The danger of Obama's dithering

[formerlurker]

The danger of Obama's dithering
His foreign policy brings to mind Jimmy Carter, or perhaps Ethelred the Unready.
By John R. Bolton

October 18, 2009

Weakness in American foreign policy in one region often invites challenges elsewhere, because our adversaries carefully follow diminished American resolve. Similarly, presidential indecisiveness, whether because of uncertainty or internal political struggles, signals that the United States may not respond to international challenges in clear and coherent ways.

Taken together, weakness and indecisiveness have proved historically to be a toxic combination for America's global interests. That is exactly the combination we now see under President Obama. If anything, his receiving the Nobel Peace Prize only underlines the problem. All of Obama's campaign and inaugural talk about "extending an open hand" and "engagement," especially the multilateral variety, isn't exactly unfolding according to plan. Entirely predictably, we see more clearly every day that diplomacy is not a policy but only a technique. Absent presidential leadership, which at a minimum means clear policy direction and persistence in the face of criticism and adversity, engagement simply embodies weakness and indecision.

Obama is no Harry Truman. At best, he is reprising Jimmy Carter. At worst, the real precedent may be Ethelred the Unready, the turn-of the-first-millennium Anglo-Saxon king whose reputation for indecisiveness and his unsuccessful paying of Danegeld -- literally, "Danish tax" -- to buy off Viking raiders made him history's paradigmatic weak leader.

 http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-bolton18-2009oct18,0,6694108,print.story

[ColonialMarine0431]

DingleBarry is gonna abandon the troops in Afghanistan. Mark my word.

[thundley4]

DingleBarry is gonna abandon the troops in Afghanistan. Mark my word.

The way the liberals are crowing about it, I think so , too.  I see many more KIA in Afghanistan under 0Bama.

[Peter3_1]

And more today have been killed. Nero still fiddles.

Iran's iatolas killed a few Republican Guard (or whatever the idiots call them) officers who had become troublesome. They are claiming that it was the Taliban and THE USA together that plotted this killing and will take revenge.

Of course, the idiot press reports their proclamitions as if they were credible. Obama Admin "condems the attack.....WOW.....but  nothing about the Americans held hostage by those moron twelvers. Dithering continues unabated . 

I wonder how his narcissism is faring under the assault of reality. Wait, I think I know combination of cognative dissonance and another  ROAD TRIP.....!!!

[ColonialMarine0431]

The way the liberals are crowing about it, I think so , too.  I see many more KIA in Afghanistan under 0Bama.

Sometimes I think it isn't worth it. Arabs are ignorant, uneducated, tribal, dirty savages. Hell, they wipe their butts with their left hand! Let them all rot.

[Peter3_1]

FIRST remove all access to oil money from these tentless bedoins. Then kill off every living member of the House of Wahhab  and any member of the House of  Saud who objects. Oil money gives them access to 20th Century Arms, and we CANNOT have that any more and Wahhabism gives us suiciders.

[Mustang]

Sometimes I think it isn't worth it. Arabs are ignorant, uneducated, tribal, dirty savages. Hell, they wipe their butts with their left hand! Let them all rot.

Well I think it is worth it. Islam is f*cked up and needs to be corrected, for everyone's security. Jews and Christians and other religious minorities who live in the middle east are constantly under attack. I would like to see secular republics established in Afghanistan and Iraq and not Islamic republics, because if we gave people the freedom to choose religion, an overwhelming majority would become Christians.

God forbid if we cut and run in Iraq and Afghanistan and said it wasn't worth it.
A loss in Afghanistan or Iraq might as well be establishing terrorist factories in those countries.