Obama Has Gotten It Wrong for Twenty-Five Years

commentarymagazine.com ^ | 7/5/2009 | Jennifer Rubin

[SonOfDarkSkies]

Those who suspect the president is engaged in a bit of dangerous self-delusion and denial about certain unpleasant realities regarding the threats from rogue states won’t be heartened to read that his current non-proliferation fetish stems, at least according to the New York Times, from his college infatuation with the nuclear freeze movement. Apparently, youthful Obama did not focus on the results from Ronald Reagan’s refusal to buy into the fantasies of liberals –namely the fall of the Soviet Empire. That lesson has entirely eluded now-president Obama. Is it any wonder his critics find his posture fraught with peril and entirely out-of-touch with the threats we face?

As the Times reports:

“This is dangerous, wishful thinking,” Senator Jon Kyl, Republican of Arizona, and Richard Perle, an architect of the Reagan-era nuclear buildup that appalled Mr. Obama as an undergraduate, wrote last week in The Wall Street Journal. They contend that Mr. Obama is, indeed, a naïf for assuming that “the nuclear ambitions of Kim Jong-il or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would be curtailed or abandoned in response to reductions in the American and Russian deterrent forces.”

In the interview, the president described his agenda as the best way to move forward in a turbulent world.

“It’s naïve for us to think,” he said, “that we can grow our nuclear stockpiles, the Russians continue to grow their nuclear stockpiles, and our allies grow their nuclear stockpiles, and that in that environment we’re going to be able to pressure countries like Iran and North Korea not to pursue nuclear weapons themselves.”

But what is naïve, of course, is to think that Iran and North Korea will be impressed by our disarmament efforts.

[VRWCTexan]

NY Times - July 4th:

...in 1983, a senior at Columbia University wrote in a campus newsmagazine, Sundial, about the vision of “a nuclear free world.” He railed against discussions of “first- versus second-strike capabilities” that “suit the military-industrial interests” with their “billion-dollar erector sets,” and agitated for the elimination of global arsenals holding tens of thousands of deadly warheads....

The student was Barack Obama, and he was clearly trying to sort out his thoughts. In the conclusion, he denounced “the twisted logic of which we are a part today” and praised student efforts to realize “the possibility of a decent world.” But his article, “Breaking the War Mentality,” which only recently has been rediscovered, said little about how to achieve the utopian dream.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/05/world/05nuclear.html?_r=1&hp

[stephenjohnbanker]

““It’s naïve for us to think,” he said, “that we can grow our nuclear stockpiles, the Russians continue to grow their nuclear stockpiles, and our allies grow their nuclear stockpiles, and that in that environment we’re going to be able to pressure countries like Iran and North Korea not to pursue nuclear weapons themselves.”

Obama sees no difference between the USA having nuclear stockpiles, and the murderous evil dictators of Iran and North Korea. I will henceforth refer to Obama as “Mr. Ivy League Stupid”

[ought-six]

Obortion is more than a naive doofus; he avidly embraces that which will destroy the United States. A pox be upon him!

[Red Dog #1]

His statement is not only naive, but factually wrong. The US arsenal stopped growing in the mid 1960’s. Of course having a D next to your name makes it unnecessary to actually be correct.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_nuclear_warheads_1945-2002_graph.png

[DDLL]

I find it amazing that the media is only now starting to dribble out some of this previously hidden- revealing ‘research’ that should have come out early last year.

[stephenjohnbanker]

You are correct, of course. Mr. Ivy League Stupid is a dedicated Marxist, and appears hell bent on destroying the US economy.

[stephenjohnbanker]

Good catch!

[Oldpuppymax]

Reagan began with the belief that the USSR was evil. Hussein begins with the belief that the United States is evil. Makes all the difference, doesn’t it!

[relictele]

Not faulting the original poster but I am sick to the back teeth of many conservative sites relying on hard-sell popups that obscure the entire column (Town Hall etc.).

It sets my desire to donate at absolute zero and will continue to do so as long as they employ these tactics.

Perhaps posters can use the print-format link such as:
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/rubin/72321/print
which by its very nature omits all the dancing baloney.

[SteamShovel]

“the possibility of a decent world.”

Naive people think there is a possibility of a decent world.....

.....Mature people know that bad people are a reality; they must be defended against and deterred.

Peace through strength has allowed us to navigate through the entire nuclear age to this point. Dropping the concept is to guarantee annihilation. This is what I believe is Zero's goal, there is no other possible explanation for all he has and plans to do.

[upchuck]

A massive BUMP to your thought.

Townhall is off limits for me. I’m on a crummy 56K dial up line and their pages take more time to load than all the rest.

A pox on them!