Jack and Squat

As if almost on cue, the Nobel committee this week served up another softball for this blog. Just last week, Saturday Night Live skewered Obama with a parody on his lack of achievements [see Youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YT5Kl38fSVY or search SNL Obama Do Nothing skit]. A liberal politician should take heed when SNL, Jon Stewart and Conan O’Brien are taking potshots at you.

The Nobel Prize just rounds out a legacy of nonaccomplishment for Obama. Other than winning elections, his resume has been completely void of actual, tangible results. As a community organizer, no one has come forth with anything one can call an actual achievement. As both a State Senator and US Senator, he sponsored not a single piece of legislation. As a professor, no original published works carry his name. No one in recent history has attained as high of a station and gotten more accolades on such a flimsy record of concrete results. In the business world that I inhabit, any job candidate must credibly reel off a series of actual, quantifiable achievements if he or she wishes to be a serious candidate for the job. For the Nobel committee, however, aspirations and great speeches are apparently enough.

So, what exactly did Obama do to deserve this distinguished award? Let us look at the statements of the Nobel Prize committee itself for the answer. In its press release, the committee singled out Obama for, “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples. The Committee has attached special importance to Obama's vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons.” Again, maybe I’m missing something, but so far, the actual accomplishments of the Obama administration have been to (i) send the mullahs in Iran a holiday video greeting, (ii) paid our UN dues and joined the Human Rights Council (along with other zealous defenders of human rights such as Russia, Cuba, Saudi Arabia and China), (iii) kicked off his presidency with a European apology tour, telling them that “America has been arrogant and has even ridiculed” its European allies, and (iv) permitted the investigation of whether the CIA caused undue discomfort to Khalid Sheik Muhammed and his cronies in attempting to gain intelligence from them. One would think that to win a Nobel Prize, you would have to come up with at least one signature achievement of some import. However, we are no closer to a Middle East peace accord, no closer to a stringent verifiable nonproliferation regimen, no closer to defeating the Taliban in Afghanistan, or advancing women’s rights (as an aside, I find it interesting that NOW found time to scold David Letterman for his “promotion of a hostile work environment” but they still have yet to utter a word about how women are treated in the Middle East). In fact, under the Obama administration, America has not entered into a new material accord with anyone, nor has America brokered a peace deal between any two parties in discord.

The committee singles out our president for his “vision of a world free from nuclear arms [and he] has powerfully stimulated disarmament and arms control negotiations”. This is almost a parody in itself. Obama made his high minded vision statement about a world free of nuclear weapons concurrent with the disclosure of the Iranian facility at Qom was made public. No actual steps were taken by Western leaders (other than to talk to the Iranians and give them time to hide things before the IAEA came to visit). Perhaps Barack will someday persuade the mullahs to give up their nukes, but so far, the centrifuges are still spinning. If actual tangible achievement counted, surely Ronald Reagan would have gotten a Nobel. Under Reagan, more verifiable arms control agreements involving the dismantling of more kilotonnage and throw weights than any other world leader. But this award is not about achievement. It’s about politics. It’s about the Norwegian committee blessing Obama’s vision for America as the semi-European nanny state, where all states, no matter how odious have equal standing, where democracy is only one of many equally plausible ways of organizing a state and governing peoples, where the state, not individuals are responsible for the well-being of its citizens, and where aggressive, hostile, and tyrannical regimes are faced with letters of disapproval, carefully crafted by large committees. It is a world in which two of the world’s leading democracies—the US and Israel are roundly condemned, while the world’s worst dictators are free to acquire weapons to threaten and destabilize the world. We have gone from Ronald Reagan’s vision of the “shining city on the hill” to the vision of Obama, “we’re sorry we’ve been so arrogant in our promotion of liberty, democracy and free enterprise.” This is why the European on the Nobel committee is so willing to overlook that nagging little detail about not having any achievements. They love his, well, European vision for America.

Games and Bombs

The rejection of Chicago as the site for the 2016 this week represents the latest setback for the Obama administration. With as many domestic and foreign challenges facing this administration, I was frankly surprised that the administration decided to spend political capital to attempt to snare the Olympics for Chicago. The city itself was divided as to whether it really wanted the games. After nine months on the job, Obama’s star power was beginning to show signs of wear and he needed a win at this juncture. It seemed to me that the Olympic push had only small upside potential and large downside risk for the president. And alas, after a personal plea by Obama, the Olympic committee promptly scratched Chicago after the first round.
On the surface, this doesn’t seem like a major blow to the administration, but on a closer look it is deeply symbolic of what is wrong with this administration and does not portend well for the immediate future of his administration. Here’s why.
Obama has come an astonishingly long way on rhetoric. His golden tongue was super b in rallying the faithful during the election. At a time when the country was in a state of fright over its fracturing financial system and exhausted from its war in Iraq, Obama’s cool demeanor and mantra of hope and change and high sounding ideals had pundits swooning. At the inauguration, they immediately began drawing analogies between Obama and FDR and Lincoln. We wanted to believe.
There is an ocean of difference, however, between giving a speech and spouting ideals and actually getting things done. The missing ingredient in Obama’s background is negotiating experience. He has none. No one has been able to tell me exactly what he accomplished as a community organizer. He had no legislative accomplishments to his credit. And certainly being a lecturer to a bunch of 20 somethings does not give you one iota of experience at negotiating. Making a case is one thing. Controlling events and negotiating for the support of other key players is another.
As a result, we are beginning to see this administration grind to a halt. It was naked and exposed for all to see during the UN meeting last week. In very lofty and idyllic terms, Obama spoke about the vision of a world without nuclear weapons, a high minded ideal about which there is little disagreement. Yet, the very next day, when faced with the actual, real concrete evidence of the crazed mullahs in Iran blatantly ignoring the West with incontrovertible evidence that their nuclear weapons program is humming along, Obama seemed disjointed and out of step with our European allies. Britain and France both spoke about “lines in the sand” and deadlines. Obama mumbled something about Iran “having to live up to its international obligations.”
This was the perfect forum to present a pre-negotiated orchestrated united front to Iran. After all, we had only the week before given the Russians a huge concession by scuttling our plans to put missile defenses in Poland and the Czech Republic.
But the only concrete action we received from others was a commitment by Iran to talk about the program, and by Russia to consider sanctions (not commit to them, mind you, but to commit to consider them). Iran promptly fired off a bunch of missiles just to let us know what they think of all this.
This is all symptomatic of an individual and an administration that has no experience in getting things accomplished. Obama much prefers grandious speeches to the hard, grinding work of negotiating and making deals. In the health care reform push, Obama’s efforts have been to ramp up the speaking circuit. Obama believes that if he just says it often enough and in an eloquent enough fashion, people will see the sense in it. But the art of getting things done involves getting people to do things they don’t really want to do. It involves cajoling, bribing, threatening, pushing at many levels to get what needs to be done. And it needs to be done in a coordinated fashion with nothing left to chance.
The issues we face with Iran are deadly serious. We failed to stop North Korea from getting the bomb. And now we are arguably faced with the most odious regime since the Nazis on the brink of becoming a nuclear power. The actions of the West over the next twelve months could easily change the history of the world. It is time to stop campaigning and get to work.

Harnessing the Good Guys

It’s been an interesting few months in Obamaworld. The Obama Justice Department now wishes to conduct criminal investigations into detainee treatment following 9/11. Apparently, Eric “We Are a Nation of Cowards” Holder is disturbed that CIA personnel roughed up Khalid Sheik Mohammed and some of his cronies after they murdered 3,000 of our citizens in 2001 in an effort to learn more about Al Qaeda and its plans. Evidently, burning, beheading and maiming is fair practice for the bad guys, but making the bad guys extremely uncomfortable is out of bounds for us.

Last month, Congress voiced its extreme displeasure with Dick Cheney’s authorization of hit squads of CIA operatives that were to be deployed in Pakistan to take out high level Al Qaeda figures. Apparently, it is fine to take them out with drones (thereby risking collateral damage), but taking them out face to face at close range is impermissible.

What is interesting to me is that these positions follow closely on the heels of Obama’s off the cuff remark in his press conference that the Cambridge police had acted “stupidly” by arresting Henry Louis Gates for being disruptive when police were called to his residence responding to a call regarding a potential break-in. After leaping to the conclusion that the Cambridge police acted stupidly, our “post-racial” president then went even further and initially asserted that this incident was about race. Finding himself caught in this entanglement, he tried to slither out from under the controversy by stating that he “could have calibrated his words more carefully” (how Clintonian) and then tried to whitewash it all using Rodney King (“can’t we all just get along”) diplomacy at the infamous “beer summit”.

What does the Gates incident have to do with how we deal with international terrorists? Quite a bit, actually. Taken together, they speak volumes about how Obama and his advisors view the world. In Obamaworld, the guys that are charged with protecting us are the ones that need to be restrained, collared and contained. They must abide by a strict set of rules, and in some cases, even abiding by the rules may not be enough. In the Gates incident, the police officer in question was not shown to have violated any rule or procedure. In the case of Khalid Sheik Muhammed, the alleged wrong was that he was threatened with a drill. Now, it might be different if they actually harmed KSM with it, but it’s hard for me to feel a great sense of injustice because the mastermind of the most bloody attack on U.S. soil was shown how a drill works. Obama and his crew seek to impose strict rules on the good guys. The bad guys get to do whatever they want.

The whole Gates incident gives us a peek at how Obama thinks about the world. Think about it for a moment. That press conference was extremely revealing. Obama (a Harvard educated lawyer) said, “I don’t know what the facts are, but the white cop was wrong.” That is Obama’s starting point. The guy in charge of protecting our lives and property was presumptively wrong.

Similarly, that is the mindset with international terrorism. The terrorists need to be protected from the guys that are in charge of protecting us—just to make sure they don’t get overzealous. The guys at the CIA are wrong. They need a labyrinthian set of rules to follow when interrogating the most evil guys on the planet. Eventually, the lawyers in Obamaworld will come to develop a code of permissible conduct for our CIA operatives.

It’s one thing to question a little dust-up between a Cambridge cop and a Harvard professor where no one got hurt, but Holder and his staff apparently don’t realize that his crusade will lead to an upgrade of Al Qaeda’s training manual.

The Stoning of Soraya M.

The recent uprising in Iran has been labeled by some as the “lipstick revolution.” While the spontaneous rebellion following the Iranian elections has quieted over the past week, it was apparent that many of the malcontents taking to the street were young women. Indeed, the icon of these street protests was Neda (or “voice”), the young Iranian woman that was gunned down and whose gruesome death was seen over the internet across the globe. My last post questioned why Western feminists have been so silent in the face of a regime and religion that so tramples on women’s rights.

It was timely that I saw the recently released film “The Stoning of Soraya M.” last weekend, and I highly recommend it. The movie is about a young Iranian woman who is unfairly accused of adultery and framed by her husband, a no-account scoundrel that wishes to unload his earnest, hardworking wife for floozies. In the West, an unscrupulous oaf can do this simply—by divorcing, dividing family property and paying the requisite maintenance and child support. It may be unpleasant for the woman, but she will get on with life.

But under Sharia law, it is another matter. In the film, the husband is able to arrange the stoning of his wife by co-opting a false witness, manipulating Sharia law and the local mullah. This is permitted to occur as a consequence of misogynist religious doctrine, the welding of law and religion, and the unchecked power of local religious leaders. The final scene is jarring—a graphic barbaric and brutal execution of a beautiful young woman in which her father, sons, and husband, along with the rest of the community all partake.

Although the actual incident upon which the film was based took place in the mid 1980’s, stoning continues to be a staple enforcement mechanism for sexual mores in the Islamic world. In a widely publicized case last year a 13 year old rape victim was stoned to death when her family reported the rape and she was accused of adultery.

In a sad coincidence, The Stoning of Soraya M. was released within 30 days of the slaying of Neda. That a segment of this culture society uses violence and threat of violence in a most barbaric way to prevent women from exercising their sexual freedom, shoots them for expressing themselves politically and beats them for not adhering to the Islamic dress code is astonishing to me. And, as I observed in my last post, what is more astonishing is the silence from Western feminists. And I also remind you that this is a culture that President Obama is tripping over himself to engage and show respect. The oppression of women by societies like Iran’s is on par with how blacks were treated in the deep South in the 50’s or in South Africa under apartheid. Why is the world so tolerant of it?

Where is NOW?

Although I believe that the correct posture of the Obama administration in the current Iranian crisis is circumspection, I believe it is high time for private citizens to voice their support for the currents of change in Iran.

In particular, I have observed with interest that it is women, particularly young women that appear to be at the center of this nascent movement. Women are defying the regime, marching in the streets, chanting, pushing back their head scarves, sporting the green markings signifying the movement. As I noted in my previous posting, the demonstrations are about much more than which stooge of the mullahs gets to be president. It is about giving voice to the people, and in particular, women. In watching some of the video that has made in out of Tehran, I saw young women bravely absorbing the thuds of the batons, being kicked, shoved and brutally pummeled by the thugs that run this government. These women want a voice. They want to be educated. They want to be full and equal citizens. I read “Reading Lolita in Tehran” a couple of years ago. It highlighted this sick and decrepit society that forces young women into hiding so they can read the world’s great literature. It is a pathological system that permits women to be stoned and beaten for being out with a man alone.

Yet, where is NOW? Where is Susan Sarandon? Where is Barbara Streisand? Where is Anita Hill? Where are all these folks? I went to the NOW website today. There are little stories about reproductive rights, discrimination and the murder of Dr. Tiller. That is all fine. Women are being beaten in the streets of Tehran today and there is not one word on the NOW website in support of these women. The misogynist Iranian regime will deprive women of THE RIGHT TO READ A BOOK, let alone permit women to exercise reproductive rights. And yet the silence from the feminist left in this country is deafening.

Well, this bald, fat, middle aged white conservative stands with you today, ladies. You deserve a future. You deserve a voice. You deserve to have the freedom to be educated, to be with who you want to be with, and to be full participants in your society. And I hope you get it. It’s a shame that your sisters here don’t share the outrage with me.

Hope and Change

Watching the news that has come out of Tehran has been intriguing to me. Not since the protests of 20 years ago at Tiananmen Square have I felt such a glimmer of hope for a people as I do now. Iran is not simply a country—it is a civilization suffocating under the rule of the clerical tyrants that have been in charge for 30 years. I see the prosperous, progressive society it could become. Unfortunately, the most likely outcome is that it will end as it did in China, precisely 20 years ago, with the regime resorting to naked force to silence the people. But I do hold out a glimmer of hope, and if there is any hope at all, we must stay out of it.

In this instance, President Obama is doing precisely the right thing--- say as little as possible. His remarks have been carefully restrained and circumspect. He has been careful not to be seen as taking sides. And his foreign policy team has been careful not to be seen as tilting one way or the other.

Unfortunately, John McCain has been railing that Obama has abandoned fundamental principles about human rights. Hogwash. What McCain simply doesn’t understand is that the mullahs have made a career out of vilifying the Great Satan. They need to demonize us. Any overt interfering and taking sides will give them exactly the excuse they need to exert force against their own people. We shouldn’t be cheerleading anybody. Obama is entirely correct when he says that, “Although there is amazing ferment taking place in Iran, the difference between Ahmadinejad and Mousavi in terms of their actual positions may not be as great as advertised.”

I have been (and undoubtedly will continue to be) critical of Obama’s approach on many economic and foreign policy issues. But on this particular day on this particular issue, I’m glad that Obama, not McCain is at the helm. McCain does not understand that the protests are not about a particular candidate. The protests are about an Iranian people that want a voice in their own future. The mullahs are dying for us to pick a side. If there is any hope that now or in the near future for a second Iranian revolution, we must be silent.

Making Progress

I’ve been following President Obama’s “Muslim Outreach” program with a high degree of interest as I believe that reducing the tension between Islam and the West is one of the single dominant themes of our time. I admit I have been pretty skeptical since Obama’s opening act included a Grand Apologia in front of European audiences and a fawning videotape sent to the mullahs in Iran, purportedly designed to open dialogue with them.

But I have to say, I give Obama’s Cairo speech this week a B. He appears to be making some progress. At least he didn’t bow to any Saudi kings on this trip, apologize directly for America’s misbehavior, or completely throw the Israelis under the bus. And I give him credit for at least explicitly putting forward the checklist of items that will need to be tackled if there is to be peaceful coexistence between the West and Islam.

And while he should be congratulated for identifying the issues that cause friction between Islam and the West, his approach will fail unless it contains two key elements that are essential in relationship: reciprocity and accountability.

It is all fine, well and good to attempt to come to some sort of rapprochement with Islamic nations, and to take affirmative steps to achieve that. But such unilateral steps will be futile unless the Islamic world wants to take similar steps. Obama commented that “some in my country… view Islam as inevitably hostile not only to America and Western countries, but also to human rights.” Islam needs to demonstrate concretely that this view is incorrect. But Islamic leaders were strangely silent following 9/11 and the murder of Theo Van Gogh. They took no steps to assist when their Arab brethren were being ruthlessly slaughtered in Bosnia and Iraq. Muslim protesters only come out when their sensibilities are offended by cartoon depictions of Allah with a bomb in his turban or when people like Geert Wilders observe the connection between Islam and violence.

It is fine for Obama to try to improve the West’s image with the Islamic world, but the Islamic world has a way to go in improving its image with the West. To many in the West, Islam conjures up images of extreme violence, intolerance, tyranny, opposition to scientific progress, and misogyny. These images did not arise out of thin air—they are based on the experiences observed by the West. If the Islamic world continues to embrace intolerance, violence and tyranny, no rapprochement with the West will be possible unless the West chooses to accede to these elements of their society. So while I applaud an effort undertaken to reach out to the Islamic world, the Islamic world must reciprocate and it must reciprocate by forcefully denouncing those elements of its society and culture which are an anathema to the West.

The second issue I have with Obama’s approach is accountability. While he stopped short of blaming America, he attributed the problems in the Middle East to, “tension that has been fed by colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims, and a Cold War in which Muslims were too often treated as proxies without regard to their own aspirations.” In other words, Muslims are historical victims. And this is the biggest reason why I remain skeptical of the Obama approach. Victim hood of white colonialism remains hardwired in the DNA of the Democratic platform, both domestically and internationally. We will make no progress until the Muslim peoples reject victim hood and take responsibility for their own societies and outcomes. By casting them as victims, Obama is perpetuating their own powerlessness vis-à-vis their purported oppressors whether it is the Israelis or, more accurately, their own political and religious tyrants that enslave them.

I applaud Obama’s efforts to bridge the gap between the Muslim societies of the Middle East and the West. I agree that George Bush could not have given this speech. But real relationships are based on reciprocity and accountability and thus far Obama has been reluctant to demand either from the Islamic world.