America the weak
By RALPH PETERS, NY POST
IF Sen. Barack Obama is elected president, our public will survive, but our international strategy and some of our allies may not. His first year in office would conjure globe-spanning challenges as our enemies piled on to exploit his weakness. Add in Sen. Joe Biden - with his track record of calling every major foreign-policy crisis wrong for 35 years - as vice president and de facto secretary of State, and we’d face a formula for strategic disaster. Where would the avalanche of confrontations come from?
* Al Qaeda. Pandering to his extreme base, Obama has projected an image of being soft on terror. Toss in his promise to abandon Iraq, and you can be sure that al Qaeda will pull out all the stops to kill as many Americans as possible - in Iraq, Afghanistan and, if they can, here at home - hoping that America will throw away the victories our troops bought with their blood.
* Pakistan. As this nuclear-armed country of 170 million anti-American Muslims grows more fragile by the day, the save-the-Taliban elements in the Pakistani intelligence services and body politic will avoid taking serious action against “their” terrorists (while theatrically annoying Taliban elements they can’t control). The Pakistanis think Obama would lose Afghanistan - and they believe they can reap the subsequent whirlwind.
* Iran. Got nukes? If the Iranians are as far along with their nuclear program as some reports insist, expect a mushroom cloud above an Iranian test range next year. Even without nukes, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would try the new administration’s temper in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf.
* Israel. In the Middle East, Obama’s election would be read as the end of staunch US support for Israel. Backed by Syria and Iran, Hezbollah would provoke another, far-bloodier war with Israel. Lebanon would disintegrate.
* Saudi Arabia. Post-9/11 attention to poisonous Saudi proselytizing forced the kingdom to be more discreet in fomenting terrorism and religious hatred abroad. Convinced that Obama will be more “tolerant” toward militant Islam, the Saudis would redouble their funding of bigotry and butchery-for-Allah - in the US, too.
* Russia. Got Ukraine? Not for long, slabiye Amerikantsi. Russia’s new czar, Vladimir Putin, intends to gobble Ukraine next year, assured that NATO will be divided and the US can be derided. Aided by the treasonous Kiev politico Yulia Timoshenko - a patriot when it suited her ambition, but now a Russian collaborator - the Kremlin is set to reclaim the most important state it still regards as its property. Overall, 2009 may see the starkest repression of freedom since Stalin seized Eastern Europe.
* Georgia. Our Georgian allies should dust off their Russian dictionaries.
* Venezuela. Hugo Chavez will intensify the rape of his country’s hemorrhaging democracy and, despite any drop in oil revenue, he’ll do all he can to export his megalomaniacal version of gun-barrel socialism. He’ll seek a hug-for-the-cameras meet with President Obama as early as possible.
* Bolivia. Chavez client President Evo Morales could order his military to seize control of his country’s dissident eastern provinces, whose citizens resist his repression, extortion and semi-literate Leninism. President Obama would do nothing as yet another democracy toppled and bled.
* North Korea. North Korea will expect a much more generous deal from the West for annulling its pursuit of nuclear weapons. And it will regard an Obama administration as a green light to cheat.
* NATO. The brave young democracies of Central and Eastern Europe will be gravely discouraged, while the appeasers in Western Europe will again have the upper hand. Putin will be allowed to do what he wants.
* The Kurds. An Obama administration will abandon our only true allies between Tel Aviv and Tokyo.
* Democracy activists. Around the world, regressive regimes will intensify their suppression - and outright murder - of dissidents who risk their lives for freedom and justice. An Obama administration will say all the right things, but do nothing.
* Women’s rights. If you can’t vote in US elections, sister, you’re screwed. Being stoned to death or buried alive is just a cultural thing.
* Journalists. American journalists who’ve done everything they can to elect Barack Obama can watch as regimes around the world imprison, torture and murder their foreign colleagues, confident that the US has entered an era of impotence. The crocodile tears in newsrooms will provide drought relief to the entire southeastern US. Sen. John McCain’s campaign has allowed a great man to be maligned as a mere successor to George W. Bush.
The truth is that an Obama administration would be a second Carter presidency - only far worse. Think Bush weakened America? Just wait.
Frank Gaffney Jr.
As it happens, Sen. Obama has exhibited a commitment to “spreading the wealth around” that extends far beyond his ominously socialistic Robin Hood agenda for this country. Late last year, he introduced the Global Poverty Act (S.2433). Interestingly, one of the bill’s original co-sponsors was Republican Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, a man rumored to be a leading candidate for Secretary of Defense in an Obama administration. Another sponsor is the Democratic vice presidential candidate, Sen. Joe Biden, who moved S.2433 to the Senate floor without a single hearing in his Foreign Relations Committee.
Unfortunately, the apparently innocuous language of S.2433 belies a larger and troubling purpose, one that augurs ill for those of us who still think of ourselves as American citizens - rather than as, in Sen. Obama’s words, “citizens of the world.” It would explicitly make it the policy of the United States ” to promote the reduction of global poverty, the elimination of extreme global poverty, and the achievement of the Millennium Development Goal of reducing by one-half the proportion of people, between 1990 and 2015, who live on less than $1 per day.”
The operative phrase in this problematic policy directive is “the achievement of the Millennium Development Goal.” In fact, the bill would require that the mandated presidential strategy coordinate “the goal of poverty reduction with the other internationally recognized Millennium Development Goals.”The Obama bill makes clear, in turn, that the latter are the objectives laid out by the United Nations General Assembly in its 2000 “Millennium Declaration” resolution. As the legislation goes on to note, these goals include (but are not limited to):
- “eradicating extreme hunger, promoting gender equality, empowering women,” combating communicable diseases, “ensuring environmental sustainability,” affording access to clean water and sanitation and “achieving significant improvement in the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers.”
Accuracy in Media’s Cliff Kincaid reminds us that, in order to advance these ambitious goals, the Millennium Declaration would require the United States to apply “0.7% of gross national product (GNP) as official development assistance.”
In other words, for each year between 2002 and 2015, the United States would have to cough up roughly $65 billion over-and-above its current foreign aid distributions. This amounts to a staggering commitment of at least $845 billion - all of which is to be given to the notoriously incompetent and corrupt United Nations to manage.
Voters need to establish whether, as it appears, Sen. Obama has, in fact, no problem with either the magnitude of this redistribution of wealth or with the idea of having international bureaucrats dole it out. We also must know whether he agrees with the UN functionary who is the driving force behind its Millennium Project, Harvard professor Jeffrey Sachs, who insists that a new “global tax” on carbon emissions is required to underwrite his agenda for spreading the wealth around.
If these obligations were not bad enough, Kincaid points out that, “In addition to seeking to eradicate poverty, Declaration commits nations to banning small arms and light weapons and ratifying a series of wildly controversial treaties, including the International Criminal Court Treaty, the Kyoto Protocol (global warming treaty), the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, and the Convention on the Rights of the Child. The Millennium Declaration also affirms the U.N. as ‘the indispensable common house of the entire human family, through which we will seek to realize our universal aspirations for peace, cooperation and development.’”
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