generalspeaking

Tuesday, January 29, 2013

That Nobel Peace Prizenik

Isn't that one hell of an irony? Hillary Clinton, winding up her energetic term as American Secretary of State. She bounced from First Lady, accompanying her husband, President Bill Clinton to Washington, then to the Senate representing New York to high-profile Democratic candidate for the presidency in the 2008 election that brought Chicago Senator Barack Obama to assume the vacancy that George W. Bush's second presidency presented.

And now, as long as her unexpected health problems clear up as her doctors have assured her they most certainly will - she hopes - she will exercise her options as a celebrated political high-profile globe-trotter to present as a candidate again once her current boss steps down at the end of his second term as president. The irony mentioned above being that her husband, Bill Clinton had no interest whatever in international affairs.

Like President Obama, President Clinton was mired in, interested in and fumbled with the internal affairs of the United States of America. After al-Qaeda bombed American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, President Clinton took note, and he took action. The action came in handy to divert the attention of the public from President Clinton's tardy admission he had misled the public about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky.

When he ventured onto the international scene, as when he attempted to deal with al-Qaeda, he rather messed things up. Clinton ordered a Cruise missile attack on August 20 on an alQaeda paramilitary training camp in Khost, Afghahnistan and on the El Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, Sudan's capital. The attack killed twenty-one al-Qaeda trainees from Pakistan but missed bin Laden. "Today we have struck back", Clinton said after the missile attacks.

Clinton had no use for intelligence. While he read the President's Daily Brief, Clinton stopped the CIA's morning briefings six months after he became president. R.James Woolsey, Clinton's first director of Central Intelligence, loved to tell the joke he heard about the plane that crashed into the White House. "They said it was just Woolsey trying to get an appointment with Clinton", Woolsey deadpans. "I didn't have bad relations with Clinton, I just didn't have any relations with him. Clinton was interested in balancing the budget, health care, NAFTA. He did not want to accomplish much in the foreign policy arena. " Ronald Kessler, The Terrorist Watch; inside the desperate race to stop the next attack.

Sound familiar? President Obama whose major interests are balancing the budget by sending the debt ceiling sky-high, health care and employment has now rebuffed criticism that the U.S. has retreated from global leadership under his administration. He defends himself by claiming he is simply exercising caution, taking care not to "shoot from the hip" in Syria. But proud of what his administration has accomplished, laying the groundwork for regime change in Libya and Egypt. Gracious us, Libya and Egypt?

Libya, where in Benghazi al-Qaeda affiliates are now so bold they had no problem attacking the U.S. mission there and dispatching four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens to his reward in the Great Beyond, thanks in good part to the lack of due diligence on the part of the State Department. And Egypt, where the Muslim Brotherhood and the more fanatical Salafists have outraged the Egyptian opposition that the U.S. more or less let down, just as they did during the Green revolution in Iran?

And Libya again, where the Taureg mercenaries no longer maintained by a dead-and-gone Moammar Gadhafi looted the weapons depots of the country, providing them to their al-Qaeda cohorts, and where Mali, once hugely supported by Libya as it was the international community as a sterling democracy, saw its northern desert fall to the Islamists. And it is France, and France alone which has sent its troops on the ground to aid Malian military in ousting the rebels.

And now, here is the world's conscience, the American administration informing Turkey, Jordan and by implication Israel - that despite President Obama's stern warning to the Alawite Syrian President al-Assad that the deployment or distribution of chemical weapons stockpiles would represent a 'red line' to Washington - that those countries should be prepared to act on their own to protect themselves. If that isn't abdication of assumed responsibility, then what is?

Suddenly the world's remaining super power isn't looking too powerful. It has a non-interventionist, isolationist president, surprise, surprise. Although of course, with the advent of his first term in the presidency, he did demonstrate his orientation by holding out the hand of U.S. friendship to the Iranian ayatollahs which they were swift to slap aside. And he did make his first major international address in Cairo - to the Muslim world.

Which looked askance and wondered what the hell was up with the Americans. And it didn't take all that long, come to think of it, for a sea change to take effect in the Middle East, with the dictators that the U.S. had got along with so well in the past suddenly taken down by a democracy that returned in their stead Islamist tyrants whose dictates now have their populations in an uproar.

"You've got to be careful", said Ms. Clinton during her joint interview on CBS's 60 Minutes program with President Obama. "You have to be thoughtful. You can't rush in, especially now, where it's more complex than it's been in decades". Yep, yep.

And from Arutz Sheva, an Israeli on-line newspaper, the following: The Lebanon-based Hizbullah terrorist organization is setting up bases in Syria close to known chemical weapons storage facilities, according to a source quoted in a report published Monday by Israeli Hebrew-language news outlet Ynet. Hizbullah, which is generously funded and equipped by Iran, has been working to shore up the government forces backing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, together with Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards.

Hey fellas, you're on your own.

Labels: Conflict, Controversy, Crisis Politics, Diplomacy, Egypt, Islamism, Libya, Syria, Terrorism, United States