Crimes Against Liberty (50 page)

Under Obama, America is no longer proud of its liberty. Instead, we are peddling American guilt and doing penance. Professor Ajami says this approach has been ill-advised. “No one,” says Ajami, “told Mr. Obama that [in] the Islamic world, where American power is engaged and so dangerously exposed, it is considered bad form, nay a great moral lapse, to speak ill of one’s own tribe in the midst, and in the lands, of others.”
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THUG OUTREACH

Rejecting the Bush administration’s focus on supporting international democratic movements, Obama adopted a policy of appeasing the world’s tyrants and dictators—also with no dividends to show for it. At the Americas Summit in April 2009, he boasted that reaching out to U.S. enemies “strengthens our hand” and claimed the notion that his approach projects weakness “doesn’t make sense.”
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Illustrating his new tack, he snuggled up to anti-American Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez at the summit, graciously accepting Chavez’s gift—a book by Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano,
Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent—
which is a scathing attack on American and European involvement in Latin America. Galeano wrote, “Our defeat was always implicit in the victory of others; our wealth has always generated our poverty by nourishing the prosperity of others.”
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Was Reverend Jeremiah Wright also Chavez’s mentor?

Also at the summit, following a nearly hour-long tirade against the United States by far-left Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega, Obama elected not to defend his own country, instead saying he was “grateful that President Ortega did not blame me for things that happened when I was three months old.” In other words,
America might be terrible, but it’s not my fault
. And anyone who thought Obama might at least have his secretary of state rebuke Ortega and stand up for America was mistaken. As FOX News reported, “Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ignored two questions about Ortega’s speech, instead offering lengthy praise of a cultural performance of dance and song opening the summit.”
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Besides Ortega and Chavez, other Latin American leaders took swipes at Obama at the summit. Brazilian president Luis Inácio Lula warned Obama that another summit without Cuba’s Communist leaders would be unacceptable, and Argentine president Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner detailed a host of grievances against America, from the drug war to U.S. support for counterinsurgencies during the 1980s.
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After a full year of Obama’s enlightened diplomacy, Chavez did-n’t seem to warm up any further. At the Copenhagen summit in December 2009, he called the United States “the great polluter,” which was responsible “for having threatened, for having killed, for genocide as well.” Having called President George W. Bush a “devil” whose podium “still smells of sulfur” in 2006, Chavez said of Obama in 2009, “I still smell sulfur. I still smell sulfur in this world.” He referred to Obama’s recently received Nobel Peace Prize as the “Nobel prize of war” and called Washington’s offer to contribute $10 billion to an annual fund for developing countries “laughable.”
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THE ANTI-DEMOCRAT

Like most leftists, Obama sees himself as a champion of democracy but proves otherwise, not just on domestic policy, where he routinely thwarts the people’s will, but on the world stage as well, where he instinctively sides with tyrants, thugs, and dictators, and turns his back on true democratic movements. Nowhere was this on clearer display than with Obama’s appalling handling of the Iranian uprising of 2009.

Here it was not just his leftist instinct toward tyranny, but also his fear that showing any sympathy to the people might displease the dictator he was trying to court. When outraged Iranians took to the streets in summer 2009 to protest the corrupt “election” of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Obama largely remained neutral, even in the face of the regime’s widespread beatings and killings of peaceful protestors. The administration’s initial response was not to stand with the Iranian people and denounce the fixed election, but rather to insist the engagement policy would continue regardless of the election’s outcome.
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Everyone knew the election was disgracefully fraudulent. As Senator Joe Lieberman declared, “Through intimidation, violence, manipulation and outright fraud, the Iranian regime has once again made a mockery of democracy and confirmed its repressive and dictatorial character.” Senator John McCain urged Obama to “speak out forcefully” against the “sham, corrupt election” and the “depravation of [the Iranian people’s] fundamental rights,” and to “speak up for the people of Iran” and “make sure the world knows America leads.”
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But Vice President Joe Biden said on
Meet the Press
, “We’re going to withhold comment.... I mean we’re just waiting to see.” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton offered the same, saying, “The United States has refrained from commenting on the election in Iran.” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, unwittingly approaching
Saturday Night Live
absurdity, said the administration was “impressed by the vigorous debate and enthusiasm this election generated.”

The administration’s feckless response brought derision from critics around the world. British political commentator Nile Gardiner called America’s response “cowardly, lily-livered and wrong” and said it was “undermining America’s standing as a global power.” He denounced it as a “cynical exercise in appeasement that will all end in tears.... As blood flows on the streets of Tehran, the United States government remains as silent as a Trappist Monk.” Even the German government, he said, was “showing more backbone than the White House.”
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But Iranian democratic protestors persisted. They turned the pressure up a notch on November 4, the thirtieth anniversary of the Iranian leadership’s takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran, when they gathered in the streets and called Obama out. “Obama, Obama, you are either with us or with them,” they yelled. He answered them again, emphatically, with his silence.

That very day Obama was scorned by the brutal leaders whose favor he was seeking. Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, spurned Obama’s numerous direct overtures to him and warned that negotiating with the United States would be “naïve and perverted,” and that Iranian political leaders must not be “deceived” into engaging in negotiations. Khamenei acknowledged Obama’s outreach, but dismissed it as, essentially, empty rhetoric. He said Obama had “said nice things.... He has given us many spoken and written messages and said: ‘Let’s turn the page and create a new situation. Let’s cooperate with each other in resolving world problems.’” However, “What we have witnessed is completely the opposite of what they have been saying and claiming. On the face of things, they say, ‘Let’s negotiate.’ But... they threaten us and say that if these negotiations do not achieve a desirable result, they will do this and that.” Unmoved by Obama’s acclaimed personal charm, Khamenei said, “Whenever they smile at the officials of the Islamic revolution, when we carefully look at the situation, we notice that they are hiding a dagger behind their back. They have not changed their intentions.”
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Obama employed the same hapless, morally bankrupt approach toward the true democratic forces in Honduras. He instinctively sided with the country’s socialist thug president, Manuel Zelaya, when Zelaya launched a referendum without the backing of his Congress to organize an assembly to draft a new constitution. The move, which was declared illegal by the Honduran Supreme Court, was a clear attempt to extend his power beyond the constitutionally prescribed term—a tactic previously employed by his ally, Hugo Chavez. Lawlessly, Zelaya and his supporters seized millions of ballots from a military base, but before he could implement his scheme, the Supreme Court ordered his arrest. He was then sent to Costa Rica, and Congress appointed an interim successor.

Although Zelaya’s leftwing sympathizers denounced his removal as a coup, it was nothing of the sort. The military acted under color of law, by order of the Supreme Court. If anyone was attempting a coup it was Zelaya, who had even terminated a top military leader, General Romeo Vasquez, because he wouldn’t join the conspiracy to commandeer the crooked referendum.

The Obama administration, which had refused to “meddle” in the internal affairs of Iran, was all too pleased to inject itself into the Honduran crisis, and as usual, on the side of the thug. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton fretted that the situation had “evolved into a coup.” She stated, “It’s important that we stand for the rule of law”—just as she was siding with the very forces who were defying the rule of law in Honduras.

Obama continued to violate his own admonition against meddling by pressuring the interim regime to restore Zelaya to power. Claiming Zelaya’s ouster could set a “terrible precedent,” he joined with other Latin American countries—Costa Rica, Peru, Panama, and Colombia—to condemn the move as an illegal coup. To add some teeth to his declarations, Obama slashed military aid by $16.5 million to Honduras, cut off various kinds of economic aid, and suspended issuing most visas to Honduran citizens.

The interim Honduran government, however, refused to yield to the pressure, even after Zelaya snuck back into the country and took refuge in the Brazilian embassy. Four months after Zelaya’s removal, the Honduran Congress decided by an overwhelming 98 to 12 majority not to reinstate him.
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Honduras instead held a presidential election that, in a shocking turnabout from America’s historic support for democracy, the Obama administration had repeatedly threatened not to recognize unless Zelaya presided over it.

Granted safe passage out of the country by newly elected Honduran president Porfirio Lobo, Zelaya went into exile in the Dominican Republic.
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In the end, Honduran democracy proved strong enough to resist anti-democratic pressure from most of the international community, including, shamefully, the United States.

THE INSPECTOR CLOUSEAU OF FOREIGN POLICY

Obama’s foreign policy failures have not been limited to his inability to convert jihadists into America-lovers. They’ve been much broader than that. The Left assured us Obama would restore class and dignity to the Oval Office after they had to endure eight years of embarrassment with Cowboy George. Finally, America could hold its head high again. The trouble is, like most everything else from this pseudo messiah, the reality didn’t quite square with the hype. Obama managed to offend leader after leader through awkward, insensitive, clueless, and sometimes rude and boorish behavior—as if oblivious to proper protocol.

Obama promised he would “repair” our relations with Europe, but he’s succeeded only in alienating the continent. When British prime minister Gordon Brown visited Washington in March 2009, Obama so blatantly disrespected him that British newspapers decried Obama’s “rudeness” and “appalling” behavior. Removing a bust of Winston Churchill from the Oval Office was Obama’s initial misstep. Then, he gave embarrassingly trite gifts to the Brown family. Brown had given Obama a penholder made from the timbers of the nineteenth-century British warship HMS
President
. (The Oval Office desk is made from the wood of its sister ship, HMS
Resolute
.) Obama reciprocated with twenty-five DVDs of Hollywood movies, prompting one
Daily Telegraph
staffer to remark, “Oh, give me strength. We do have television and DVD stores on this side of the Atlantic.” The
Times of London
found Michelle Obama’s “solipsistic” and “inherently dismissive” gifts to the Browns’ two little boys—toy models of Marine One, the president’s helicopter—just as insulting.
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Beyond the gifts, which many Brits interpreted as a calculated snub, the world noticed Obama acted distinctly indifferent toward the leader of our closest ally. Not even bothering to deny the slight, the administration casually passed off Obama’s rudeness on his being “too tired” to give Brown a proper welcome because of his focus on the economic crisis. Obama was reportedly so busy with domestic issues that he had little time to deal with international matters, “let alone the diplomatic niceties of the special relationship,” according to the
Sunday Telegraph
. One source told the
Telegraph
he was concerned that Obama had failed to “even fake an interest in foreign policy.”
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Obama also offended our ally yet again by turning down five requests from the Brits in September 2009 to hold a bilateral meeting, either at the UN building in New York or at the G20 summit in Pittsburgh.
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Obama’s distaste for Britain was also evident in his West Point speech on Afghanistan, of which Nile Gardiner wrote, “One subject was conspicuous by its total absence ... there wasn’t a single mention of America’s main ally in the region, Britain. Never mind that we have 10,000 troops on active service there—far more than any other of America’s so-called allies—and never mind that 237 of our brave soldiers have already lost their lives there, Great Britain wasn’t even a footnote.” Condemning what he called “the most extraordinary and insulting oversight,” Gardiner noted this wasn’t just a one-time occurrence, which “might have been overlooked as a careless mistake,” but in all of Obama’s speeches “neither Britain nor the special relationship have merited a single mention”—a relationship, said Gardiner, that is “certainly dying.”
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