Posts Tagged ‘Foreign Policy’

Missing Link Between the Benghazi Scandal and the Petraeus Sex Scandal

Tuesday, November 13th, 2012

If, as resigned CIA Director David Petraeus’ mistress Paula Broadwell mentions in the clip below, the attack on the Benghazi consulate was an attempt to free prisoners being held for interrogation, then it adds a new dimension to the scandal, as explained by Charles Krauthammer.

If the interrogation story is true, there are at least four interlocking scandals here:

  1. The Obama Administration standing by watching while an American consulate was under attack for seven hours without lifting a finger to help as four Americans died.
  2. That same Administration lying about the cause of the attack to both congress and the American public.
  3. The same Administration has known about the CIA director being compromised by an extramarital affair since at least summer and did nothing about it for fear of jeopardizing Obama’s reelection campaign. The only other explanation is that everyone in the intelligence community is manifestly incompetent. (“Hey, should I tell Obama his CIA director is having an affair? Nah. He’s got that golf swing to worry about.”)
  4. Either the intelligence community, or else the Obama Administration itself, has been ignoring Executive Order 13491, issued January 22, 2009, which states (in part) “The CIA shall close as expeditiously as possible any detention facilities that it currently operates and shall not operate any such detention facility in the future.”
  5. I think the Administration standing by for seven hours while four Americans died without lifting a finger to help them is still the biggest scandal. Guess I’m just old-fashioned that way. Sadly, I get the impression that the last point is the one the Obama Administration was trying hardest to cover up.

    But all deserve investigation.

Barack Obama Stands Down Throughout History

Saturday, October 27th, 2012

“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers
For he today that stands down with me
on Crispian’s day shall be my brother”
— King Obama V, October 24, 1415, the day before the English surrender at Agincourt


“Come and take it. No, really, come and take this cannon off our hands. It’s just cluttering up the place. We’ll just stand down while you haul it away.”

— Colonel John Henry Obama, commander of Texas forces at Gonzales, before handing over the town’s cannon to Francisco de Castaneda, October 2, 1835, ending the Texas Rebellion


TO PRESIDENT OBAMA STOP
FROM FT SUMTER STOP
UNDER BOMBARDMENT BY REBELS STOP
REQUEST PERMISSION TO COUNTERATTACK STOP

TO FT SUMTER STOP
FROM PRESIDENT OBAMA STOP
STAND DOWN STOP
STRIKE COLORS STOP
SURRENDER FORT STOP

— Telegram exchange, April 12, 1861, a month before the United States government recognized the Confederate States of America.


General George S. Patton, Commander, U.S. 3rd Army: Request permission to relieve 101st Airborne surrounded by Germans at Bastogne.

General Dwight D. Obama, Supreme Commander, Allied Forces in Europe: Attack two German armored divisions? That’s just nuts! Stand down.

— Field message exchange December 23, 1944, three weeks before the Roosevelt-Hitler Peace Treaty was signed


Gen. Douglas MacArthur: Pusan perimeter now stable. Request permission to launch Inchon landing under Operation Chromite.

President Harry Obama: There’s no way we can defeat so many red Chinese. Stand down, withdraw from Pusan, and evacuate all U.S. personnel from the Korean peninsula.

— Message exchange, September 8, 1950


Gen. William F. Garrison, Commander UNOSOM II: Two UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters have crashed in central Mogadishu following raid on Aidid compound. Request permission to send rescue force in to retrieve survivors.

President William Jefferson Obama: Stand down. Our troops could never hope to survive such a hostile urban combat environment. We’ll just have to leave those men behind.

— Message exchange, October 3, 1994, three days before the American withdrawal from Somalia

Shrinkage

Saturday, October 27th, 2012

Mark Steyn’s latest column looks at the Incredible Shrinking Obama presidency, contrasting two videos (“the Islamophobic one and the Obamosexual one”) that “bookend the remarkable but wholly deserved collapse of the president’s reelection campaign.”

Given yesterday’s revelations about Benghazi, that the besieged Americans were denied aid thrice by higher-ups in Washington, I think it’s safe to say Obama looks smaller than at any point during his presidency.

I thought I would drive that point home in graphic format:

Once More Into the Breach!

Monday, October 22nd, 2012

Once again I will be Livetweeting tonight’s Presidential debate. Drinking words to sip on are “Libya,” “China,””Iran,” “Russia” and “Nuclear.” Chug for “Jihad” or if Obama calls Benjamin Netanyahu “Bibi.”

The Obama Administration’s Response to Benghazi, In Easy-to-Understand Graphic Form

Monday, October 22nd, 2012

Some devastating critiques of the Obama Administration’s non-response on American officials in Benghazi.

Bing West:

A U.S. ambassador is missing and his diplomatic team is desperately fighting off terrorist attacks. Our commander-in-chief and his national-security team in Washington are listening to the phone calls from the Americans under attack and watching real-time video from a drone circling overhead. Yet the U.S. military sends no aid. Why?

Snip

Our diplomats fought for seven hours without any aid from outside the country. Four Americans died while the Obama national-security team and our military passively watched and listened. The administration is being criticized for ignoring security needs before the attack and for falsely attributing the assault to a mob. But the most severe failure has gone unnoticed: namely, a failure to aid the living.

Snip

For our top leadership, with all the technological and military tools at their disposal, to have done nothing for seven hours was a joint civilian and military failure of initiative and nerve.

Mary Steyn:

Obama, Biden, and Panetta met in the Oval Office at 5 p.m. We know Charlene Lamb at the State Department was watching events in real time. It seems likely Panetta was, too — and perhaps even Obama.

When something bad happens at a consulate on the other side of the world, very few nations have the technological capability to watch it in real time.

Even fewer have fighter jets and special forces within less than 500 miles — or about the distance from Boston to Washington.

Yet the commander-in-chief chose to do nothing. He chose to let the enemy determine the course of events, how long the battle would last, how many Americans would die. The only choice he made was to hold a photo-op at their coffins.

Many Obama partisans continue to downplay the attacks in Benghazi as though they were indeed a mere bump in the road of no particular importance. Therefore, I’ve decided to put the incident in a graphic form that perhaps even they can grasp:

Mark Steyn Lays Waste to the Obama Adminstration’s Libyan Lies

Saturday, October 13th, 2012

Mark Steyn’s comprehensive takedown of all the Obama Administration lies and incompetence in the Benghazi terrorist assault and the murder of Ambassador Chris Stevens is so righteous it deserves a link of its own.

“The entire reason that this has become the political topic it is is because of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan.”

Thus, Stephanie Cutter, President Obama’s deputy campaign manager, speaking on CNN about an armed attack on the 9/11 anniversary that left a U.S. consulate a smoking ruin and killed four diplomatic staff, including the first American ambassador to be murdered in a third of a century. To discuss this event is apparently to “politicize” it and to distract from the real issues the American people are concerned about. For example, Obama spokesperson Jen Psaki, speaking on board Air Force One on Thursday: “There’s only one candidate in this race who is going to continue to fight for Big Bird and Elmo, and he is riding on this plane.”

She’s right! The United States is the first nation in history whose democracy has evolved to the point where its leader is provided with a wide-body transatlantic jet in order to campaign on the vital issue of public funding for sock puppets.

Snip.

Obviously, Miss Cutter is right: A healthy mature democracy should spend its quadrennial election on critical issues like the Republican party’s war on puppets rather than attempting to “politicize” the debate by dragging in stuff like foreign policy, national security, the economy, and other obscure peripheral subjects.

Snip.

For most of those four weeks, the president of the United States, the secretary of state, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, and others have persistently attributed the Benghazi debacle to an obscure YouTube video — even though they knew that the two events had nothing to do with each other by no later than the crack of dawn Eastern time on September 12.

Snip.

Secretary Clinton linked the YouTube video to the murder of her colleagues even as the four caskets lay alongside her at Andrews Air Force Base — even though she had known for days that it had nothing to do with it. It’s weird enough that politicians now give campaign speeches to returning coffins. But to conscript your “friend”’s corpse as a straight man for some third-rate electoral opportunism is surely as shriveled and worthless as “politicization” gets.

Snip.

Liberals are always going on about the evils of “outsourcing” and “offshoring” — selfish vulture capitalists like Mitt shipping jobs to cheap labor overseas just to save a few bucks. How unpatriotic can you get! So now the United States government is outsourcing embassy security to cheap Welshmen who in turn outsource it to cheaper Libyans. Diplomatic facilities are U.S. sovereign territory — no different de jure from Fifth Avenue or Mount Rushmore. So defending them is one of the core responsibilities of the state. But that’s the funny thing about Big Government: The bigger it gets, the more of life it swallows up, the worse it gets at those very few things it’s supposed to be doing. So, on the first anniversary of 9/11 in a post-revolutionary city in which Western diplomats had been steadily targeted over the previous six months, the government of the supposedly most powerful nation on earth entrusted its security to Abdulaziz Majbari, 29, and his pal, who report to some bloke back in Carmarthen, Wales.

Read the whole thing.

Map of Muslim Riots Across the Globe

Friday, September 14th, 2012

Map of Muslim unrest using Google maps. I think this is updated in real time but I’m not 100% sure.

Update: now embedded:


View Muslim Protests in a larger map

Dispatches from the Land of Smart Diplomacy: Islamists Storm American Embassy in Cairo

Tuesday, September 11th, 2012

I think those parallels between the Carter and Obama Administrations are getting a bit too close for comfort. It’s gone from homage to plagiarism.

Radical Islamists storm American embassy in unstable Middle East country. I’m sure that’s not a headline anyone in the Obama Administration wanted to see less than two months before election day.

Hey, didn’t Obama make a speech in Cairo a few years back? Remember how liberal commentators hailed it as “masterful” and “inspiring”?

Remember all that talk of smart diplomacy?

Now? Not so much.

Hey the Middle East is hard. It’s very, very easy to get things wrong. But it wasn’t any easier when Bush was President, and I don’t remember his liberal critics cutting him any slack.

I also don’t remember Islamsists storming an American embassy while he was President.

Hosni Mubarak Declared “Clinically Dead”

Tuesday, June 19th, 2012

It looks like last week’s post was only slightly premature, as doctor’s have declared Mubarak clinically dead after suffering a stroke.

My previous comments still largely apply, although given the Egyptian High Court’s invalidation of parliament, a Muslim Brotherhood takeover is looking a lot less likely.

Greece Opts To Continue to Euro Shell Game

Sunday, June 17th, 2012

Feeling less suicidal than usual, Greek voters have opted for the conservative (for Greece) New Democracy party in parliamentary elections, beating out the radical-left Syriza, which insisted Europe keep shoveling money into the black hole that is the Greek budget, but rejected even the fake austerity the Eurocrats demanded. New Democracy leader Antonis Samaras has his work cut out for him, convincing the Eurocrats that yes, this time, they really are implementing austerity. This time for sure!

Look for this to help forestall the inevitable “grexit” for, oh, maybe three months. Which is when I bet Greece will find out it can’t pay it’s bills again after the latest infusion of cash, the money Europe kicked in will have strangely disappeared without seeming to have been spent on any fundamental government services, and insiders will have managed to transfer another few months of funds into their out-of-country banks accounts in advance of the next crisis…