Wednesday, 8 April 2009

I feel that the tone of this article is salutary and we should note 
it.  I never thought Bush was bad - he was by no means great, but the 
Democrat spinners did a thorough job of demonising him, unjustifiably.

Obama strikes ne as a polished speaker who can think on his feet but 
only as far as the next 5 minutes.  He strikes me as utterly light-
weight and his racial identity seems to shift with the wind.

On the subject of troops for Afghanistan what Steltzer says is so 
very true but from the British point-of-view I am astonished that the 
Chief of the Defence Staff and the army;s head should have trailed 
the possibility   2,000 or 1,700 more troops from here and we end up 
with sending possibly 300.    What do those selfsame leaders say now?

As many of us saw the Dispatches programme on C4 this week will have 
seen things are not going well for us in Afghanistan, with inadequate 
numbers of men, hampered operationally by grossly inadequate 
helicopter backing, and defective equipment.  The troops testified to 
this - officers and men -   and we now learn that even some of our 
'successes' were more due to the Americans than to the British.

We are not in that country to support the Americans but to fight in 
our own defence against an IslamIST Jihad .   Meanwhile the 
government is busily destroying the army and its morale.
xxxxxxxxxx cs

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TELEGRAPH 8.4.09
President Barack Obama is going home with non, nein and no ringing in 
his ears
The US President has to explain why he is sending more troops into 
Afghanistan and his Nato allies won't, says Irwin Stelzer

By Irwin Stelzer

Fugedaboutit. For those of you who don't speak New York, that's 
"forget about it", the most emphatic of the negatives in a New 
Yorker's repertoire.
But it has nothing like the power to influence events that the "non", 
"nein" and "no" that capped Barack Obama's tour of Europe have. It is 
one thing to attract a crowd in Berlin, a city in which politicians 
have historically been successful in attracting mass audiences, or to 
wow several hundred adolescents in Strasbourg and thousands of adults 
in Prague with talk of a nuclear-free world, and quite another to get 
the elected representatives of those crowds to shoulder a fair share 
of the burden of the fight against Islamist terrorists.

The leaders of Europe came naked to the Nato meeting last weekend, 
shorn of the cover provided by Bush-hatred. As the American 
commentator Robert Kagan puts it: "George W Bush did the Europeans a 
great favour by giving them the best excuse for inaction in 
transatlantic history." Europe's leaders have always claimed they 
would co-operate with America in all things, were it not for that 
toxic Texan with his unilateralist belief in spreading democracy and 
free markets.

Well, George W Bush is safely back in Texas, Barack Obama wants to 
listen as well as lead, and Michelle Obama, after a touchy-feely 
visit with the Queen, proved to have more crowd-appeal than Carla 
Bruni. One astute observer told me that British and European crowds 
"went weak-kneed in the presence of the Obamas". But popularity on 
the streets means little in the conference room.

At the Nato meetings, "weak-kneed" took on an added meaning - no 
significant permanent deployment of fighting troops to aid the 
Americans. Obama was prepared for the turn-down, although he did 
harbour the illusion that in the end Gordon Brown would come up with 
more than a few poll-watchers. [After all our generals talked big, 
they've gone quiet now.  -cs]  After all, the President had gone out 
of his way to sprinkle some of his stardust on the embattled Prime 
Minister. Unfortunately, Obama had not been briefed by Tony Blair on 
Brown's capacity for gratitude.

Turkey was a somewhat better stopover for the travelling President, 
who had no specific requests that could be turned down. The 
persistently fawning New York Times reported that the President was 
"showing more self-confidence each day on his maiden overseas trip as 
President", although how Obama could show more self-confidence than 
he already has is difficult to imagine: this is a man confident in 
self to a point that is slightly unnerving.

Obama had won favour with European audiences by proclaiming that 
America has shown inadequate respect for Europe's accomplishments. So 
he carried his I-am-not-George-Bush campaign to Ankara by implying 
that the US bears responsibility for "the difficulties of these last 
few years" between Muslim countries and America. No need to mention 
the World Trade Centre, Khobar Towers, the USS Cole or his support in 
the Senate for labelling as "genocide" the killing of Armenian 
Christians by Ottoman Turks. More politic to support Turkey's 
application for membership in the EU, despite a mind-your-own-
business warning from President Sarkozy, who earlier agreed to accept 
one - yes, one - of the 245 Guantánamo detainees because that is 
"what being allies is about".

After having spent an entire presidential campaign playing down his 
full name and early years, the President had himself introduced to 
the Turkish parliament as Barack Hussein Obama, and pointed out that 
"Many other Americans have Muslims in their family, or have lived in 
a Muslim-majority country. I know, because I am one of them." This, 
on the heels of his deep bow to Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah (the 
Queen of England merited what can at best be described as a 
deferential nod). There is more to come: the President will soon 
travel to an as yet unnamed Muslim country to deliver a major speech 
laying out his views on Islam.

The question for Obama is what he does about coming home with nothing 
tangible to show for his trip. He has made the war in Afghanistan his 
very own, deploying the forces that he claims were diverted from the 
real fight against terrorism by the war in Iraq. He has set forth a 
reasonable strategy and been careful not to ask his Nato allies to 
join America in attacking terrorist bases inside Pakistan. Still, a 
Bushless America, with a coherent strategy, making a measured request 
for help, could not win over European leaders who have learned to 
free-ride on America. After all, the Europeans have their welfare 
states to fund, and Britain is so broke that ministers are leaking 
stories about the non-humiliating virtues of an IMF bail-out.

The usually soft-spoken Charles Krauthammer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning 
columnist and Fox television commentator, created something of a 
television, and subsequently YouTube, sensation when he said Europe 
"has been sucking on. [America's] tit for 60 years. parasitically". 
And so it has.

Obama now has to explain to his pacifist Democratic Left why he is 
sending tens of thousands of troops into Afghanistan when his Nato 
allies, equally threatened - witness terrorist attacks on Madrid and 
London - won't. He must also explain his plan to spend billions on 
what looks very much like a "surge" - a policy that dare not speak 
its name in the White House. Especially when that effort will shore 
up the regime of Hamid Karzai, who is stalling on the repeal of new 
laws that restrict women's rights every bit as much as did the 
Taliban zealots.

Fortunately for the President, the Republican opposition is more 
loyal than was the Democratic opposition to Bush. John McCain has 
backed Obama's Afghanistan policy, and conservative commentators, 
although more than a little annoyed by the President's rubbishing of 
his own country in order to pander to European and Muslim audiences, 
are supporting him.

Democrats in Congress are sullen but not (yet) mutinous. But their 
President's failure to wring a single dollar of added stimulus from 
the G20, or a meaningful commitment of fighting troops at the Nato 
meeting, has persuaded many that a conservative colleague of mine was 
right when he told the then-president of the European Commission - at 
a dinner in your Washington embassy - that "Europe is irrelevant to 
the 21st century".

Administration economists are predicting that the EU economies will 
fall off a cliff by year end, and Obama and Congress will have little 
reason to offer any help. Obama returns home knowing that the success 
of his administration will depend on working out reasonable 
arrangements in Beijing, New Delhi, Moscow and Islamabad. London and 
Paris remain nice places to visit.

The President's more immediate task is to get his daughters the dog 
he promised them. After his European tour, it is not likely to be a 
French poodle, a dachshund, or a bulldog.