Those of us of a certain age remember well the goofy image of Alfred E. Neuman, cover boy for that wonderfully juvenile and sardonic magazine, Mad, along with the quote “What, me worry?” (Although my own favorite AEN quote is, “Who says nothing is impossible? Some people do it every day.”)
Nevertheless, we have in Barack Obama a president who has suggested he might have toked a few too many in his youth, now imbibing a laid back Alfred E. Neuman approach to national security.
In an interview before the president headed off for his Christmas stay in Hawaii, CNN’s Fareed Zakaria asked whether Obama was downplaying the importance of terrorism as a threat to the United States. President Obama responded, “What I do insist on is that we maintain a proper perspective and that we do not provide a victory to these terrorist networks by over-inflating their importance and suggesting in some fashion that they are an existential threat to the United States or the world order.”
Reassured?
Not if you are one of the hundreds of thousands now displaced from Syria and Iraq. Not if you are the relatives of the scores of beheaded and who knows how many women raped by ISIS fighters. Not if you are in Europe facing both a massive refugee crisis and a terrorist threat of unprecedented scale. Not if you are the friends and relatives of those slaughtered in San Bernardino. Not if you are living in Afghanistan or Libya and now face the turmoil and mayhem generated not only by al Qaeda and the Taliban, but now ISIS as well.
Of course, ISIS is not an “existential threat” to the United States. Nobody serious is claiming otherwise; nor (as the president went on to do his best “straw-man” thing in the interview) is anyone suggesting we turn over the Bill of the Rights and/or the American way of life to address that threat.
But the fact that ISIS is not an existential threat doesn’t excuse his standing by a strategy that has proven ineffective. The president wants to claim that he has a “surgical, precise response to a very specific problem,” but it’s a strategy that has shown to be so surgical as to be ineffective in practice. Maybe, with Lava Lamp lit, President Obama is channeling some inner Robert McNamara here.
It’s telling that the president has framed the issue in the manner he has. In a sense, it captures much of what we have seen in the administration’s response to various crises during the president’s seven years in office. Nothing—be it, Chinese threats, Russian invasions, the development of nuclear weapons by rogue states, the use of chemical weapons by a Middle East dictator, the hegemonic march of Iran, the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan, cyberattacks on key government entities, American commerce and infrastructure by foreign governments and their hired hands—seems to be of sufficient concern for the president to set out plans that might actually address those issues and put them in the win column for the US.
It’s anybody’s guess what it would take for the president to take these issues truly seriously; hopefully, we won’t have to find out before he leaves office in a year.
from AEI » Latest Content http://ift.tt/1kdiACH
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