Obama: Alien or Incompetent. Krauthammer vs. Rabinowitz.

Sometimes really smart people fail to understand their situation because they lose perspective. When I think of paradigm shifts, I think back on one of the most profound books ever: “The Gulag Archipelago.”

In it, Solzhenitsyn describes an arrest in Stalinist Russia.

"And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward." …

But the darkened mind is incapable of embracing these displacements in our universe, and both the most sophisticated and the veriest simpleton among us, drawing on all life's experience, [when arrested] can gasp out only: "Me? What for?"

Even as everything is being taken away from them, they still have not grasped the situation, they don’t understand the context; they and their captors are not thinking the same way. Like Dorothy, they are not in Kansas any more.

Two recent articles helped me to understand the Obama administration; one by Charles Krauthammer and one by Dorothy Rabinowitz. The Krauthammer article, and many just like it, chide Obama for failing to understand that gentle persuasion will not accomplish America’s goals. But that assumes that Obama’s goals are the goals that are congruent with the goals that previous presidents and previous American governments had.

That may be a fundamental error and could explain Obama and his policies.

Try to put yourself in the shoes of a mixed race man who identifies as a black man and does not feel a natural affinity for white America, referring to his grandmother as “typical white.” Imagine you are the man who for 20 years attended a church where the minister’s sermons damn America and finds the Jews despicable.  And you think enough of him to tell the world that he is your spiritual mentor. Imagine that you are politically close to someone like Bill Ayers who’s proud of having bombed the Pentagon and wishes that he had been more successful. Imagine that you spent your youth in foreign lands where Islam is the dominant religion and was once a Dutch colony. Imagine that you are now the President of the United States, a country that you believe is seriously flawed, has done much harm both to its own citizens and to the rest of the world. You now have the opportunity to set national policy. Why in the world would you think that you would like to see the America as it’s currently constituted prevail? Why would you wish to support America’s traditional allies, allies who you believe were complicit in ravaging the world and impoverishing the third world via colonial exploitation? You empathize with the Muslims of Africa and the Middle East and have taken to heart the sermons of your pastor. Why would anyone think that you would stand steadfastly with Israel?

The reason even very smart people like Charles Krauthammer think that Obama is a well intentioned bumbler is that they can not believe (Me? What for?) a basic truth about Obama: he genuinely does not like the America that he inherited from Bush - father and son - Ronald Reagan, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Washington, Madison and the rest of the founders. He does not like the America of the Revolution, America of the Westward expansion, America the sole global superpower. So he’s changing that.

He’s really not interested in effective sanctions against Iran that will lead to the end of its nuclear program. Oh he says he is, just as he says he’s said he's totally focused the oil spill in the Gulf, but that’s for domestic political consumption. "Boob bait for bubba" as Pat Moynihan once said. He has to say it. But he does not have to actually work toward that goal. From that perspective, time-wasting and wheel spinning actions in the United Nations serve both his and Iran’s interests. Is there any objective - not rhetorical - evidence that Obama genuinely believes that Iran should not possess nuclear weapons? If Iran builds a nuclear arsenal, the end of the “Zionist problem” would be closer to solution. I realize that this is not a position that would garner a lot of votes in the US, but that is the trajectory of American policy regarding Iran unless we assume that Obama is totally incompetent.  This is beginning to be the default position for many of his former supporters as well as his political opponents. But why do we suppose someone smart enough to beat the Clintons and the Republicans in the last election is incompetent? Keep in mind that he sat in Reverend Wrights pews for 20 years and has other prominent Jew haters are friends.

I am of the opinion that Obama and Helen Thomas share the goal of a Jew-free Middle East. Note the reaction to the Israeli interception of the ships trying to break the Gaza blockade. The Obama administration is working to reduce the effectiveness of the blockade. They will also take a dual track on the investigation of the incident; supporting the Israeli investigation but also supporting a second investigation by the UN, a collection of anti-Semites who condemn out of hand any attempt by Israel to defend itself.

Team Obama has chosen to ignore the brewing violence in the Korean theater. To them South Korea is a Cold War relic whose existence or destruction is not a concern except as a potential political liability. Ditto the war in Afghanistan. Obama is willing to sacrifice a few thousand members of the military because he is concerned about that the political fallout from a defeat. His goal is to have the troops withdrawn by the 2012 election.

Obama has insulted the British. gotten into a tiff with the French, double-crossed the Poles to appease the Russians and gone on a global apology tour explaining that now that he’s in charge, America will mend its errant ways. His symbolic bows to America’s traditional adversaries were not diplomatic gaffes, they were meant to show a humiliated America in foreign eyes.

Domestically, Obama is working diligently to create a stronger political base of union members, students, welfare recipients, teachers and other government workers. Note that most of the “stimulus” money has gone to public employees with the result that the public sector has actually grown while employment in the private sector has risen to devastating heights. This is not an accident. The concept of “shovel ready” public works projects has been long forgotten and was a bad joke even as it was being sold to the American public as the rationale for the various stimulus packages. In the modern bureaucratic world, there are virtually no “shovel ready” jobs that have not been funded years ago. But Obama and his advisers know that it is not just possible but advantageous to have a high permanent level of unemployment because the unemployed are dependent on the government for their income and will vote for the group that will promise them the most.

Krauthammer in “The Myth of Iran’s ‘Isolation” points to the fact that Iran is not isolated. He points to the fact that:

On Tuesday, one day before the president touted passage of a surpassingly weak U.N. resolution and declared Iran yet more isolated, the leaders of Russia, Turkey, and Iran gathered at a security summit in Istanbul “in a display of regional power that appeared to be calculated to test the United States,” …

Just last month, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad hosted an ostentatious love fest in Tehran with the leaders of Turkey and Brazil. The three raised hands together and announced a uranium-transfer deal that was designed to torpedo U.S. attempts to impose U.N. sanctions.

Six weeks ago, Iran was elected to the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women, a grotesque choice that mocked Obama’s attempt to isolate and delegitimize Iran in the very international institutions he treasures.

Increasing isolation? In the last year alone, Ahmadinejad has been welcomed in Kabul, Istanbul, Copenhagen, Caracas, Brasilia, La Paz, Senegal, and Gambia. Today, he is in China.

Krauthammer calls these failures of the Obama administration. But consider the world from the perspective of a friend of Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers. Consider the possibility that Obama shares the world view of his friend Edward Said who ...

“..considered Israel to be an illegitimate, colonialist state that preyed aggressively upon blameless Palestinians. “

Who ...

“[in the 1990s] …spoke out against the sanctions that the United Nations had imposed on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. The professor was joined in this criticism by such academic luminaries as Robert Jensen, Howard Zinn, and Noam Chomsky. The four collaborated to issue a January 1999 statement condemning the situation in Iraq as “sanctioned mass-murder that is nearing holocaust proportions”

This was prior to 9/11 and prior to the Iraq war.

The mistake that Krauthammer and most Americans, conservative and liberal, make is that they believe that Obama uses mistaken tactics to achieve long-held American goals. They should seriously consider that Obama has totally different strategic objectives which are radically different from those pursued by previous administrations. Consider the possibility that Obama does not want a close relationship with former colonial powers like Britain.  Consider that he may not view America as the guarantor of Israeli existence.  They should consider the fact that, as Dorothy Rabinowitz wrote, Obama is an alien in the respect that he rejects long-held American values. He finds them not just erroneous, but evil. As she points out in The Alien in the White House he is not alone. Many in the academic community, having joined in the long march through academia, have similar views. And he has peopled his administration with them in appointments like Van Jones.

A man is not responsible for his friends.  But his friends are a window to his soul, his belief system and his mind.  I am not suggesting that Obama is a “Manchurian Candidate” placed in power by a foreign government. What I am saying is that the assumption that Obama is pursuing traditional American goals and values using different tactics is probably mistaken. It’s not the tactics that are the problem, it’s the objectives.