Jimmy Hussein Obama

When President Obama was meeting with members of his administration to decide whether to intervene in Libya's civil war in 2011, he polled everyone in the room - including low-level staff. "Of the choice not to intervene he says, 'That's not who we are,' by which he means that's not who I am. The decision was extraordinarily personal. 'No one in the Cabinet was for it,' says one witness. 'There was no constituency for doing what he did,'" writes Michael Lewis in Vanity Fair.

The Lewis puff piece intended to show a president willing to translate personal compassion into a foreign policy to bridge the cultural gap between the people of the United States and the Arab Street. Ironically, the Vanity Fair story hit the newsstands Tuesday - the day Islamic militants murdered U.S. Ambassador to Libya John Christopher Stevens and three others. The terrorists concealed themselves among an Arab-Street mob demonstrating outside the U.S. mission in Benghazi.

If this has the ring of familiarity, that's because we've been down this road before. In 1977, President Jimmy Carter met with the Shah of Iran to discuss the unease he felt over the Iranian leader's human rights record, a matter of personal concern for Carter. Carter told the Shah that "disturbances have arisen among the mullahs and other religious leaders, the new middle class searching for more political influence, and students in Iran and overseas," recalled Carter in his memoir.

When human rights, Carter's personal hobbyhorse, became official U.S. foreign policy, and the Shah's government fell, Carter's National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski met with Iranian Islamic revolutionary representatives to assure them "of American acceptance of their revolution, ... the need to cooperate on security matters relating to the Soviets, and left open the possibility of resuming military sales," wrote Brezinski aide Robert Gates in a White House memo.

The very students that were a focus of Carter's human rights concerns later stormed the U.S. Embassy in the Iranian capital and seized our diplomatic personnel.

"It is perhaps ironic that Jimmy Carter, arguably the most devoutly religious occupant of the White House in modern times, would be confronted by a religious revolution that neither he nor any of his advisers adequately anticipated or understood," writes Robert Strong in his book Working in the World: Jimmy Carter and the Making of American Foreign Policy.

Later, when a U.S. military mission to rescue the hostages failed, resulting in the death of 8 American servicemen, Carter aide, Hamilton Jordan, had the unenviable task of reviewing calls to the White House switchboard by angry Americans who described the mission as "stupid" and the Carter administration as "inept."

"Many call for the President's resignation," said Jordan in a memo, "Some of the people express the thought that the rescue attempt was a means for the President to win votes for re-election. Others express a fear that the hostages will be killed and war will result."

In 1980, Americans took matters into their hands and voted Ronald Reagan the nation's 40th President. Our hostages were released after 444 days, while a downtrodden Carter watched Reagan take the oath of office, and war with Iran was avoided. Reagan replaced Carter's personal foreign policy with one that saw the world as it is.

It was one of Reagan's foreign policy triumphs to supply Iraq with weapons to wage a bloody war with Iran. Israel secretly provided Iran with the same. The eight-year Iran-Iraq war resulted in the deaths of 300,000 Iranians, and the Islamic Revolution's debt to America was paid.

"I have come here to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world," said President Obama in his speech at Cairo University in 2009, "one based upon mutual interest and mutual respect ... they overlap, and share common principles - principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings."

When, in 2011, mass uprisings toppled governments across the Middle East and North Africa, the president tried to sell the Arab Spring as a reinterpretation of the familiar, "In America, think of the defiance of those patriots in Boston who refused to pay taxes to a King or the dignity of Rosa Parks as she sat courageously in her seat."

"Those shouts of human dignity are being heard across the region," the president continued, "And through the moral force of nonviolence, the people of the region have achieved more change in six months than terrorists have accomplished in decades."

Recent events clearly show that the "moral force" of Arab-Spring demonstrators and the aims of violent jihadists are one and the same.

At the Democratic National Convention last week, former President Carter spoke to his party's delegates in a video address. "Overseas, President Obama has restored the reputation of the United States within the world community. Dialogue and collaboration are once again possible, with return of a spirit of trust and good will to our foreign policy ...," said Carter.

"The biggest challenges and problems that we face don't lend themselves to quick fixes nor to the snappy rhetoric of a television commercial," continued Carter, "Solutions are complex and difficult requiring the judgment, skill and patience to pursue the right policies for the right reasons. There's a clear choice facing voters this November ..."

Iran's Islamic terrorist dictatorship blossomed under Carter's watch. A nuclear Iran will surely occur on Obama's. A clear choice, as Carter said, faces voters this November.

"There is a certain irony in having Jimmy Carter vouch for Obama's foreigh policy bona fides"

There is more irony to Bill Kristol and all of the NeoCons vouching for Obama's foreign policy.

When Obama finally agreed to intervene in Libya, Kristol proclaimed Obama to be a "Born Again NeoCon".

The NeoCons were quite pleased with Obama for intervening, though they did criticise him for not going in earlier and leading from behind. Some of the hard core NeoCons like John Bolton said Obama should have put boots on the ground in Libya.

Now, the NeoCons are frothing at the mouth trying to get Obama to intervene in Syria. They will have to wait until they get their boy Romney into the presidency.

It was one thing not to understand the depth of the antipathy the militant Islamic jihadists had for anything or anybody who was not Muslim in 1978, it is another thing altogether to profess that the differences between Islam and other religions are of style, not of substance, in 2012.

Islam is an ideology. Not content to deal only with man’s relation to a supernatural force, a whole set of rules comes with it about how man is to deal with fellow man. And not a simple set, taking up only a part of ten basic rules, with limitations spelled out and a sense of basic decency included.

The complex Islamic interpretation of how man should deal with fellow man begins with dividing the world of all mankind into three basic groups. One is the Noble Islamic Gentleman, a classification which includes the scholars and rulers, their acolytes, and their entourage. Note that females are SPECIFICALLY excluded from this classification. The second are those that owe allegiance to the Noble Islamic Gentlemen, and serve at their pleasure, paying tribute to the blessed paragons of Islam through either unforced labor or forced compliance, in the form of a compulsary tax levied on the head of household. A third classification, the accursed unbelievers who would defy the rightness of the order of having the supreme moral authority of the Noble Islamic Gentleman as the natural rulers of mankind, by demanding such things as a representative republic and some kind of democratic vote in decisions affecting the daily lives and actions of the greater number of all people, are subject to being imprisoned or summarily executed without any other process than being identified as an “enemy” to the Noble Islamic Gentlemen.

In other words, setting up a totally structured autocratic rule, and doing it in the name of some divinity. This did not work when it was tried in Europe while it was under the feudal system of kings, nobles and serfs, which led to endless wars and cruel grasping suppression of those not in the favored class. It did not work in China, or Japan, with a ruling class of war lords, who exerted their might through frequent quarrels with neighboring war lords, and subjugation of the unfortunates who happened to be in the territory they controlled.

The Islamic interpretation of this order gives the Noble Islamic Gentlemen the ABSOLUTE power of dominion over those unfortunates who are located in their territory, and the territory of the Noble Islamic Gentlemen extends to wherever a Muslim foot has trod. Once claimed in the name of Islam, the territory may never be surrendered. For to surrender or withdraw, id to submit to subjugation to another, and that is completely against the will of the divinity which is to guide all their actions.

It becomes obvious, rather quickly, that this intransigence comes up against a considerable obstacle when it meets an equal or greater obstinacy in another. Given that there is no option for negotiating a peaceable solution, only one alternative remains - a fight to the death.

Last Man Standing is a crappy way to run any enterprise. But it is the only one that the ideology of Islam permits to be used. Very well, if that is the gist of their rules of engagement, then so be it. Self defense is a categorical imperative that is in our very genetic structure, and it has served well in the long road of evolution. Surrender, not so much.

Scorpions and vipers know this principle well.

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