On the 11th anniversary of September 11, 2001, the United States was again the victim of terrorism, as attacks on our embassies in Egypt and Libya, led by Al Qaeda, resulted to the deaths of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans, including two former Navy Seals. The upheaval then spread across the region and into Asia.
What has been our response? To lie, grovel, and apologize, a reply led by President Obama, a graduate of the Neville Chamberlain School of Foreign Policy.
This has happened once before, under the presidency of James Earl Carter, another graduate, when in 1979 extremists in Tehran took control of the US embassy and held Americans hostage for more than 400 days. Carter showed himself to be impotent. So has Obama.
During his 2008 election campaign, and throughout his presidency, Obama has tried to placate the Middle East, as well as the rest of the world. He announced that his mere election to the presidency would begin to ease the tensions in the Middle East, that he understood their concerns, and that “the world will have confidence that I am listening to them,” a policy that will ultimately “make us safer.” In other words, he would do the opposite of that buckaroo George W. Bush.
Once elected, he began his administration with a worldwide apology tour, stopping in Cairo for a speech entitled “A New Beginning,” where he hoped to bring together our differing civilizations.
“I’ve come here to Cairo to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world, one based on mutual interest and mutual respect, and one based upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive and need not be in competition. Instead, they overlap, and share common principles – principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.”
To the Turkish Parliament, he confessed America’s sinful saga. “Another issue that confronts all democracies as they move to the future is how we deal with the past. The United States is still working through some of our own darker periods in our history.”
In another stupefying move, President Obama bowed to the King of Saudi Arabia, which no American President has ever done.
Why is he acting like this? He certainly believes, as Neville Chamberlain did, that appeasement works. But history shows otherwise. His true motive can only be a fervent anticolonial worldview, as put forth by Dinesh D’Souza in his book, The Roots of Obama’s Rage, and his documentary, “2016.” When viewed through that prism, his actions make sense.
Obama, like his Kenyan father before him, believes the Middle East, as well as other parts of the world, including Africa, has been the subject of oppression and thievery by the West for centuries, and such treatment is deserving of recompense.
He used the word colonialism in reference to the Mideast in his Cairo speech. “More recently,” he told the assembly, “tension has been fed by colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims, and a Cold War in which Muslim-majority countries were too often treated as proxies without regard to their own aspirations.”
So when Muslims rise up in “righteous” indignation, he feels their pain, and we continue to send $4 billion a year in cash to Pakistan, Egypt, and Libya, for to suspend it would be unthinkable and expose us as true brutes.
And what have been the fruits of this policy? The attacks on our embassies and the killing of our ambassador in Libya, for which we apologized, falsely blaming a ridiculous video that had nothing to do with it and spent $70,000 in Pakistan on ads to say we are sorry for the film. It took the administration weeks to finally admit it was a terrorist act, an ongoing cover-up resonate of Watergate.
Reminiscent of Chamberlain’s “peace in our time” remark, Obama went on 60 Minutes two weeks after the attacks to tell the world that the recent violence was just “bumps in the road” and that he believes that lasting peace and prosperity will develop in the region. Not likely.
In Egypt, his policy has again produced some especially rotten fruit. The Egyptian successor to American ally Hosni Mubarak, President Mohamed Morsi, supposedly a friend, espoused the most radical view of Islam during his campaign. “The Koran is our constitution. The Prophet Muhammad is our leader. Jihad is our path. And death for the sake of Allah is our most lofty aspiration.” He vowed to impose radical sharia law on the nation, “regardless of the actual text [of the new secular constitution].” The man is an Islamic fanatic if there ever was one but continues to reap rewards courtesy of the American taxpayer.
Like everything else with the current administration, the Obama Doctrine has been an abysmal failure. Yesterday Mitt Romney hammered Obama’s policy and proposed changing course in the Middle East. On October 22, the last presidential debate will be held on the subject of foreign policy, and if Romney performs as well as he did in the first debate, this race should be over.
This column was published in the Laurel Leader Call (Laurel, MS) on Tuesday, October 9, 2012.
Ryan S. Walters 
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