Obama Needs to Focus on Real Enemies

WedNEWSday - March 4th, 2009

Barack Obama needs to worry less about socially re-engineering the United States of America via wealth redistribution and concern himself more with foreign affairs and our national security.  Instead of picking fights with Rush Limbaugh, how about taking a stand against Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The mainstream media has been enamored with Obama, admitting they feel “thrills” going up their leg.  Because of his youth and inexperience, and his young children at The White House, they quickly like to draw a comparison between Obama and JFK.  However, when we base the comparison on policies and principles, both foreign and domestic, Obama is more like LBJ.

NRO’s Mary Habeck writes:

LBJ inherited a series of foreign crises from his predecessor (Southeast Asia, of course, but also Cuba, the Cold War, and a worsening relationship with Europe), yet his entire personal interest was domestic policies. LBJ believed above all else in social justice, and his primary policy focus was the Great Society that he hoped to create through righting race relations, a war on poverty, and health care for all.

LBJ’s beliefs about American national interests led him to adopt the foreign policies of his predecessor, even keeping on JFK’s foreign policy team, and to seek to win the battles over his domestic policies, while being content to manage crises abroad through military and area experts. Throughout his tenure LBJ never lost his hatred for the conflict in Vietnam, calling it that “bitch of a war” because of the way it distracted him and the American people from the remaking of society, the only issue that truly mattered to him.

This pattern should sound familiar. Obama has not kept Bush’s foreign policy team, but he has retained key figures — including Secretary of Defense Gates and Afghanistan/Iraq war czar Lute — and he has adopted even the most controversial of his predecessor’s foreign policies. Even the mini “escalation” in Afghanistan seems eerily similar to LBJ’s escalations in 1964-5.

Yet Obama has been quick to appoint domestic policy czars who reflect his own beliefs in social justice and how to achieve it; quick to make detailed and well thought-out pronouncements on how his views of reshaping society differ from those of his predecessor; and quick to fight and win the domestic battles on the Hill while declining to even engage in a battle over the war on terror. All this suggests the same lack of personal interest in foreign matters combined with an overwhelming interest in domestic policy that dominated the LBJ White House.  

During his presidential campaign, Obama tagged Iran “a grave threat” and had Americans believing he wasn’t just talking tough when he said, “the world must prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.”  But talking was about as tough as Obama wanted to get, being naive enough to think he would be able to sit down to negotiations and cajole Iran into skirting their nuclear ambitions.

The Wall Street Journal discusses the imminent danger Iran poses:

We’ve never held out much hope for those talks, which would inevitably be complicated and protracted. Mr. Obama is already trying to lure Russian help on Iran by offering to trade away hard-earned missile defense sites in Eastern Europe. Russia’s President claims to be unimpressed. And now it turns out that the rate at which Iran’s nuclear programs are advancing may render even negotiations moot.

Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak warned last week that “time is slipping through our fingers” when it comes to stopping Tehran. “What is needed,” he added, “is a two-pronged course of action which includes ironclad, strenuous sanctions . . . and a readiness to consider options in the event that these sanctions do not succeed.”

Nobody — Mr. Obama least of all — can doubt what Mr. Barak means by “options.” Nor should the Administration doubt that an Israeli strike, however necessary and justified, could put the U.S. in the middle of a broader Middle East war. If Mr. Obama wants to avoid a security crisis in the first year of his watch, he will have to get serious about Iran now.

This from The Wall Street Journal - March 4th, 2009

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123612623865424027.html

This from National Review Online - March 3rd, 2009

http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YTc1MzRlZmUwYjUwZDgxZTgwNTJjM2Y0ODc1NTE2YmM=

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