Obama’s Treasonous Squandering of American Power

Conservative HQ ^ | 2/26/14 | CHQ Staff

We don’t usually flak for The Washington Post, but every so often the Washington elite’s liberal “paper of record” gets something right, or at least asks the right question.

Such was the case on Monday, February 24, when the Post published an opinion piece by Richard Cohen entitled “Susan Rice and the retreat of American power,” that detailed a bill of particulars against President Obama’s national security advisor, Susan Rice, and the President himself, for the treasonous squandering of American lives, treasure and influence in the world’s affairs. While what happened at Benghazi, Libya and how the events there led to the deaths of four Americans receives some treatment in Cohen’s column what interests us is Cohen’s drilldown on the favorite tactic used by Rice and Obama to sell their foreign policy failures as success: the false choice or straw man of “American boots on the ground” versus doing nothing, or at least nothing effective. As Cohen so correctly observed: “An increasingly messy world is looking for guidance. But not only does the United States refuse to be its policeman, it won’t even be its hall monitor. The utterly false choice in Syria articulated by Rice — America can do nothing because it won’t do everything — is noticed by the rest of the world. Obama threatened ‘consequences’ if someone stepped ‘over the line’ in Ukraine. Ah, another line. Is it red?” Cohen, however, misses the opportunity to ask the final, and most important, question: How would Obama enforce “consequences” even if he had the inclination to impose them? The President and his Secretary of Defense have just announced that the United States military will but cut back to the lowest level it has been since before World War II, which was the last time the dangerous threat of super-nationalism that concludes Cohen’s article stalked Europe. And along with the announcement of the cuts came this statement from Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, “we are entering an era where American dominance on the seas, in the skies, and in space can no longer be taken for granted.” The reason, said Hagel, is that the current force is “larger than we can afford to modernize and keep ready.” Translation: We blew the money we should be spending to protect America and defend western civilization on Nancy Pelosi’s “shovel ready” stimulus program, green energy, doubling food stamps and other Democratic Party vote-buying schemes. So the only way we can use economic influence or expand our military capability is to borrow more trillions from the Chinese. The result of this is, as retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Thomas G. McInerney put it to Bill Gertz in an interview for The Washington Free Beacon, the Obama administration is “continuing on its path of unilateral disarmament that was started by Defense Secretary Robert Gates in April 2009.” “This action,” said McInerney, “will escalate the demise of our military unilaterally and we still have no strategy for defeating radical Islam after 9/11. This is very dangerous.” Through the peculiar combination of lies, arrogance and ignorance that is the hallmark of almost all Obama foreign policy actions the President has squandered the legacy left to him by conservative Republican President Ronald Reagan, and his anti-communist Democratic predecessors, such as President Harry Truman. It took sixty-nine years to build America into the world's only superpower; it has taken Obama less than six to flippantly throwaway America’s national influence and unilaterally disarm America through a conscious and treasonous hollowing-out of America’s military capability.