On Monday, both the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post each published opinion articles attacking President Barack Obama’s foreign policy.

Obama and Venezuela;s Hugo Chavez. (Photo source: Huffington Post)

The LAT article, by former Dick Cheney adviser John Hannah, was entitled: “The U.S.: MIA in the Mideast.” It makes the case that despite Obama’s success in the war against Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, overall his foreign policy of “retreat” has destabilized the region:

In private conversations I’ve had with Middle Eastern officials, the sense of unease and dread expressed are only more severe. Fairly or not, these leaders appear to have taken Obama’s measure and found him wanting. Their bill of indictment includes retreat from Iraq and, soon, Afghanistan; betrayal of longtime U.S. allies, especially Mubarak; indulgence of enemy regimes in Tehran and Damascus; overblown promises to end the Palestinian conflict; and a persistent failure to mount the type of credible military option that these leaders believe is necessary for addressing the region’s most urgent threat — Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons.

The hardening conviction that the U.S. is disengaging from the Middle East should be cause for real concern.

Hannah also attacks “the administration’s lack of strategic vision, its instinct for retreat and its complicity in the unraveling of a benevolent imperium that has for decades underwritten the region’s security.” He notes that a perception of U.S. weakness is “one that left unchecked will breed uncertainty, instability and even war.”

The Washington Post article, by columnist Jackson Diehl, declares: “Obama’s foreign initiatives have failed.” Like Hannah, Diehl questions the conventional political wisdom, which sees foreign policy as a strong card for Obama to play in the wake of Osama bin Laden’s death. (more…)

The Washington Post, in an apparent effort to embellish President Barack Obama’s national security credentials, has given him credit for accelerating the military’s highly successful drone program in an article entitled, “Under Obama, an emerging global apparatus for drone killing.”

President-elect Obama greets eager Washington Post fans (Jan. 2009)

That headline is impressive to all but the most die-hard anti-war activists (mostly quiescent under a Democratic president). The conclusion the Post evidently wishes readers to draw is that Obama has been a tough, courageous, and uniquely successful commander-in-chief.

The article begins:

The Obama administration’s counterterrorism accomplishments are most apparent in what it has been able to dismantle, including CIA prisons and entire tiers of al-Qaeda’s leadership. But what the administration has assembled, hidden from public view, may be equally consequential.

In the space of three years, the administration has built an extensive apparatus for using drones to carry out targeted killings of suspected terrorists and stealth surveillance of other adversaries. The apparatus involves dozens of secret facilities, including two operational hubs on the East Coast, virtual Air Force­ ­cockpits in the Southwest and clandestine bases in at least six countries on two continents…

With a year to go in President Obama’s first term, his administration can point to undeniable results: Osama bin Laden is dead, the core al-Qaeda network is near defeat, and members of its regional affiliates scan the sky for metallic glints.

But the drone program did not begin on January 20, 2009–even if mainstream media squeamishness about it ended on the day. The most important elements of the program began under Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush–a fact buried deep into the article:

Inside the White House, according to officials who would discuss the drone program only on the condition of anonymity, the drone is seen as a critical tool whose evolution was accelerating even before Obama was elected.

What is new is that Obama reversed himself and embraced the idea that terrorists could be killed abroad in what the left used to described as “extrajudicial killings,” partly because of Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder’s ideological hostility to terrorist detention. (more…)

Long live Gene Simmons.

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Peter Beinart, who writes for the Daily Beast, is clueless. I say this because I don’t quite understand how he sees the Middle East. He takes various conservative pundits to task for selectively pushing Democracy. He brings examples of where it seems, at first blush, the US even went so far as to attempt to thwart burgeoning democracies by agitating for coups. He does this while praising Barack Obama for helping push Mubarak out, urging fundamental political reform, etc. etc.

Now, I don’t know which Obama he’s been watching, but I only recall an Obama who’s been flailing about helplessly when it came to Egypt and unwilling to support pro-Democracy groups in Iran.

My main issue comes with the meat of Beinart’s claims about conservative foreign policy as respect to democratic idealism. He takes the Bush administration to task for supporting coup attempts against all regimes Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and Hamas in Gaza. Of course, he claims that both were democratically elected; which is true. Of course they’ve both turned into serial human rights abusing regimes where any pretense of democracy has been swept under the carpet, but hey, it’s the thought that counts, isn’t it?

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Originally, I wrote that using “terrorist” to describe Julian Assange was hyperbole. Of course, this was before he double-downed. After this stunt, it’s difficult to argue that he’s not behaving like a terrorist:

The founder of WikiLeaks has warned that his supporters are primed to publish a ‘deluge’ of leaked government documents should his activities be curtailed by any country.

Julian Assange has distributed to fellow hackers an encrypted ‘poison pill’ of damaging secrets, thought to include details on BP and Guantanamo Bay.

He believes the file is his ‘insurance’ in case he is killed, arrested or the whistleblowing website is removed permanently from the internet.

This seems like a priss move.

One of the files identified this weekend by The (London) Sunday Times — called the “insurance” file — has been downloaded from the WikiLeaks website by tens of thousands of supporters, from America to Australia.

Assange warns that any government that tries to curtail his activities risks triggering a new deluge of state and commercial secrets.

Hmm.

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Slate Magazine’s Jack Shafer has called for Sec. of State Hillary Clinton to resign her post after classified cables sent be her were released in the Wikileaks document dump.  Slate is often an Obama ally however Shafer said, “The leaked cables make it impossible for Hillary Clinton to continue as secretary of state.”

Not withstanding the fact that numerous nations dabble in spying and say things in classified cables that aren’t meant for public consumption, previous Secretaries of State have engaged in similar efforts.  Shafer acknowledges this but claims, “what makes Clinton’s sleuthing unique is the paper trail that documents her spying-on-their-diplomats-with-our-diplomat orders.”  And because its now public, Shafer says we must give the offended nations Clinton’s “scalp” to “save face.”

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First, I’ll say right out of the gate that I think the term “terrorist” applied to Julian Assange is a bit much. Jerkwad scavenger, yes. Analogous to generations of terror and murder for a faith that believes it’s OK to beat your wife so long as it doesn’t leave a bruise? No. I don’t want “terrorist” to become the new “racist.” The fallout from Wikileaks is incomparable to 9/11, the USS Cole, numerous embassies, et al.

Second, I think the focus on Julian Assange is misguided, though if he and Bradley Manning can be prosecuted (the latter definitely), do it to it. Dudes like this wouldn’t have wares to peddle in the press if people in government kept secure things secure. This is a problem because our government allowed it to become one. Wikileaks wasn’t a problem months ago because the focus wasn’t Obama didn’t lose political capital over it. Now he does.

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Recently in the New York Times, JFK speechwriter and adviser Ted Sorensen commemorated the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy/Nixon debates: “When Kennedy Met Nixon: The Real Story,” reads the op-ed’s title.

Turns out, however, that the “real story” as “revealed” by Sorensen is identical to the one filtered through the MSM for the past fifty years:  Kennedy, we’re given to understand, trounced Nixon—and not just in style—mainly in substance. Sorensen also laments what “now passes for political debate in our increasingly commercialized, sound-biteTwitter-fied culture, in which extremist rhetoric requires presidents to respond to outrageous claims.”

Nothing of the sort, we’re given to understand, marred those heady and substantive debates of yore. Take Kennedy’s claim that President Eisenhower had fallen asleep (or gone golfing) during his command and allowed a perilous “missile gap” to grow between the U.S. and the Soviets. In fact a huge gap had grown (roughly six thousand for us, three hundred for the Soviets.)

Might this qualify as an “outrageous claim” by Kennedy?  Not if your source is Ted Sorensen and the New York Times. In fact, prior to the debates, CIA director Allen Dulles had briefed Kennedy on the genuine missile numbers. But rather than respond to this genuinely outrageous claim, Nixon bit his tongue. Disclosing the real number (that JFK knew perfectly well) in public would alert the Soviets to how we got their number, and jeopardize U.S. national security.  Which is to say, to blindside his Republican opponent Kennedy relied on that opponent’s patriotism. Let’s face it, Republicans are at a woeful disadvantage here. (more…)

President Obama’s disdain for that class of nations and leaders traditionally referred to as “allies” has become apparent even to the more obtuse among us. I refer to the New York Times’ s featured op-ed, by the noted op-ed-er Roger Cohen, a distinguished former foreign correspondent in central Europe and elsewhere, who has just noticed that President Obama doesn’t cultivate foreign friendships the way he promised to, gosh darn it. Embarrassingly late to the party, aren’t you, Roger?

Mr. Cohen is perturbed by President Obama’s indifference to tried and true European allies, noting with consternation:

[Obama] has dedicated scant diplomatic energy to Europe. . . . he is the first post-Atlanticist president, drawn by temperament, upbringing and circumstance to focus elsewhere.

But where? Or, rather, what has the president gained by abandoning European allies? (more…)

Obama’s unforced-error endorsement of the mosque at Ground Zero — he did it because he wanted to — may well turn out to be the single action that doomed his presidency, as Americans cast off the intellectual shackles of political correctness and finally began to see the Punahou Kid for who and what he really is.

One of the nation’s highest-ranking former spy hunters says that the individuals responsible for the theft and publication of tens of thousands of secret military documents should be prosecuted under federal espionage laws. The Obama Administration is pursuing the disclosure of more than 90,000 secret documents to WikiLeaks.org as merely the mishandling of classified information – a far less serious offense than espionage.

Administration supporters say that the leak was not espionage. But one of the country’s most successful counterintelligence officials argues the contrary – and says that legal precedent proves it.

Kenneth E. deGraffenreid

“We have an excellent precedent in the case of Samuel Loring Morison,” the naval intelligence analyst who compromised top secret U.S. imagery intelligence capabilities, says Kenneth E. deGraffenreid, who as Deputy National Counterintelligence Executive from 2004-2006 was the nation’s second-ranking counterintelligence official. Morison served a two-year sentence on conviction of espionage for having compromised U.S. secrets – not to a foreign intelligence service, but to a British publishing company.

“The Morison case was an espionage case. Morison was charged with espionage because he provided classified information to a foreign power,” deGraffenreid tells BigPeace.com. It doesn’t matter that the foreign power was a private media company housed in one of the most solid and reliable American allies: “Morison stole U.S. secrets and provided them to Jane’s, the British military publisher. It was like taking U.S. defense secrets and laying them out in the street in front of the Russians.”

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First, take a look at this story, which appeared today in Foreign Policy:

This week marked the international coming-out party for a new media organization that could upend the sacred cows of traditional journalism. Wikileaks, an Internet-savvy investigative journalism outfit, released a video showing an American Apache helicopter open fire on a group of men, killing two Reuters employees, along with 10 other people, on July 12, 2007.

“There was no threat warranting a hail of 30mm [caliber gunfire] from above,” says Anthony Martinez, a former U.S. Army noncommissioned officer who has watched thousands of hours of aerial footage of Iraq.

Now watch the video:

The video was sensational, and it exploded online Monday — it’s since gotten more than 2 million views on YouTube and prompting a follow-up story by the New York Times. (more…)