Podhoretz nailed it. This is O’s real objective.
OPINION
September 8,
2013
The president may look incompetent on Syria. But his behavior fits his
strategy to weaken America abroad.
By
NORMAN PODHORETZ
It is entirely understandable that Barack
Obama's way of dealing with Syria in recent weeks should have elicited responses
ranging from puzzlement to disgust. Even members of his own party are
despairingly echoing in private the public denunciations of him as
"incompetent," "bungling," "feckless," "amateurish" and "in over his head"
coming from his political opponents on the right.
For how else to characterize a president
who declares war against what he calls a great evil demanding immediate
extirpation and in the next breath announces that he will postpone taking action
for at least 10 days—and then goes off to play golf before embarking on a trip
to another part of the world? As if this were not enough, he also assures the
perpetrator of that great evil that the military action he will eventually take
will last a very short time and will do hardly any damage. Unless, that is, he
fails to get the unnecessary permission he has sought from Congress, in which
case (according to an indiscreet member of his own staff) he might not take any
military action after all.
Summing up the net effect of all this, as
astute a foreign observer as Conrad Black can flatly say that, "Not since the
disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, and before that the fall of France
in 1940, has there been so swift an erosion of the world influence of a Great
Power as we are witnessing with the United States."
Yet if this is indeed the pass to which
Mr. Obama has led us—and I think it is—let me suggest that it signifies not how
incompetent and amateurish the president is, but how skillful. His foreign
policy, far from a dismal failure, is a brilliant success as measured by what he
intended all along to accomplish. The accomplishment would not have been
possible if the intention had been too obvious. The skill lies in how
effectively he has used rhetorical tricks to disguise it.
The key to
understanding what Mr. Obama has pulled off is the astonishing statement he made
in the week before being elected president: "We are five days away from
fundamentally transforming the United States of America." To those of us who
took this declaration seriously, it meant that Mr. Obama really was the
left-wing radical he seemed to be, given his associations with the likes of the
anti-American preacher Jeremiah Wright and the unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers,
not to mention the intellectual influence over him of Saul Alinsky, the original
"community organizer."
So far as
domestic affairs were concerned, it soon became clear—even to some of those who
had persuaded themselves that Mr. Obama was a moderate and a pragmatist—that the
fundamental transformation he had in mind was to turn this country into as close
a replica of the social-democratic countries of Europe as the constraints of our
political system allowed.
Since he
had enough support for the policies that this objective entailed, those
constraints were fairly loose, and so he only needed a minimum of rhetorical
deception in pursuing it. All it took was to deny he was doing what he was doing
by frequently singing the praises of the free-enterprise system he was
assiduously working to undermine, by avoiding the word "socialism," by invoking
"fairness" as an overriding ideal and by playing on resentment of the "rich."
But foreign policy was another matter. As
a left-wing radical, Mr. Obama believed that the United States had almost always
been a retrograde and destructive force in world affairs. Accordingly, the
fundamental transformation he wished to achieve here was to reduce the country's
power and influence. And just as he had to fend off the still-toxic socialist
label at home, so he had to take care not to be stuck with the equally toxic
"isolationist" label abroad.
This he
did by camouflaging his retreats from the responsibilities bred by foreign
entanglements as a new form of "engagement." At the same time, he relied on the
war-weariness of the American people and the rise of isolationist sentiment
(which, to be sure, dared not speak its name) on the left and right to get away
with drastic cuts in the defense budget, with exiting entirely from Iraq and
Afghanistan, and with "leading from behind" or using drones instead of troops
whenever he was politically forced into military action.
The
consequent erosion of American power was going very nicely when the
unfortunately named Arab Spring presented the president with several juicy
opportunities to speed up the process. First in Egypt, his incoherent moves
resulted in a complete loss of American influence, and now, thanks to his
handling of the Syrian crisis, he is bringing about a greater diminution of
American power than he probably envisaged even in his wildest radical
dreams.
For this fulfillment of his dearest
political wishes, Mr. Obama is evidently willing to pay the price of a sullied
reputation. In that sense, he is by his own lights sacrificing himself for what
he imagines is the good of the nation of which he is the president, and also to
the benefit of the world, of which he loves proclaiming himself a
citizen.
The problem for Mr. Obama is that at least
since the end of World War II, Americans have taken pride in being No. 1. Unless
the American people have been as fundamentally transformed as their country is
quickly becoming, America's decline will not sit well. With more than three
years in office to go, will Mr. Obama be willing and able to endure the
continuing erosion of his popularity that will almost certainly come with the
erosion of the country's power and influence?
No doubt he will either deny that anything
has gone wrong, or failing that, he will resort to his favorite tactic of
blaming others—Congress or the Republicans or Rush Limbaugh. But what is also
almost certain is that he will refuse to change course and do the things that
will be necessary to restore U.S. power and influence.
And so we can only pray that the hole he
will go on digging will not be too deep for his successor to pull us out, as
Ronald Reagan managed to do when he followed a president into the White House
whom Mr. Obama so uncannily resembles.
Mr. Podhoretz was the editor of Commentary from 1960-95. His most recent
book is "Why Are Jews Liberals?" (Doubleday, 2009).
Dan Friedman
NYC
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