RUTHFULLY YOURS

PETER HUESSEY: WHAT WILL THE NEXT ADMINISTRATION INHERIT?

Posted By Ruth King on October 1st, 2012

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-next-inheritance?f=puball

What then will the next administration inherit from the current one? What does 2012 look like compared to 2008 in the foreign policy arena?The next administration will most definitely face the prospects of an Iranian nuclear weapon “sooner rather than later”.

At the same time, the administration will find making the case for taking action against Iran a very hard sell to the American people. For millions of Americans, the next administration will find that accurately describing Iran’s nuclear weapons program as deadly serious will get one portrayed as “war mongering”.

The next administration will find that for millions of other Americans, an Iranian nuclear weapon is solely a problem for Israel.The next administration will also find that many Americans will agree with former President Clinton that terrorism goes away if a deal creating a Palestinian state goes through. And for many, that onus is on the United States and Israel more so than the Palestinians or their terrorist affiliates.

For millions of other Americans, the administration will find many on the left and on the right believe “Iran terrorism” is an invention by those pushing for higher defense budgets. We will hear that while “Al Qaeda and its affiliates” were the prime terrorist threat, that has severely diminished with the killing of Osama.

And the administration will find that even when people believe terrorist threats exist, they believe the US is at fault. We are portrayed as a bully in the world, and our support for tyrants in the Arab and Islamic world is blowing back on us. We are simply getting our just deserts.

One prominent Washington Post journalist wrote a best-selling book connecting 9/11 to the US supported coup in Iran in 1953 and the subsequent rise of an Islamic regime in Iran in 1979.

The new administration will inherit a non-aligned movement that has just voted 120-0 to support Iran in its fight with not only the UN’s International Atomic Energy Administration but the United States and its P5+1 allies over Tehran’s nuclear program. This compared to a previous vote of 118-0 in 2006.

And they will inherit what the Washington Post termed a “dismal summer”, an Iran hardly “isolated” even after some 3 1/2 years of fabled “smart power”. All this despite a very candid IAEA report outlining stunning Iranian progress toward building more nuclear centrifuges and producing more enriched nuclear fuel.

The next administration will also inherit a China and Russia with little intention of stopping Iranian progress toward a nuclear bomb, or stopping their cooperation with Tehran’s missile programs, or curtailing Iran’s state sponsorship of terrorism. And inherit we will a coalition that includes Iran, Russia, China, Venezuela, Cuba, Syria, North Korea and affiliated terror groups such as FARC, Hamas, Hezbollah, Al Qaeda, the Taliban, Abu Sayef, and the Haqqani networks.

Is there a head of a SPECTER-like organization with a white cat with malevolent aims against the United States? Or are their multiple threats that work together as what the Northern Alliance hero Massoud warned us was a “poisonous coalition” made up of a number of agents and actors? In either case, the coalitions are more powerful now than they were and are expanding their reach and power.

The Next Poisonous Coalition

Will we be better able to defend our security in the face of these continued threats? Unfortunately not. A key problem? The next administration will inherit a badly thought out counter terrorism policy almost entirely focused on “Al Qaeda” and its affiliates, as opposed to the terror masters and THEIR affiliates, especially Iran and Syria and their affiliates, Russia and China. And it will inherit a flawed policy that sees violence from Tunisia to Thailand as a reaction to a homemade video about Islam rather than the outgrowth of Islamic and tyrannical regimes and their terror affiliates seeking power and domination.

The next administration will find an Egypt largely gone to the Muslim Brotherhood, imperiling the peace of the Middle East even further and especially the Saudi peninsula. And a Libya divided into terror sub-states whose weapons have migrated to Mali and the Sinai, with subsequent threats to Nigeria and Israel. And ballistic missile programs from Pyongyang to Peking, from Islamabad to Tehran, with Hamas, FARC and Hezbollah.

Four years ago, New York Times reporter David Sanger wrote in “The Inheritance” that the 43rd occupant of the White House “…had given little thought to the virtues of soft power, the power of America to shape events through the lure of its culture and example”. Furthermore, Sanger concluded, “Bush could never accept” the new world in which the US “has to heed rules set by others”.

Bill Keller, now the managing editor of the Times, and Sanger’s boss, said much the same nearly a decade earlier. In November 2001, just 60 days after 9/11, Keller complained that the administration US missile defense plans, as with its other defense plans, were nothing more than a search for “a new primacy of unfettered American self-interest”, contrary to a “pragmatic respect for the rest of the civilized world”.

Now, over a decade later, after four years of soft and smart power, Keller in a recent editorial concedes that Iran should be allowed to get nuclear weapons. He says Iran is surrounded by enemies, has a “grand sense of self-esteem”, “a tendency to paranoia”, and thus is understandably in need of nuclear weapons. Must be the Iranians want to be “unfettered”.

But now is gone the Sanger prediction that the incoming President in 2009 would be considered “great” once the threat of an Iran with nuclear weapons was eliminated.

So much for the lure of American power and culture.

Maybe we should go back to that “world order” that starts with that quaint idea of “protecting ourselves”. That includes missile defenses, as that 223 year old document commands us to do: “Provide for the Common Defense”.

Read more: Family Security Matters http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-next-inheritance?f=puball#ixzz282O0ivVe
Under Creative Commons License: Attribution

Comments are closed.