◼ The Fantasy House of Barack Obama - Victor Davis Hanson/Pajamas Media
...In foreign policy, the fantasies proved even scarier. A young, JFKish, Nobel Peace laureate, biracial, hip, cool, and beloved president — with a Muslim patrimony no less — would charm the Middle East the way he had mesmerized American with “hope and change,” “yes, we can,” and, less grandly, “make no mistake about it.”
Obama assumed that all real problems began with Bush, and would end with Bush gone — given that he would apologize, bow, and contextualize to the world about the sins of the pre-Obama America, the unexceptional country that did nasty things when “I was three months old.” Once the cooled and now drier continents grasped that American was “on their side,” and not entangled with the Brits, the Israelis, the Czechs, the Poles, and all the old staid “allies,” new possibilities would become endless.
“Radical Islam” would give way to all sorts of euphemisms; terrorists were to be the merely accused and tried in civil courts in New York. Guantanamo would release all its political prisoners. Renditions, tribunals and preventative detention would end. The al Arabiya interview, the Cairo speech, and the notorious “apology tour’ would win oppressed peoples over, if not to our side, at least over to Obama’s — given that “they hate us” not because of who we are (as in vacations to Martha’s Vineyard, golf, prep schools, jet-fueled junkets, and rap and hip-hop music), but because of what we used to do before 2009. Apparently, European socialist models would spring up in the Middle East — the region a sort of hybridized half-socialist Greece, half-Islamist Turkey.
That fantasy cruelly ended with the horrific death of an American ambassador in Libya, the graphic details of which the administration will not disclose, given that the truth would confirm that we were not prepared when we should have been, amid policies towards Afghanistan, Iraq, Egypt, Syria, and Iran that are imploding. What are we left with? The Muslim Brotherhood president of Egypt, Mr. Morsi, just summed it up when he outlined the conditions under which his country would be willing to accept aid and remain friendly. The State Department is funding apology ads on Islamic television, and we are still using all the rhetorical power of the White House to hound one crude filmmaker, a modern Ares who supposedly had the power to set the Muslim world afire against Barack Obama....
