CONNECTING THE DOTS: CLAUDIA ROSETT
Connecting The Dots
Claudia Rosett, 01.07.10, Forbes
President Barack Obama has just denounced the “screw up” in which his own intelligence team had the information to nab the Christmas Day underwear bomber but “failed to connect those dots.”
But what about Obama himself? He is president of a country against which jihadis desiring an Islamic caliphate have declared war; meanwhile, Obama extends his hand and apologizes for his nation. While Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was preparing to don his suicide underpants, what dots was the president connecting?
Obama had a lively December. He kicked it off with an address at West Point promising a smaller increase in troops in Afghanistan than his specially tasked adviser, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, had asked for. (He also gave the Taliban a handy tip that he’d start pulling the troops out again in 18 months.) He flew to Oslo to collect a Nobel Peace Prize. He flew to Copenhagen for a United Nations “climate change” conference at which he pledged to lame the U.S. economy and fork over more American tax dollars to other countries. He then stuck around Washington not for priorities of defending U.S. security, but for the Christmas Eve passage of the Senate’s monstrous health care bill.
Then Obama flew to Hawaii for some R&R at a beachfront estate. American holiday travelers, waiting in gridlocked airport security lines, absorbing news about six-foot flames shooting from the suicide pants of a jihadi inbound for Detroit, were initially left to ponder the alternative universe of the absentee president and Homeland Security Secretary Janet “the-system-worked” Napolitano.
More than a week after the attack, Obama finally returned to Washington. On Tuesday he announced that “the system has failed in a potentially disastrous way” and that it is his job “to find out why and correct that failure so that we can prevent such attacks in the future.”
If he really wants to find out what’s going wrong, here’s a sampling of seven warning signs–huge, blinking red, and even easier to spot than the flagrant trail of the watch-listed, cash-paying, luggage-free, al-Qaida-in-Yemen-tutored Abdulmutallab:
Iran: Last week the Tehran regime missed another U.N.-drafted deadline for halting its uranium enrichment, aka its nuclear bomb program. Instead, in its umpteenth round of nose-thumbing at the multilateral monitoring and dialogue on which Obama has placed his bets, the Iranian regime set its own Jan. 31 deadline for the West to accept Tehran’s terms for its bomb-fuel projects. Meanwhile, Manhattan’s longtime, legendary district attorney (a Democrat), Robert Morgenthau, just before going into retirement, told The Wall Street Journal, that “the president is smoking pot or something if he thinks that being nice to these guys is going to get him anywhere.”
While that was going on, Iranian protesters were dying in the streets, battling to end the misrule of the mullahs, who for 30 years have held power with terror at home and by spreading terror abroad.
China: The Beijing regime, fresh from jailing democratic dissident Liu Xiaobo, opined that the time is not ripe for new U.N. sanctions on Iran. Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal wrote that “Chinese companies banned from doing business in the U.S. for allegedly selling missile technology to Iran continue to do a brisk trade with American companies.”
Gaza: About the time Obama’s old Chicago connections Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn were disporting themselves in Egypt, demanding access to luxuriate in Gaza’s terrorist environment, Reuters–not known for any bias toward Israel–reported that Iranian-backed terrorist organization Hamas has tightened its grip on Gaza over the past year. Moreover, a detailed Jan. 4 report by the Jerusalem Center for Foreign Affairs concluded that 2009 brought a “spread and buildup of ‘global jihadi’ organizations in Gaza,” a number of which identify openly with al-Qaida, such as Jaish al-Islam (the Army of Islam), Jaish al-Umma (the Army of the Nation), and Fatah al-Islam.”
North Korea: As detailed in the Washington Post, a report surfaced from Pakistan’s nuclear mass-marketing wizard, A.Q. Khan, that, based on his multiple past close encounters with North Korea, Kim Jong Il’s regime may have a more advanced uranium enrichment program and missile-ready nuclear arsenal than suspected. Meanwhile, North Korea keeps dispatching munitions to Iran, by ship and by plane.
Russia: Obama’s “reset” and reneging on missile defense for Eastern Europe has now translated into Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s threat that Russia, to balance any American missile defense, will develop new “offensive” weapons.
Venezuela: While buying Russian military equipment and offering Iran a portal into America’s backyard (and access to Venezuela’s gasoline supplies and uranium mines), President Hugo Chavez signaled last month that the charm of Obama’s handshake last spring has worn off: “The Obama illusion is finished.”
Piracy: In 2009, pirates off the Horn of Africa almost doubled their attacks over 2008, rounding out a year of record exploits. Africa and security expert Peter Pham notes that this past year 214 ships were attacked, with 47 successfully hijacked, including three in the final week of December.
Add this up. A picture emerges of a world in which, often hand-in-hand, tyranny and Islamic terrorism are on a roll. Rules vital to any civilized order are breaking down. Tyrants are emboldened, networking among each other and brazenly pursuing more powerful arsenals. Freedom is in retreat.
That won’t be reversed just by sprucing up watch lists or requiring American travelers to bare more skin in airport security lines. America’s foes have their differences. But they all have this in common: They see America as an antagonist, not because they are appalled by Guantanamo Bay, as Obama keeps arguing (every patch of turf listed above features far worse treatment of “detainees”), but for the opposite reason–that America has stood for generations as the leader of the free world, what Ronald Reagan called “the shining city on a hill.” That’s what this war is about, and that’s the crisis that needs the full attention and a genuinely viable strategy right now from America’s commander-in-chief. When does President Obama look at this scene and finally connect the dots?
Claudia Rosett, a journalist in residence with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, writes a weekly column on foreign affairs for Forbes.
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