How Obama Betrayed America

How Obama Betrayed America.(Frontpage).By David Horowitz.


Above is David Horowitz’s new pamphlet, How Obama Betrayed America…And No One is Holding Him Accountable. To order it, click here.
“If we have to use force, it is because we are America.  We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall.  We see farther into the future.” – Madeleine Albright, Secretary of State under Bill Clinton
It is a judgment on Barack Obama’s timorous, apologetic, irresponsible and ultimately anti-American conduct of foreign affairs that Madeleine Albright’s words, spoken little more than 15 years ago, now sound as antique as a pronouncement by Harry Truman at the onset of the Cold War, the great challenge America confronted bravely and without equivocation a generation ago.  While Obama has quoted this statement repeatedly to hide his real disdain for his country, he has set in motion policies meant to make America far from indispensable — a diminished nation that “leads from behind” if at all; a nation with a downsized military that is chronically uncertain about its meaning and its mission as it skulks in the wings of the world stage.
Albright’s statement was made about Iraq when Democrats were still supporting their country’s confrontation with its sadistic dictator Saddam Hussein, and before they defected from the war shortly after its battles were under way.  As a senator, in step with his Democratic colleagues, Obama opposed America’s war with Iraq while American troops were still in harms’ way, and then opposed the military surge that finally won the victory; as president he presided over the withdrawal of all American forces from Iraq,  against the wishes of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who wanted a continuing military presence, paid for with the blood of thousands of American men and women in arms. Obama thus turned that benighted nation over to the malign influences of America’s chief enemy in the Middle East, Iran, while betraying every American who gave his or her life for its freedom.
Far from shouldering his responsibility as the commander-in-chief of America’s global War on Terror and embracing it as this generation’s equivalent of the Cold War, Obama showed his distaste for the entire enterprise by dropping the term “War on Terror” and replacing it with an Orwellian phrase — “overseas contingency operations.” Minimizing the Islamist threat to the United States is not an oversight of the Obama administration; it is its policy.
It should not have been difficult for Obama to make the nation’s defense a priority when he became America’s commander-in-chief in January 2009.  The American homeland had already experienced a devastating attack, which terrorists have been constantly trying to repeat. The number of foreign states openly supporting terror has steadily increased (and grown even more during Obama’s tenure); and the most dangerous Islamist regime – Iran – is being allowed to acquire nuclear weapons, while Washington dithers over pointless negotiations. With secular governments giving way to Islamist regimes in Turkey, Egypt and Iraq, with the Taliban on the rise in Afghanistan and an American withdrawal imminent, the global situation today has eerie parallels to the early Cold War, with implications equally dire.  Yet instead of policies that put U.S. national security first and are pursued without hesitation or apology, Obama’s time in office has been marked by retreat and accommodation and even support of Islamist foes – most ominously of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, which swept aside an American ally, with Obama’s personal intervention, and is busily creating a totalitarian state.

  Obama’s Foreign Policy Disasters

In the four years since Obama’s first inauguration, almost three times as many Americans have been killed in Afghanistan as in the eight years of the Bush administration. Withdrawal, not victory, has been Obama’s goal from the outset, and now it is the only outcome possible.  During the Obama years, there have been more than 8,000 Islamic terrorist attacks on “infidels” across the globe, a twenty-five percent rise over the years in which the fighting in Iraq was at its height. Yet, in the face of this bloody and intensifying Islamist offensive, Obama has tried to convince the American people that the war against al-Qaeda has been essentially “won” — by him — and the terrorist threat is subsiding.^[1]  Denial of the war Islamists have declared on us and denial of the threat it represents is the heart of the Obama doctrine that has guided this nation’s policies for more than four years.
Obama’s desire for rapprochement with Iran’s Islamist regime has prompted the administration to drag its feet on the sanctions designed to halt Iran’s nuclear program. For the same reason, the president and his administration were silent when hundreds of thousands of Iranians poured into the streets of Teheran to call for an end to the dictatorship and were met by an orgy of violence from the mullahs’ thugs.  Because of the White House’s moral and political timidity, borne out of its denial of the Islamist threat and the guilty conviction that America (presumably an even greater predator) has no right to condemn another nation, this tipping point in Iran tipped the wrong way.
The administration’s denial was also egregiously manifest in its response to the massacre of 13 unarmed soldiers at Fort Hood by an Islamic fanatic, who three and a half years later still has not been brought to trial. The Fort Hood terrorist successfully infiltrated the American military and despite open expressions of hatred against the West was promoted to U.S. Army Major. The Obama administration’s Kafkaesque response to an obvious case of Islamist violence against the U.S. was to classify the terrorist attack as an incident of “workplace violence,” and thus to hide the fact that Hasan was a Muslim soldier in a war against the infidels of the West.
This inability to name our enemies was on display again on the eleventh anniversary of 9/11 when  jihadists staged demonstrations and launched attacks against the American embassies in Egypt and other Islamic countries. In Libya, al-Qaeda terrorists overran an American consular compound and murdered the American ambassador and three brave staffers. The attack took place in a country that had recently been destabilized by Obama’s own intervention to oust its dictator. As senator, Obama had denounced a military intervention in Iraq, which, unlike his Libyan adventure, had been authorized by both houses of Congress and a unanimous U.N. Security Council resolution. As president, he had invoked the principle of non-intervention to justify his passivity in the face of governmental atrocities in Syria and Iran. But in Libya he conducted an unauthorized invasion of a country that posed no threat to the United States and was not, as Syria is, in alliance with the mullahs of Iran and the terrorists of Hizbollah. The chaos that followed Obama’s Libyan intervention led directly to the rise of the local al-Qaeda, which planted its flag atop the same American outpost in Benghazi it later destroyed, and the U.S. ambassador along with it.
The events in Benghazi were a stark revelation of the consequences of a foreign policy without a moral compass.  The battle over the embassy lasted seven hours. Although the President learned about the attack shortly after it began and although the embattled Americans inside the compound begged the White House for help, and although U.S. fighter jets were stationed in Italy only an hour away, the president, in one of the most shameful acts in the history of that office, denied help by leaving his post, so that only silence answered their desperate calls. The president and his administration then went into cover-up mode lying to Congress and the American people, pretending for weeks afterwards that the attack was the result of a spontaneous demonstration over an anti-Mohammed internet video, whose director they then threw in jail.
Before his overthrow, the dictator, Moammar Gaddafi, warned that his demise would unleash the forces of the Islamic jihad not only in his own country but throughout North Africa. This was a prophecy quickly realized. In the aftermath of Obama’s intervention, al-Qaeda was able to take control in Mali of an area twice the size of Germany. In Tunisia and Egypt, jihadists emerged as the ruling parties, with the acquiescence and even assistance of the Obama administration. In Syria, a savage civil war metastasized unimpeded, killing tens of thousands and eventually pitting a fascist regime allied to Iran against rebel forces largely aligned with al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood.
As these disasters unfolded, the White House not only did not oppose the Islamists but armed and enabled them. Obama had previously intervened in Egypt, the largest and most important country in the Middle East, to force the removal of its pro-American leader, Hosni Mubarak. He then promoted the Brotherhood’s ascension to power by portraying it as a “moderate” actor in the democratic process. As the Middle East situation deteriorated, the Muslim Brotherhood became the chief beneficiary of America’s financial, diplomatic and military support. This same Brotherhood was the driving force behind the Islamist surge, the mentor of Osama bin Laden and the leaders of al-Qaeda, and the creator of Hamas. Rather than being quarantined, the Brotherhood-dominated government in Cairo now received hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid and F-16 bomber jets from the Obama administration that had facilitated its rise to power.

Appeasement of Islamist Enemies

To allay concerns about the emergence of the Brotherhood, Obama’s Secretary of State Hillary Clinton issued the following justification for its acceptance by the White House: “We believe that it is in the interests of the United States to engage with all parties that are peaceful, and committed to non-violence, that intend to compete for the parliament and the presidency.”^[2] In these words, Clinton was referring to an organization whose spiritual leader, Yusef al-Qaradawi, had recently called for a second Holocaust of the Jews, “Allah willing, at the hands of the believers,” and a party that was calling for the establishment of a Muslim caliphate in Jerusalem and the destruction of the Jewish state.^[3] Soon after Clinton’s endorsement, the Muslim Brotherhood’s presidential candidate, Mohamed Morsi, was elected Egypt’s new leader and was referring to Jews as apes and pigs. Secure in the American administration’s support, he wasted no time in abolishing the constitution and instituting a dictatorship with no serious protest from the United States. Only months before this destruction of Egypt’s civic space by his Islamist party, the new dictator was visited by then Senator John Kerry, shortly to be Hillary Clinton’s successor as Secretary of State. Kerry assured the world that the new Muslim Brotherhood regime was “committed to protecting fundamental freedoms.”^[4]
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