists, let alone that we are losing that war – hands down. On Obama’s part, he is likely to continue being the simple ideologue he has been since taking office. He will continue to operate in his own world, one in which there is no room for genuine religious belief and motivation unless it comes from the mouth a half-baked, fiercely anti-American Chicago cleric. Obama and his Chicago political pals are suppose to be savvy and slick politicians and yet they are so ideologically blinded by their view of what the world should be that they have not – in four years – bothered to read polls that show that more than 75 percent of the world’s Muslims view U.S. foreign policy as either a threat to Islam or a plan aimed at destroying the faith. To add to this staggering problem for the United States, polling also shows that this interpretation is shared by men and women, young and old, and those who self-identify as moderates and militants. Confronted by this reality, Obama and his oh-so-smart Ivy League crowd continue to insist that, from the attacks in Saudi Arabia in 1995, to the 1996 destruction of our embassies in East Africa, to the near sinking of the USS COLE in 2000, to the massive U.S. defeat on 9/11, to the bipartisan decision to lose the Afghan and Iraq wars, to the recent, easily predictable mujahedin victory in Benghazi, America has faced only a limited number of militants, criminals, nihilists, and madmen – non-legitimate Muslims – who can be killed one man at a time to achieve victory. Is it really possible that the tiny crew of misfits Obama and his team have identified as America’s enemies have been able to cause so many shameful U.S. defeats and, in the face of a superpower attacking them, to have – since 9/11– established fully viable bases outside South Asia in East Africa, Yemen, West Africa, Palestine, and Iraq.
In the coming debate, Obama will no doubt brag that he killed Osama bin Laden. Well good, about time, well done! But what has he done to stop the spread of militant Islam and its armed forces across South Asia, the Middle East, and Africa? This is a presence that now sits directly on sea lanes vital to the United States in the Suez Canal, the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden, and the Indian and Atlantic Oceans, and is nearing oil reserves and deposits of uranium and other strategic minerals in West Africa that are indispensable to the U.S. and Western economies. Obama has done nothing but lie to Americans about the genuine religious motivation, numbers, and growing armed strength – thanks to his policy facilitated arsenal-looting in Libya, Egypt, and Syria – of al-Qaeda and its allies. At the end of Obama’s term, America is far weaker militarily and far more vulnerable to Islamist power than it was when he took office. (NB: To show the depth of the Obama-ites’ reality-defying ideological rigidity, I would note that I recently attended a U.S. government conference on the growing threat posed by the Islamists’ war on America. I have worked on this topic for a long time but at first could not get what folks were talking about. My fellow conferees kept talking about “EVOs” and never using the terms Islam or Islamist. Much to my embarrassment, I finally had to ask the meaning of “EVOs.” I was told that the Obama administration had banned the use of the terms like Islam, Islamic, and Islamist in discussing the war the Islamists are waging on and in America, Because of the ban, the military, the intelligence community, and other government organizations now must use the meaningless term “EVOs” – “Extremist Violent Organizations” when discussing how to insure America survives the current war. I suppose that had Obama been in power during the 1941-1991 period the Wehrmacht, the Gestapo, the Red Army, and the KGB would have been termed EGOs, or “Extremist Genocide-producing Organizations.” In addition, I was told there is a thoroughgoing “purge“ being conducted of all counter-Islamist training materials heretofore used to train military, intelligence, and federal, state, and local law enforcement officials if the materials do not portray Islam as benign and/or if they identify those waging war as “Islamists.” If this is true, it fits precisely the Muslim Brotherhood’s long-term plans to lull the West into defenselessness as it prepares to Islamicize the world. If claims about this purge are true – and I have no reason to doubt the veracity of my interlocutors – Obama and his team could not be doing more to ensure the Islamists’ ultimate victory over the West if they were Muslim Brotherhood members in good standing.)
And, in foreign policy, Romney will be no better. Amazingly, Romney has surrounded himself with the same brain-dead, Israel-first Neoconservative cabal that brought on the war we lost in Iraq and which made bin Laden‘s defensive jihad self-perpetuating, the latter proven by the continuing post-bin-Laden geographical spread of war-making Islamist organizations, Islamist-controlled states, and Islamist-caused violence. Listen to the media and hear Bolton, Krauthamer, Hannity, Kristol, Wolfowitz, Keane, Lieberman, and the crazed war boys Graham and McCain mouth exactly the same America-defeating nonsense spouted by Obama, Rice, Brennan, Mrs. Clinton and their acolytes at MSNBC and the mainstream media: Muslims hate America and the West because of their freedom and liberties, gender equality, freedom of speech, and elections. Whenever you find prominent political, media figures, and professors using this description of the Islamists’ motivation, you will find America’s truest enemies, men and women who want to continue an interventionist foreign policy and so are deliberately providing Americans with an enormous underestimation of the growing threat the Islamists’ pose. These are the men and women who are happy to get any number of America soldiers. Marines, intelligence and security officers, and ambassadors killed so they can keep trying to force Muslims by bayonet to abandon their faith, vote, abort, blaspheme, Zionize, feminize, and generally become pagans just like us. So cock a non-partisan ear toward the Obama-Romney debate and hear the same worldview and foreign policy prescription presented by both men, although – thankfully – Romney will not be spouting Obama’s Islamist-abetting nonsense about Islam being benign even when it perceives itself under attack. When you clear your way through all the spurious hot air about “American exceptionalism” and “a world eager for U.S. leadership,” you will hear the ardent desire of two men, two parties, and almost all of the media to maintain and even increase the cultural and military interventionism in the Muslim world that has killed so many Americans at home and abroad in the past sixteen years; which has brought the United States numerous, shameful military defeats; and which has created nothing but the prospect of an ever larger and more costly war with much of Islam in the years ahead – a war which no American should be confident his/her country will win as long as the current bipartisan worldview prevails.
And there are perhaps two things to think about after the debate. First, notwithstanding what you hear from Obama and Romney, their followers, and the media on this issue, the fact will remain that (a) most Muslims do not hate Americans for their way of life, but do believe that the Islamic faith and Islamic civilization are under attack by Washington’s – and its Western allies’ – foreign policy and, for that reason, (b) most loathe the U.S. government and judge the late Osama bin Laden to have been a “good Muslim,” who, despite methods of war-making unacceptable to many Muslims, steadfastly defended his faith against the genuine threat posed by unrelenting Western intervention in an era when “Muslim regimes” not only would not resist but actually enabled that intervention. Second, Americans are faced with a war with the Islamists they cannot avoid and must win. The United States is losing at the moment, and the talk of large cuts in the defense budget is merely campaign drivel. The way the defense budget is spent may change – more Marines and soldiers and fewer submarines, for example – but the last four U.S. presidents have created an environment in which we face war at every turn. Whoever is elected, defense spending will grow, probably starting with a U.S.-led intervention in Syria and a war on Iran. How to cope? Accept reality:
This article was originally published at Non-Intervention.com. October 19, 2012 Michael Scheuer [send him mail] is the author of Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq and Imperial Hubris and Through Our Enemies' Eyes. He recently resigned after 22 years at the CIA. He served as chief of the CIA's bin Laden unit. Copyright 2012 © Michael Scheuer
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