Rich Lowry: Obama’s Lesson

National Review Online ^ | April 14, 2009 | Rich Lowry

[kellynla]

If every Obama-era negotiation is as clear-eyed and unsentimental as that over the fate of Capt. Richard Phillips, the nation’s interests will be well-served.

Pres. Barack Obama approved negotiations with the Somali pirates holding Phillips, but authorized force should Phillips appear to be in imminent danger. When one of the pirates pointed his AK-47 at Phillips’s back, snipers aboard the nearby USS Bainbridge took out the three pirates with three shots — not a bullet wasted.

Suddenly, the headline the New York Times had run about the spectacle of the days-long standoff between a few pirates in a lifeboat and U.S. ships of war didn’t seem so apt: “Standoff With Pirates Shows U.S. Power Has Limits.”

Pirates couldn’t conduct their business without safe havens on land. Those bases are inherently more vulnerable than the pirate operations at sea, in an area encompassing as much as 2.5 million square miles. Who could raid the land bases, on the model of Thomas Jefferson’s assault on the Barbary pirate bases in 1805, and seriously crimp this curse on international shipping? Only the United States will have the capability or the will.

For Obama, events of the past two weeks should have been a crash course in the indispensability of American power. In Europe, he pleaded for more help in the Afghan War — a fight involving the interests of the entire West — and got close to nothing. In the Indian Ocean, he was confronted with the consequences of a festering problem that will have no answer absent rigorous American leadership.

This suggests one way to look at U.S. power: as a global public service.

[peace with honor]

obmao IS an IDIOT

[digger48]

Obama is just trying to figure out how someone can just TAX the pirates at 90% of their booty to deter them.

[pissant]

So is Lowery, usually.

[jveritas]

If every Obama-era negotiation is as clear-eyed and unsentimental as that over the fate of Capt. Richard Phillips, the nation’s interests will be well-served.

Well served? Really? Like what? Like Obama indecision and weakness in holding the mightiest fleet in history of man for five days before taking over 3 ragtag pirates trapped in a tiny boat in the middle of the Ocean?

This great weakness by Obama has greatly emboldened the much more dangerous enemies such as Al Qaeda terrorists, the Taliban terrorists, the Iranian terrorist regime, the North Korean communist regime, Hizballah terrorists, Hamas terrorists not to mention Russia and China.

The narrow sightness by some conservative pundits is shocking. They want to appear nice to Obama on the expense of the truth.

[Beckwith]

Remember this?



Obama is wearing the garb of a SOMALI elder.

[happygrl]

The underpinning of these global goods is the U.S. military — as it happens, the only major function of government that the Obama administration thinks should experience austerity in an era of unbridled spending. In unveiling his priorities for the future of the defense budget, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates talked of “matching virtue to necessity.” What “necessity”? Gates is the skeleton at the feast, the only Cabinet member whose budgetary problem isn’t figuring out how to spend money fast enough.

There needs to be an update on It's a Wonderful Life.This story should describe what the world would be like if America had never been established.

[AndrewB]

Oh I get it now...for Bush it was imperialism, for Obama it’s a “global public service”.