Monday, January 25, 2010
china confidential
Was Obama Elected to Lead the Muslim World?
Looking ahead to the State of the Union speech, this reporter wonders: Was Barack Hussein Obama, who was born a Muslim according to Islamic law, which he is inclined to respect, elected President of the United States or President of the so-called Muslim world?
The answer, of course, is that Obama was elected President of the United States; but based on his performance during his first year in office, one would think he was elected to lead the world's Muslims, supposedly united by "the Holy Koran," as Obama insists on referring to Islam's central religious text, to a degree that allegedly transcends all political boundaries and non-Islamic legal systems as well as all differences in nationality, ethnicity, race, and class.
Obama has given enormous credence to the menacing, Muslim world concept--the bedrock of Islamist ideology--while achieving nothing of importance for the American people. He has produced no new jobs, created no new industries, initiated no new programs or policies that resonate with and inspire ordinary Americans. He has, however, helped the Muslim world, also known as the Ummah, or Muslim nation, enormously by elevating its status to the level of a globe-spanning superpower, allowing its most powerful "Islamic republic"--a monstrous tyranny that muses openly about a world without America and Israel--to come closer to acquiring atomic arms, and downgrading the war against Islamist terrorism to the level of a mere law enforcement challenge. The latter initiative involves banning the W word--war--altogether and treating enemy combatant terrorists, such as the Al Qaeda war criminals responsible for carrying out the 9/11 mega-attacks, and the Nigerian, Christmas Day airplane attacker, as common criminals entitled to civilian court trials, public defenders, and, incredible as this may seem, plea bargains.
Conservative-leaning U.S. voters are outraged by Obama's obvious attempts at expanding the power of the federal government, raising taxes, and crippling U.S. industry through crushing overregulation and the choking-off of energy (the Democrats' despised "fossil fuels" on which our civilization runs and will run for the foreseeable future). The outrage is more than justified. But all voters should be alarmed by Obama's foreign and counterterrorism policies, which are effectively increasing the nation's vulnerability to threats that were more or less unthinkable before 9/11, but now seem more and more likely to actually occur.
Understand, as Obama likes to say, that while the U.S. is a big, powerful country, the threats it faces border on the existential. Could the U.S. economy withstand waves of suicide bombings and Mumbai-style swarming assaults? Maybe. Could the U.S. economy recover from a nuclear blast in a high-population area, or a major biological attack on the homeland? Probably not. Could the U.S. as a nation survive an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack--the increasingly plausible detonation of a nuclear warhead at high altitude above U.S. soil in order to wipe out the country's communications and electronics systems? The truly terrifying answer, according to many defense and national security experts, isno. An EMP attack would overnight plunge the world's mightiest military power back into the 19th century. Millions of Americans would die from lack of food, water, electricity, medicines, and heat. Those who somehow survive the chaos would long for the days when it was still possible to argue passionately about health care reform (or media coverage of the Tiger Woods scandal).
If an EMP attack seems far-fetched, bear in mind that a cargo ship with a concealed, containerized launch system could fire the necessary nuclear-tipped missile--or missiles--that thousands of cargo ships, flying flags of convenience, approach U.S. coastal waters every day, that there is no known way to defend U.S. (or any other) cities against sea-based, ballistic missile attacks, and that Iran and North Korea are believed to have successfully test-fired missiles from cargo vessels. For what purpose have they done this?
Does Obama know--or care? Observing the President, this reporter often thinks that he inhabits a different planet, or, at the very least, a different country from the one he is supposed to be leading and protecting.
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