"The house we hope to build is not for my generation but for yours. It is your future that matters. And I hope that when you are my age, you will be able to say as I have been able to say: We lived in freedom. We lived lives that were a statement, not an apology."


Wednesday, September 19, 2012

Bias, Maybe?

It says quite a bit about the American media's ideological predilections that for the second time in as many weeks (for as many reasons) they are declaring the Romney campaign dead for saying, in essence, Americans are too dependent on government and ignoring the president's breath-taking claim that America's debt is "not a short-term problem."

Fallen Conceit

The eruptions against American embassies in the Middle East this past week condemn what President Obama cannot and could not ever do as much as they condemn what he has done.

Following the invasion of Iraq in 2003 the postulate of the American Left was that our presence there coupled with the broader War on Terror policies of the Bush Administration fueled anti-Americanism in the Arab world.  As a corollary to this, it was Candidate Obama's contention in the '08 campaign that, because he had spent so much of his childhood in Indonesia and was the anti-Bush, he was "uniquely" qualified to rectify this.

Both were conceits, and hollow ones at that.  Anti-Americanism on the Arab Street did not begin or exist as a result of the American War on Terror or its presence in Iraq.  Anti-Americanism in the violent Islamist strain is a murderous diatribe against civilization itself, and as the leader of the civilized world the United States has always been its main target.  An assertive foreign policy does not change that.

Neither does its opposite, as it turns out.  President Obama has apologized for the role we have traditionally played in the region and in the world. He has ceded the field to the enemy in Iraq.  He was slow and indecisive with Egypt, led "from behind" on Libya, and has not led at all on Syria.  He has done nothing to retard Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons.

All to no effect.  American embassies are still attacked, the American flag is still burned, and Americans are still being murdered.

If these conflagarations do not demonstrate that the genesis of Islamic Jihad is within Islamic Jihad itself, nothing will.  An America afraid of its own shadow in the region and in the world will not mollify this -- it will only leave us more vulnerable to its explosive rage.